Volume
1,
Issue
2:
Section
A
PychNews Information
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VOLUME 1, ISSUE 2 PSYCHNEWS INTERNATIONAL May, 1996
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SECTION A: PsychNews Information
_________
INDEX
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1. THE NEED TO GROW AND THE GROWTH OF INFORMATIONAL NEEDS:
COMMENTS AND A SECOND INTRODUCTION TO
THE PSYCHNEWS INTERNATIONAL.................Sunkyo Kwon
2. PSYCHNEWS DESCRIPTION AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION (NEW)
3. JOINING THE STAFF
THE NEED TO GROW AND THE GROWTH OF INFORMATIONAL NEEDS:
COMMENTS AND A SECOND INTRODUCTION TO
THE PSYCHNEWS INTERNATIONAL
Sunkyo Kwon, Executive Editor
There is always a need to keep informed and a responsibility
to inform in our respective fields of research and practice.
For this purpose, the PsychNews International team distributes
information relevant to the Internet community
of individuals,
world-wide engaged or interested in mental-health-related
disciplines.
The Internet has become an attractive medium for information
distribution and discussion. Psychology, psychiatry, and
related disciplines have discovered the Internet for their
particular needs with a peak period during the last two years
and the PsychNews Int'l (formerly the InterPsych Newsletter)
has been with you during this time. With the Internet
popularization trends
in countries that used to be not as
involved in electronic communication, the general growth in
Internet literacy, and entrepeneurial activities, we also
witness substantive changes "on the Net" to which we need
to adapt.
It is the intent of this short article to forecast some
of these developments and to preview the role that the PN
will assume as your guide on this journey.
o The need to grow: Knowledge acquisition and
information-seeking have always been main values. In
the process of building the ever-accumulating body of
scientific knowledge, information technologies have
been "discovered" as possibilities to overcome some
of the apparent shortcomings that characterize the
traditional distribution and search channels.
In turn, a need to grow emerged, because the
technologies had to be learned...and they became
research fields, independent study objects, and
targets of evaluation in their own right.
o The growth of needs: Although the need to grow implies
that there are growing needs, these informational needs
are less dictated by changes of the basic information
than by changes of accessibility and exposure to this
information. E.g. users of the Internet are much more
aware of the information explosion phenomenon because
rapid transmission, extended bandwidth, and ready access
to a myriad of sources induce a sense of the size of
the iceberg, while in fact we see multiple tips instead
of one.
o Needless growth: There is no such thing. Every growing
has a reason, and if the creation of needs creates
the need for growth, it is essentially like the creation
of a demand in a given market to sell a product, the
promotion and production of which again supports the
maintenance of the whole system. However, the
unpredictability and chaos on the "Net" leave one feeling
that one has swapped the inadequacies of searching
bookshelves and cryptic library catalogues for gigabytes
and terabytes of www, ftp, gopher and telnet information
that are just as hard to come by.
A manifestation of t
he above is the increasing involvement
of professional services for profit, such as search engine
developers, information brokers and publishers. The trend
toward scientific electronic publishing was for instance
reported in _Science_ (9 February 1996). Another example
is the rising number of "infranets" in the Internet, generally
designed and maintained by the high-tech and media industries.
All these developments have as a driving force the aim
to structurize the unstructurable, and to instill a sense
of control. This purpose is apparently appealing enough
to make more and more people willing to spend money for
the access to such informational nodes.
The PsychNews International views itself as a sm
all but necessary
piece in this mosaic. Despite various hardships, the distribution
is currently stable, and as long as the PsychNews can sustain
itself with the enthusiasm of its editors (who all work
on an uncompensated basis) and with
the inflow of information
-- its main, maybe only asset -- from the Internet community,
you have the guarantee that at least one informational node
exists that claims to be truly independent and designed
exclusively to meet its readers' needs.
The PsychNews International team asks you for your
support by
1. Telling others about its existence;
2. Submitting announcements, letters, and
articles;
3. Consider joining our staff as a
writer, editor or technical assistant.
Instructions for either of these support functions
follow in the remainder of this section.
________________________________________________________________
2. PSYCHNEWS DESCRIPTION AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION (NEW)
The PsychNews International has recently changed its server
at the North Dakota Higher Education Computer Network,
added websites, and modified its mission statement.
Individuals responsible for any redistribu
tion list or news
are particularly adviced to make the necessary adjustments.
The full text follows below.
PsychNews on listserv@LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU:
The Mailing List "PsychNews International"
PsychNews International -- An Online Publication -- is an
independent electronic publication distributed to professionals,
students, and others interested in issues related to the mental
health profession.
PsychNews (or short: PN), formerly titled the InterPsych
Newsletter (IPN) and associated with the organization
InterPsych, has been in existence for more than a year and
serves thousands of readers as one of the first and premier
sources of its kind on the Internet. We are proud to state that
the PsychNews is t h e source for international news in
psychology and psychiatry.
PsychNews Int'l publishes articles on current events in mental
health, updates from relevant Internet discussion groups, as
well as original research and theoretical articles. PN also
contains reports on new mental health resources on the Internet,
conference, employment, and announcement listings.
The PsychNews Listserv is a "send only" mailing list which
means the list is used solely for the purpose of distributing
the PN. No messages can be posted to this list directly.
To subscribe to PsychNews, send the following command to
LISTSERV@listserv.nodak.edu in
the BODY of e-mail:
SUBSCRIBE Psychnews yourfirstname yourlastname
If you would like to unsubscribe from PsychNews at any time,
send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU with
the body of the message
UNSUBSCRIBE Psychnews
Submissions can be sent to:
wpb@badlands.nodak.edu
The PsychNews International is available on the World Wide Web at:
http://www.cmhc.com/pni/
http://www.mhnet.org/pni/
http://userpage.FU-Berlin.de/~expert/psychnews
and will be retrievable at more international websites soon.
________________________________________________________________
3. JOINING THE STAFF
STAFF-L on listserv@rz.hu-berlin.de
STAFF-L is a private list for the staff of the PsychNews
International.
The staff is international and consists of researchers
and practitioners in psychology and psychiatry, producing
the PsychNews International on a voluntary, uncompensated basis.
If you are interested in joining us, pls send an email to the
coordinator (fu03c2dj@zedat.fu-berlin.de), and the
following command to LISTSERV@RZ.HU-BERLIN.DE
in the BODY of e-mail:
SUBSCRIBE Staff-L yourfirstname yourlastname
Your subscr
iption request will be sent to the coordinator for
approval. You will not be added to the list staff-l if you
have not explicitly written a direct request, e.g. being added
to the staff is a two-step procedure: (1) Issuing the necessary
l
istserv commands for staff-l, and (2) identifying yourself and
your interests and background in direct mail.
Coordinator:
Sunkyo Kwon
fu03c2dj@zedat.FU-Berlin.de
kwon@rz.HU-Berlin.de