This is a question from my classmate Deng Hongwei. We discussed this in class tonight, it seems different people have different opinions on this, therefore I just share mine here.
To me, I think the answer to this question is quite straightforward: email is definitely a kind of social networking, because we have mailing list. Mailing list is basically a service built on email. A mailing list has an email address and it has to be hosted on a server. To use the mailing list service, a user should provide his/her email address and subscribe the list. After that, when the user sends an email to the mailing list's address, the mailing list server will forward this email to all of its subscribers. While sender field remains the original sender, the reply-to field is changed to the email address of the list. Therefore another user can just reply the email so that all other subscribers will receive the conversation. In this way, all subscribers can communicate with each other and this forms a network. Thus, if we agree that mailing list is still email, then email is a kind of social networking.
Mailing list is not a new product, in fact it seems to be quite an old-school thing for me. However, mailing list is still very popular nowadays, especially in open source communities. As we learnt in tonight's lecture, open source development is a kind of social networking. IMHO, mailing list plays a very important role in open source development to make it possible and social. Most of developers of open source projects communicate using mailing list. They may also use other tools, but the offical communication method is usually mailing list. For example, if you want to contribute your patch to the Linux kernel. You don't send an email to Linus Torvalds directly or post the code on your personal blog. You send an email to the corresponding Linux kernel mailing list instead (and maybe also to the maintainer(s) of the kernel module which your patch belongs to, correct me if I am wrong). Then, other developers can see your patch, review it and discussed about it. Another example from the course notes, the Apache Software Foundation. If you check the Get Involved page, you may see joining mailing lists is always a good choice to get started.
P.S. Recently open source developers may prefer to use other methods for collaborating and communication, for example, using GitHub, especially for new and small projects (sure, there are many large projects on GitHub too). GitHub is also an good example of social networking, I may post another article on this later.
References
- Electronic mailing list - Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list
- The Apache Software Foundation http://www.apache.org/
- How to Participate in the Linux Community - Linux Foundation http://www.linuxfoundation.org/content/how-participate-linux-community
Hi, your article is awesome. I agree with that email list is definitely a method to build a social network. But in my view, when we talk about the "EMAIL", we always focus on its original use which is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Usually, the content of an email is private. So I think that's the reason why email cannot replace something like Facebook, Renren, QQ...
ReplyDeleteHey! Your article expresses your opinions quite well but actually, the first impression in my mind that email is not kind of social networking because when we talking about the email, we usually mention its communication function. It just cannot link people well even they are on the mailing list. People use the "group email" mostly because they have to let those people know the information like work schedule, but not coming from their willingness. You can see that people in social networking websites like twitter and Facebook, they are willing to post news to their friends or group members.
ReplyDeleteI think the answer of your question depends on what usage of email you define.
Maybe every kind of internet tool can be kind of social network as long as users tend to make social-communicating use of it. But I still believe that "be used as" is not equal to "seriously be". Email was invented to help communicate between a certain group of people, and those who can be included in this certain group are seriously determined by the first writer. Even it can be use to some kind of social communicate, it still has too many limits. And you see, other social network can provide more free communication. So I think Email is still not a kind of social network. That's my point ~~~
ReplyDeleteFrom my perspective,I think e-mail is a kind of social network.Back to the concept of social network we have learnt on the first class, social network is a social structure made up of individuals(or organizations)called "nodes",which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship,kinship,common interest,finacial exchange,dislike or something like this. And the e-mail can be match this concept.But actually,we use e-mail as only a kind of communicational tool.
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