Cybersite

The settlers of the Old West undoubtedly found comfort in the knowledgethat their forbears had once crossed vast distances on the Mayflower but beyond comfort, there was little in the specifics of that earlier voyage that would help a homesteader weather seasons of depredation and starvation.

The scholar/networker of today explores a different kind of terrain than that travelled by our pioneer ancestors. The ground is invisible, the distance immeasurable, the route untraceable. Some would even argue that our position is not so unlike that of the pre-Columbian sailor who, despite the repeated reassurances of science, nonetheless embarked on each voyage with his heart in his mouth, fearing that the myth of the edge of the world would turn out to be true.

Yes, there are orders of magnitudes more individuals navigating the Internet than sailed the pre-Columbian oceans, each seemingly at his or her own helm, and yes, the more adventurous have "travelled" to nearly every conceivable corner of the earth, though there are areas including much of Africa and South America whichremain completely inaccessible. But despite numbers, diversity and dispersion, the committed scholar/networker must place his faith in the inevitability of a "new world" for which there is nothing but theoretical evidence and futuristic prediction, while his more timid compatriots reside comfortably in the secure and tangible world of print on paper.

The growing discussion of the mechanics of evaluation of scholarly output in an electronic environment suggests that the evolution from print to electronic scholarship requires a re-examination of the nature of scholarship itself. Treating the effects of this "retooling" as superficial will only widen the fissure between the traditional modes of scholarship and the new electronic scholarship.

Excerpted from the Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture. The author is with Rutgers University, USA