Professional literature and the internet

Dear colleagues,
There has been some preliminary talk about the desirability of an international
journal, and the ASGPP in the USA is considering re-starting its journal (which is on
hiatus as the publisher sold most of the journals to a large conglomerate, Taylor &
Francis). Incidentally, that conglomerate has taken over other journals, too, and charges
for these journals are exceptionally high, ranging around an average of at least $60 per
issue (not per year, and many journals have only 2 - 4 issues per year!) Photocopying
costs are a small fraction of what these journal charge!
(It reminds me of pharmaceutical businesses and medical insurance businesses, with
their continual escalations of costs.)

So I'm wondering about the costs of e-journals.

First of all, we should recognize that psychodrama (and other professional fields) has
become international, and that many institutes in various countries are surprisingly
dynamic. There are also teachers going to groups that are not yet organized into any
institutes. For these and I'm sure you might come up with many other reasons, it begins to
make more sense to work towards a way to share our discoveries, insights, ideas, research,
etc. through the internet.

A nice thing about a webpage is that it can be revised if a reader comes up with a
fair criticism or correction. It can also link to related webpages. (I imagine in a number
of years that many references in papers on websites will be so linked.)

This mode of communication invites more interchange. The aforementione capacity to be
revised is not possible in printed formats, because even letters to the editor---not that
many professional journals even encourage this---cannot undo misleading statements in an
original printed article. The nature of pedagogy, the art of education, has been hampered
by the flexibility of the medium---if teaching is based on books, that sort of fixes what
Moreno called the "cultural conserve" more rigidly. Conversation is okay, but hard to
sustain a discussion in depth except at a college seminar where time is devoted to
analyzing not only the material, but also the coherence and mode of thinking of the
discussants (which seems to be happening less and less nowadays).

Ideally, there can be an open market of ideas. On the internet, many magazines post
their articles and leave room for comments, the chain of which can number in the scores or
hundreds.

Social media have become more prominent, but I haven't gotten the impression that
much beyond fairly superficial connections and exchanges go on there. The illusion of
being connected, of having a relationship, replaces any depth of connectedness. (I'm not
being old-fashioned, though there is a bit of that, but comparing the nature of the
psycho-social exchanges that happen through various media, such as the longer love letters
of generations past, the power of reviewing the letter and its writing, the sensuality of
handwriting, the considered depth of thinking in an exchange, and so forth.
On the phone there is also the relative immediacy of connection---like
Twitter---but with far richer and more complex exchanges, including the power of
non-lexical communication (voice tone, phrasing, dialect, intonation, pacing, etc.).

So, back to the proposal: Another reason for an e-journal is that national
postage rates have gone up, and international postage rates have gone up even more. These
costs must be added to the increasing costs of paper-journals.

Thoughts? Warmly, Adam Blatner