One of the first communications technologies with which I became acquainted was the LISTSERV, an email-based discussion list which provided archives and a feed to the old BitNet for bulletin board-style display. I’ve written about them here before, and have observed that all online communications platforms are a great deal more alike than they are different. But there has been a slow but profound shift in the style of discourse.
I will now engage in some very unscientific data gathering. EDTECH, a LISTSERV I used to moderate, still maintains archives going back to 1989. It took a few years for it to pick up steam and become popular, so I picked an arbitrary month: January, 1995. Of the 48 posts that day, 9 originated threads. 2 of those were announcements, the remaining 7 were questions. All of the other 39 were in responses to questions by others. Hence, only 2 of the 48 posts were not associated with someone asking a question of the collected wisdom of the EDTECH list community. And that was just one day.
For contrast, I fired up my Twitter account and searched the #EDTECH hashtag. Of the 23 recent tweets, two contained questions, but they were both rhetorical, answered later in the same tweet. None actually asked questions. All were announcements or links to resources elsewhere. There were also none on my Facebook feed, although I did not attempt to narrow that by any subject search.
So here’s the question I’m really asking: What has happened? Maybe people didn’t know very much back in 1995. Or maybe people didn’t know as much about technology in 1995. A lot has happened since then, for sure, but I’m not buying that as an explanation for a behavior change. It’s a little like saying that it was a lot easier to teach US History in 1995, ‘cause there’s been nearly 20 years more history since then.
Perhaps my study is flawed because the sample is of two radically different populations. Perhaps. The membership of the LISTSERV back in 1995 would have been probably equally divided between K-12 practitioners and higher-ed teacher educators and observes. That pretty much matches the few names I could pick out of the #EDTECH tweet list – I most certainly don’t know them all, hence the “unscientific” nature of my study. Probably the most significant aspect of the LISTSERV population is that these were all early adopters – members of a small group of people engaging in online discussion before it was common, But would that make them less or more likely to ask questions?
Maybe a much more likely explanation is that the LISTSERV was set up by someone specifically interested in providing a place to ask questions. In contrast, Twitter and Facebook are specifically set up to encourage the declarative – Twitter’s tweet composer specifically asks “What’s happening?” Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” Both seem to encourage the participant to answer those questions, rather than posing questions of her own. But in any case, my sense is that something has fundamentally changed about the nature of online discourse. And my contention is that it isn’t positive.
Well into the 2nd decade of the 21st Century, our society has relegated the question mark to secondary status. If we really want to know something, we ask Google or Bing, though we call that a "search," not a question. (It's a little easier to see now, isn't it, why "Ask Jeeves" died as a search engine trade mark!) A search engine will not notice, or care, that we don’t already know the answer. Of course, we'll have lost that very basic of human behaviors, asking for help.
And we don’t even have to use a question mark.
