It seems that my readership has plummeted lately due to my lack of posting. Bah! Oh well. I don’t do it for the fame, you see. Anyway, if you’re reading this - thanks for sticking with me while I struggle with how often to post and what to post and wondering why I don’t feel like posting as much as I used to do. I would point out that partially, this is not my fault: I have been loathe to type as much lately because I’m starting to have some pretty strong symptoms of carpal tunnel, and until I can deal with it in a serious way, I’m cutting down on my not-absolutely-necessary time using the keyboard.
I just went on a vacation to Lake Michigan, specifically the town of Ludington, and a couple of funny things popped up. One, there is a store there called Argue Communications. It sells all manner of cell pones, cable-getting devices, and whatnot. But its name is Argue, and its business is communications. Imagine?
Two, there is a mechanic there called B & M Transmission. If you do not see the hilarity in this name, dear reader, then I fear that I cannot help you find it. Note that there are actually lots of B & Ms, all over the country. On a similar theme, on the drive I saw a billboard for pencils where the slogan was “Turning No. 2 into No. 1!” Genius. Also a billboard for PoopyCredit.com, which is really just a clever marketing ploy based on a ridiculously juvenile domain name that redirects you to the “real” (I’m not sure how real it is, actually) website. But this made me think: is “poopy” an adjective that people up here use to mean “bad” or “crappy”? I recall my dance teacher, when I was growing up, once saying of another woman, “She’s just so…poopy,” meaning that she was dumpy-looking (my dance teacher was not a nice person). For me, this isn’t a real word that gets used in my lexicon; it’s a novelty word that’s pulled out every now and again for a cheap laugh.
My travels this summer have also taken me to a modern dance festival in Philadelphia, where I was reminded of how modern dancers have a rather strictly bounded set of linguistic practices keeping the community on track. But it’s not a set that’s strictly unique: they borrow terminology/concepts from literary theory (e.g. “structure reveals content”), feminist/postcolonial theory (e.g. “this is a gendered piece,” “i am exploring the struggle against modernity”), philosophy/religion (e.g. “it’s the Other that’s being tempted, yet it’s the Other that represent salvation from temptation”), poetry (e.g. “i’m getting a deep sense of loss from this piece…can you tell us where that emerges from?”), and other highbrow genres of academese. I hadn’t been in an environment with that kind of dancers in a really long time, and I had forgotten just how…um…esoteric? it all sounds at times. All of the pieces have to be about something; no one’s interested just in dance technique; and the vocabulary you use to describe your work is just as important as the vocabulary you use in your movement (no really; they refer to sets of movements as “vocabularies”). I think this could make for a very interesting ethnographic and sociolinguistic/DA study sometime, not least of all including the appropriation of some of the terminology from other disciplines and how they get interpreted.
Since I’ve been back I’ve just been getting ready to go to California to spend July at Stanford, for the LSA Summer Institute. Meanwhile, the past few days have been really interesting for people engaged with internet research, meme spreadery, or social network/ing sites. A few days ago danah boyd posted an essay to her blog regarding class and race distinctions as revealed by/replicated on Myspace and Facebook. It’s a messy essay, a collection of thoughts, really, to which she fully admitted when she posted it - she made very clear that it wasn’t a finished paper, it was preliminarily articulated, and she was posting it in hopes of starting a discussion about the topic and getting some constructive feedback.
What’s fascinating is the way her essay - and lots of vitriolic responses to it - have been spreading around the internet like wildfire. It somehow got picked up by the BBC, the Guardian, Time’s tech news blog, Salon, the Star-Ledger, and many others. And, most of them have been representing the essay as an actual “study,” as if boyd had sent out a press release with the results of a systematic study - which she didn’t do (she claims she sent it to the Assn of Internet Researchers list and a few colleagues [who are no doubt prominent in the tech world, but still]), and which it wasn’t (she takes pains to make this clear, in the essay). It’s inspired a ton of negative responses, both on her blog and in comment threads to other links to the piece. They accuse her of being racist, they call her a “little girl,” and they criticize her for being sloppy. There are three points I think are particularly interesting about the discourse unfolding from the barrage of attention she’s gotten.
1. It got me a little nervous about ever blogging preliminary thoughts about ongoing research. Nothing like this would ever happen to me, probably, because she has connections in the tech world and the academic world that I don’t have; she’s already well-known to media sources and does in some senses keep public, thereby inviting publicity. Still, it’s something to think about: if I ever wanted to put up something relatively provocative, in hopes of starting a conversation and better understanding how my research fits in with the public, and even a single newsmedia outlet picked up on it, how would they represent it? And what might the repercussions be of their misrepresentations of it, which I have no control over?
2. Many of the negative comments being thrown at boyd make a point of criticizing her typographical practices, and using this as a way to show how young/unsophisticated/unintelligent she is! She doesn’t capitalize her name (legally), and this gives people who are prone to easy, meaningless criticism an easy weapon with which to attack her credibility. Check out some of the comments on her blog (like here and here), and places like this blog, which says:
According to a project by tech researcher danah boyd, who is so down with dotcoms that she legally ee cumminized [sic] her name, Facebook is for college preps and MySpace is for Latin Kings, or at least economically depressed, goth-wearing, gang-banging, extreme bass-playing meth addicts.
“ee cummingization”! i love it.
3. Lots of reactions point to a very ambivalent public attitude toward academics. I’ll just reprint here what I wrote on boyd’s blog, because I’m lazy and my wrists hurt :-(
what’s really interesting to me about how this is unfolding, though, is the fascinating “class” (or whatever you want to call it - it’s somehow *related* to class, at any rate) dynamics playing out in comments both here on your blog and elsewhere online. this has mostly to do with people’s attitudes toward academics, or towards college education. i obviously know nothing about any of the people who’ve been leaving negative comments, but i’ve noticed that lots of them are using your academic credentials *against* you.
there’s an ideology being articulated a couple of different ways here, either: (1) she is just another privileged academic who thinks they know everything, when really they know nothing about the real world; academics are useless and their “research” does no one any good. [see comments by Dara, Alex U-A, and even Nina above* - i'm not sure how to interpret her comment other than that you're a useful, provocative researcher in a sea of useless, complacent ones] OR (2) if she’s an academic, she should know better than to let the world see something that’s not up to academic standards, and it was her responsibility to have facts and statistics and proofreading in place before going public. [equals: we trust academics, but she let us down with her sloppiness...equals: academics are ones we look to to help us understand society...equals: nominally opposite sentiment of (1)]
and there you have it, the double-edged sword of being a researcher/academic/ivorytowerresident. it *sucks* to see this so clearly coming out, and it sucks that it’s part of such hateful commentary spinning your way. i mean, your own self-positioning (referring to “the academics” as if you’re outside of them) is perhaps something to think about here, too. the way you wrote this particular essay, i guess you have to claim your credentials to establish some legitimacy (”i’ve been doing systematic ethnography; i’m a phd candidate!”), but you also have to temporarily suspend the standards that come along with that (”but these are just anecdotes; this comes from observation; my terms aren’t theoretical!”). so it’s sticky. i wonder how many of the negative interpretations are related to this positioning, though, more than the content of the essay.
also, i’ve chosen not to capitalize just to piss off everyone who’s bitching about your name being uncapitalized, particularly those who don’t even spell your name correctly when chastising you for said uncapitalization ;-)
That last part was just for fun.
*refer to comment thread.