Abstract

Electronic Academia: Academia in the age of telecommunication.

ISTE/Tel*ED 1995.

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The "Net" is popular in a dual sense: its usage is increasingly democratic scanning both mundane and worldly corners of experience and it is cherished by its users. The purpose of this paper is to describe and characterize a Listserver usage and, in particular, how this tool of communication mediated the activity of an academic community, hence the reference to this phenomenon as Electronic Academia . Findings are derived from a three year ethnographic study of an international academic community based in Southern California, using Soviet Activity theory and a Conversation for Action discursive model of communication as framework for analyses. Three conversational patterns of communication are identified and described as constituent of Electronic Academia. Two of these conversational patterns are succinctly characterized and described herein.

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