we consider the future of CMC as a medium for scholarly commu- nication by discussing factors that threaten to impede its development as well as its potential to create a new and more highly interactive form of scholarship. Although CMC offers great promise, its development cannot be taken for granted. Systematic and organized efforts are required to integrate the use of CMC into the communication practices of an academic community. We recom- mend that professional academic organizations begin to undertake such efforts now. We also argue that CMC can have a more substantial impact on scholarship than that achieved simply in facilitating interaction. This new medium offers the opportunity to realize the advantages of oral and written discourse simultaneously, producing a text with "dialogic" qualities. Generated in on- going computer-mediated exchange between scho- lars, a dialogic text allows us to re-appropriate and preserve some of the interactive, conversational qualities of knowledge production lost since the development of printed text.

makes possible the production of an altogether new form of discourse that could be of consider- able scholarly value.

Given the dramatic rate of diffusion and the intense levels of interest in these capabilities that we have witnessed in connection with our six years of experience with COMSERVE, it is our opinion that if established professional organizations do not move to incorporate computer-mediated com- munication, new CMC-based professional organ- izations may soon emerge•

Many systems have been implemented that provide resource sharing capabilities by establish- ing "robot users" O.e., computer programs that operate continuously, without human monitoring). These programs are capable of responding to commands sent to them in electronic mail mes- sages. Users send mail to the service's network address. When the message is received and inter- preted, the program will attempt to respond to the embedded commands. In this way users can control programs operating on computers located thousands of miles away that manage access to large repositories of resource materials. Such programs can be instructed to send particular files or programs or to perform other operations, such as searching a database of information (e.g., an index for a scholarly journal). Results are returned to the user in the form of electronic mail or files sent back over the network

conference members

We also argue that CMC can have a more substantial impact on scholarship than that achieved simply in facilitating interaction. This new medium offers the opportunity to realize the advantages of oral and written discourse simultaneously, producing a text with "dialogic" qualities. Generated in on- going computer-mediated exchange between scho- lars, a dialogic text allows us to re-appropriate and preserve some of the interactive, conversational qualities of knowledge production lost since the development of printed text.

Although CMC offers great promise, its development cannot be taken for granted. Systematic and organized efforts are required to integrate the use of CMC into the communication practices of an academic community.

Empirical research has sought to determine whether CMC as a tool for scholarly communica- tion achieves its expected advantages. The earliest studies reported that participants were enthusias- tic about the medium, finding that the computer facifitated information exchange within larger groups, enhanced creative thinking and idea gen- eration, fostered more complete examination of ideas, and generated new interaction and friend- ship patterns among participants (Ferguson, 1977; Freeman, 1980; Spelt, 1971; Zinn, 1977). In one of the most extensive evaluations of interaction in "on-line communities" (Hiltz, 1984), participants reported that their scholarly contacts were broad- ened, that they better understood the research of others and how their research related to that of others, and that the conferences had clarified theoretical controversies