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Editorial
A glance at the table of contents of this issue is testament to the eclectic nature of the field of communications. We have everything from considerations of the nature of public life in John Keane's Southam Lecture to the social and financial dynamics of smart cards.
Keane challenges us to consider the nature of public life when information is abundant in every home and increasingly every place in society. Leslie Regan Shade's paper is really a variation on this theme in a concrete context. She analyzes the role of freenets in the maintenance of both the local and national community. Michael Antecol takes us into the consumption of that abundance and its structuring effect on society by examining television viewing. And Gary McCarron explores a separate manifestation of what creates that abundance in his investigation of our current conception of perfection -- pixel perfection. Martha Lee & Walter Soderlund's evaluation of the roles newspaper editors see themselves and the public playing in foreign policy brings us firmly back to the daily world of constant communication. Finally, Felix Stalder & Andrew Clement encourage us to consider the social ramifications of the very constant event, the exchange of money for goods, in particular by means of smart cards.
Following these articles you will find some statistics on the usage of the electronic version of this journal in the year beginning May 1997. You may be surprised how frequently the Journal is accessed on the web. Certainly, we were. You may be interested to see which articles received the greatest attention. And you may appreciate knowing that the http:www.CJC-Online.ca site is gaining in its operability. You will now find various new features to encourage subscribers and readers to make more frequent use of the Journal. We now have a recommended books section with reviews connected to an easy ordering system. Currently, it is set up with Amazon.com but we intend to add Canadian sources as soon as possible. We have also increased the power of the search engine and will be adding even more sophistication in the near future. We also intend to bring the CJC papers to the attention of members of the Canadian Communication Association via e-mail.
What you do not see here, but I would encourage you to think about, has been articulated by Robert Darnton in the March 18 edition of the New York Review of Books:
Any historian who has done long stints of research knows the frustration over his or her inability to communicate the fathomlessness of the archives and the bottomlessness of the past. If only my reader could have a look inside this box, you say to yourself, at all the letters in it, not just the lines from the letter I am quoting. If only I could follow that trail in my text just as I pursued it through the dossiers, when I felt free to take detours leading away from my main subject. If only I could show how themes crisscross outside my narrative and extend far beyond the boundaries of my book. Not that books should be exempt from the imperative of trimming a narrative down to a graceful shape. But instead of using an argument to close a case, they could open up new ways of making sense of the evidence, new possibilities of making available the raw material embedded in the story, a new consciousness of the complexities involved in construing the past.
I am not advocating the sheer accumulation of data....Instead of bloating the electronic book, I think it possible to structure it in layers arranged like a pyramid. The top layer could be a concise account of the subject, available perhaps in paperback. The next layer could contain expanded versions of different aspects of the argument, not arranged sequentially as in a narrative, but rather as self-contained units that feed into the topmost story. The third layer could be composed of documentation, possibly of different kinds, each set off by interpretative essays. A fourth layer might be theoretical or historiographical, with selections from previous scholarship and discussions of them. A fifth layer could be pedagogic, consisting of suggestions for classroom discussion and a model syllabus. And a sixth layer could contain readers' reports, exchanges between the author and the editor, and letters from readers, who could provide a growing corpus of commentary as the book made its way through different groups of readers. (Darnton, 1999, n.p.)
Any comments you have on all of this would be most welcome.
References
Darnton, Robert. (1999, March 18). The new age of the book. New York Review of Books. URL: http:www.nybooks.com /nyrev/index.html