Do Public Electronic Bulletin Boards Help Create Scientific Knowledge?

Bruce V. Lewenstein

28 citations0/0 files storedScience Technology & Human Values

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Knowledge Management and Sharing Academic Publishing and Open Access Wikis in Education and Collaboration

Abstract

The impact of new technologies on the transformation of information into knowledge is not clear. Especially problematic is the degree to which electronic communication can replace traditional forums in which information is judged and social consensus about its value is achieved. This article uses electronic bulletin boards active during the cold fusion saga that began in 1989 to explore these issues. Dividing the contents of the bulletin boards into big ideas and little ideas, the article suggests that only about half of all messages on the boards were big ideas, and only half of those were on technical issues. The study suggests that the substantial volume of irrelevant material and the difficulty of applying extratextual cues to the judgment of information made the bulletin boards an ineffective tool for creating knowledge in this case.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

References

1974The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations 1992Connections: New ways of working in the networked organization 2017THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE:: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations 1992Connections, new ways of working in the networked organization 1994Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Technological Foundations of Cooperative Work.1992Computerization and controversy: value conflicts and social choices 1993Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Technological Foundations of Cooperative Work 1975Theories and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology.

Cited by

2002Cyberscience and Social Boundaries: The Implications of Laboratory Talk on the Internet 2004The Social Embeddedness of Academic Online Groups in Offline Networks as a Norm Generating Structure: An Empirical Test of the Coleman Model on Norm Emergence 2009The Embeddedness of Academic Online Groups in Offline Social Networks 1998Out of the Limelight: Discredited Communities and Informal Communication on the Internet 2009Quality of information in academic e‐mailing lists

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.