I agree with Dot. I see facebook's relationship to DM much like a favorite bar to a department: a place where people who wish hang out sometimes but no real work is done.
----------- Daniel O'Donnell University of Lethbridge (From my mobile telephone)
--- original message --- From: "Dot Porter" dot.porter@gmail.com Subject: Re: [dm-l] 500 members Date: November 7, 2009 Time: 3:38:24
I don't think anyone is suggesting shutting down the DM listserv and website and wiki and moving us to Facebook. In fact that's a pretty terrible idea. The suggestion was to have a DM page on FB, it would just be another place to post news and announcements. There is, however, already a DM page on FB that doesn't get much use (I use FB a lot myself and have only visited the page a couple of times). In addition, there is the pretty major hurdle that any page on FB can only be used if you have an account on FB, and many people have many good reasons for not having one. If we were to push FB too much I would be concerned that DM discussions (especially) would start to happen on FB and not on the list - which is where they belong.
My own feeling is that the FB page is more likely to pull people onto the list from FB, rather than the other way around. I have no doubt that there are academics around the world, particularly at smaller institutions, who have never heard of DM but may noodle their way to the FB page. If we make a clear link from there to here (where the action is) we're doing a lot more good than if we place a link to FB from the DM web page. Everybody already knows about FB, right?
Just my $.02 of course.
Dot
On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 6:24 PM, Peter Baker psb6m@virginia.edu wrote:
Hi all
Il giorno dom, 08/11/2009 alle 22.41 -0700, O'Donnell, Dan ha scritto:
I agree with Dot. I see facebook's relationship to DM much like a favorite bar to a department: a place where people who wish hang out sometimes but no real work is done.
My feelings exactly: FB can help "spread the word", but in no way could be considered an adequate substitute for the DM mailing list. IMHO it could be a parallel channel for announcements and news, I have several feeds on FB that work exactly as a supplementary information feed to the main web site/mailing list.
Ciao
Roberto