[Air-L] Landrushes and Interdisciplinarity

[Nancy Baym]

I haven't seen the evidence of a landrush mentality in which 
disciplines are pitted against one another in internet studies or the 
study of social network sites and the WP article didn't provide any 
to support that claim.

I would have thought that being so deeply invested and watching it 
from its gestation, I would be attuned to tensions between, say, 
sociology, communication and information studies, over who ought to 
"own" the field. I haven't seen it. To the contrary, I've seen people 
in all three of those fields realizing how much the perspectives of 
other 2 have to offer.

What I generally observed in a decade of working to move internet 
studies forward as a solid and legitimate field of study is people in 
every field feeling like internet studies was/is on the margins of 
their own discipline and therefore seeking connection across borders. 
If people were cloistering to try to keep it to their own field, AoIR 
wouldn't do as well as it does. Unless, I guess, we're just a big 
spyfest where we take the gems back to our own camps for polishing.

There may be landrush in the sense of all disciplines wanting a piece 
of the topic, but if the disciplines are after one another to own the 
field so they can corner the grants, it's news to me. The big grants 
I see getting funded generally involve people from multiple 
disciplines working together. All disciplines SHOULD be rushing to 
internet research because the internet does impact them all. It's the 
charge of disciplinary *competition* with which I disagree.

I have seen poor observations "dressed up in academic terminology" 
and don't challenge that there's some lame internet research (and I 
must point out that the WP writer did note after teasing everyone 
that there are good ideas in the work she mocked). I'd wager there's 
not a paper written, no matter how deep its insights, that has no 
lines than cannot be pulled from their context and inserted into 
another stream of discourse to look vacuous or dressed up in, shock 
horror, a language style more appropriate to its original genre.

Nancy

>I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. The author of the Post 
>article observes that scholars demonstrate a land-rush mentality when 
>a new area of inquiry opens and substantial funds for its researching 
>become available. They demonstrate this by hurriedly staking claims 
>in the new area with supposedly academic observations that are merely 
>the most obvious ones dressed in academic terminology. And they do so 
>because the group of people who get repeatedly cited in the new area 
>quickly narrows, along with the opportunity for acquiring the 
>lucrative research grants. That fact is reflected in the resentment 
>of the "sooners" expressed by scholars who feel they've been beaten 
>to the punch. As I see it, these observations are pretty accurate, 
>and predictably so given all the available research on academia as a 
>social institution.
>--Christian