Email != USENET
One thing I need to remember about mailing list, USENET and web forum analysis is that those are all public spaces, and e-mail corpora are data from a private space. The techniques used to analyze the data will be different, and the structure of the data will be different, as well. For example, there is no private individual-to-individual communication in mailing lists that would be recorded in the archives — such communication is out of band. So too for USENET. For web forums, participants typically don’t have ways to contact each other privately. These media are always one-to-all communications. One-to-one communications are always performed in front of an audience, and one has to use special techniques in order to tease out these communications, which can be lossy, since replies to other messages may not be delimited by a quoted section, and the header information is not as rich as in e-mail. We can only get the To: line for messages in these media, and pretty much we can get: to one, to a group or to all.
The knowledge that all messages are visible to the entire community (or perhaps the entire world) should cause people to behave differently than they would if they knew that their audience was restricted, in theory, only to those people to whom they explicitly send their messages.
E-mail has more options: one-to-one, one-to-some. Bcc: complicates things by preventing the full distribution of a message from being known to the recipients. So the audience of a message is smaller and purposely selected, although there is always the danger of forwarding of messages (see [1]). Cc: has a different relational implication than To:, and Bcc: has yet another implication. Neither of these are present in mailing lists, USENET or web forum analysis. On the other hand, for large communities, the “to all” communication in e-mail will be rare, because it’s typically not trivial or acceptable to send to such audiences. I know that at Caltech, very few people have the right to send a communication to even everyone in our department, let alone everyone at Caltech.
- Brown, S. D. and G. Lightfoot (2002). Presence, Absence, and Accountability: Email and the Mediation of Organizational Memory. Virtual Society , 209-229.
Leave a Reply
