A Question for Academics

[nancylebov]

I've heard laments that the rise of the telephone meant that there weren't letters to study.

Now that the net has taken hold, is there getting to be unmanagably much writing from people who you want to study?

Comments

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I don't think it's because the few people I would have been interested in have more writing available; rather because there are so many additional interesting people for me to accidentally stumble across ... and I tend to be interested in way too many things at once.

If I pick a small handful of living people, I'll always be able to read faster than they can write. My whole friends list, OTOH, I have trouble keeping up with just what they post here on LJ.

A dead person with a seventy-year head start, whose entire output I'm trying to read all at once ... well one expects that to take a while, right?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I was bringing up the academic problem--not just reading, but reading and then thinking and writing about what one has read.

Also, just suppose one was doing an overview of my net writing. Google groups turns up 36,400 posts that I've written. I'm far from the most prolific person on line, and most of those posts are fairly short. Still, that's rather a lot, and I wonder how much you'd have to read to do adequate context for them, especially if you wanted to evaluate what I've occasionally said about newsgroups.

[nosebeepbear.livejournal.com]

Google groups turns up 36,400 posts that I've written.

Hear that, folks? There will henceforth be no more cracks about my measly 900-some-odd LJ posts ;)

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

At some point I skim, looking for the interesting bits, and only following on to the context "when it seems needed". I guess there's something to be said for leaving some work for the next scholar to do...