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.