[Air-L] snide, cute, ignorant, surprising

[Mary-Helen Ward]

Also, my observation of journalists is that they are usually more
comfortable dealing with academic work when they can get their hands on
statistics and 'interpret' them for us. They are much less comfortable when
dealing with qualitative or theoretical work - they find it slippery and
hand to get the 'angle' on. I think this was at the root of some of Danah's
troubles earlier in the year.

The 'academic jungle' makes a great angle but I can't see any evidence for
it in the article!

M-H


On 17/12/07 9:07 AM, "Nancy Baym" <nbaym at ku.edu> wrote:

> The article author's notion that we are in disciplinary camps,
> divided, and eager to get to the Land of Social Networking, put up
> our disciplinary flag, and claim it for our own before the others do
> does not reflect what I see in AoIR, which is much more attention to
> learning from each other than competing with each other.
> 
> I also have to say that going for the danah angle was lazy. I love
> danah, I cite and teach her work, she's got a piece in a book Annette
> Markham and I just finished editing, and I admire her success as a
> public intellectual, but the "danah boyd invents social networking
> research" story has been written many times (Hesse even nabs a
> moniker directly from one of those articles) and, as danah will be
> the first to say, it's still silly. There are considerably more
> interesting tales to be told about the study of social network sites
> in academia.
> 
> But as my father likes to say: "whenever journalists write about
> other people's fields they get it exactly right, but whenever they
> write about your own field, they get it exactly wrong."
> 
> Nancy