Tag Archives: danah boyd

blog comments, bloggers, comment-fishing, Education, moral enterpreneurs, responsible drinking, U.S. exceptionalism, United States, Universities

Blogging the Drinking Age Debate

9 Comments

danah “zephoria” boyd is blogging about the conversation over drinking age in the United States.

apophenia: Dionysus and the Amethyst Initiative.

As boyd is relatively well-known, her blogging about this can have interesting effects in terms of generating “buzz.”

Her blogging the issue might help me as I follow my previous post up with some further comments. But that’ll have to wait. RERO!

What follows is my answer to boyd’s post, since trackbacks can be more powerful than blog comments.

You might enjoy IU researcher Ruth Engs‘s work on the topic.

A few concepts/expressions which could be useful in your future coverage…

  • “Moral entrepreneurs” (Howie Becker’s concept)
  • “Forbidden Fruit” (or cookie jar, but forbidden fruit works better for keyword searches, I think)
  • “Responsible Drinking” (a taboo expression in alcohol research in the United States but the concept which runs at the core of Amethyst)
blogosphere, Concordia, librarians, new media, Radio Open Source, ramblings, United States

Blogged Librarians

4 Comments

Is it just me or is there an increased presence of librarians on the blogosphere, these days? Not just as authors but as subjects.

For instance:

I know the connection between libraries and blogging is pretty obvious and information scientists are as blogworthy as anyone can get. So it’s probably just that I notice librarian blogging more, these days. Thing is, on the Web, perception is worth a lot, however accurate it may be.

Academia, critical thinking, U.S. media

Dangers of Academic Blogging

5 Comments

A-list blogger and fellow Ph.D.  candidate danah boyd comments on the reaction to one of her blog entries.

I think some folks misinterpreted this piece as an academic article. No doubt this is based on my observations from the field, but this is by no means an academic article. I did add some methodological footnotes in the piece so that folks would at least know where the data was coming from. But I didn’t situate or theorize or contextualize this at all. It’s more like publicizing field observations. There’s much work to be done before this can be anything resembling an academic article. The “citation” note at the top of my pieces also confuses this. That was meant for when people picked it up and stole it whole from my page or when people got to it indirectly. I put that as a standard for my blog essays a while back because of this issue. I guess I see my blog as a space to work out half-formed ideas. I just didn’t expect 90K people to read it. Blog essays to me are thoughts in progress, blog entries that are too long to be blog entries. But I can see where there’s confusion.

apophenia: woah…. omg. reflections on mega-viewership

The same could be said about a lot of online texts. Taken out of context, they are often thought to be more serious than they were meant to be. Examples from The Onion abound as readers often send links to friends without pointing out that the site is parody. I quite like the fact that online humour may force people to adopt critical thinking.

But Boyd’s case is a bit different. The difference isn’t simply in terms of serious vs. non-serious (or between fully-researched and off-the-cuff). It’s between reflections by an academic and actual academic writing.

The issue here isn’t that people aren’t trained to distinguish academic writing from personal thoughts. Many people can and do distinguish the two. IMHO, the issue is that an academic will often sound academic even when writing from a personal perspective. Kind of an occupational hazard.

Then, there’s the combined issue of prestige, trust, and authoritative voice.  Very common in U.S. academia and U.S. media. Somewhat similar to what happens with public intellectuals elsewhere but with a political twist.

It will certainly be fascinating to see what comes out of this situation in Boyd’s academic life.