[Air-l] suggestions?

[elw at stderr.org]

>> 2.  I have a number of qualms about participating in the story as a 
>> local "expert" - but hope that by doing so I might be able to defuse 
>> some of the prevailing dichotomies that seem to shape reporting on 
>> media (beginning, in this instance, by using the disease model of 
>> addiction as the primary frame).  Stated another way, I'm hoping to 
>> provide more informed and nuanced commentary that would help both the 
>> reporter and the audience move away from these sorts of notions of 
>> technology (good or bad? cure or disease? blessing or curse, etc.) - 
>> notions that fuel the sorts of "moral panic" reporting on new media 
>> (currently, e.g., connections between violent video games and recent 
>> episodes of violence in schools, etc.)


Charles, it seems to me that the tendency to use disease models for an 
excess of communicative action -- for discussion of "crackberries", et 
cetera -- is not really without its offline precedent.

I'm thinking very specifically of people who "talk too much"; there's a 
kind of taboo-like property (that I don't have a better name for -- 
stigmatization is not quite it...) assigned to such folks that is 
intuitively parallel to "addiction".

I'm sure that other folks on the list will come up with more exemplars.

--elijah