I like the conversation on Journalism Next, quite a bit in fact — all the participants are great and have thoughtful viewpoints. I even like online conversations (like this one).

It’s the email delivery mechanism that I don’t like.

This could be something particular about me, because plenty of other people seem to love mailing lists and email exchanges.

On the simplest level, email exchanges tend to carry along quoted prior text, so there’s some tedious searching for the new content, and figuring out who said what when. If if one makes the mistake of subscribing to a digest, then the responses don’t all stay in the same thread and it takes some work to track back through everything.

In contrast, a forum for example tends to keep all the threads and subthreads in line. None of the responses gets lost, and even if one thinks maybe she was misunderstood, she can see her response sitting right there amongst the others, so she doesn’t wonder whether her message was read. Ditto comments on a blog post.

Email is nice in so many ways, though, that it’s worth figuring out how to combine its best elements with the best of a forum. The project management system Basecamp has done a nice job of integrating email into their project messaging system; maybe something along those lines would work.

I wouldn’t think that people didn’t hear what you said – I think it’s more a matter of computer-mediate-communication being different than face-to-face.

Sorry you aren’t enjoying the conversation. I’ve had great fun reading differing viewpoints than my own. That’s the joy of these for me.