[Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 75, Issue 22

[Brabham, Daren C]

In addition to concepts and trends such as cyberbullying, sexting, and so on, there's also the technologies themselves. Twitter was a breakthrough technology in many ways, but it took a while for peer-reviewed stuff to get published about it (and by now it has evolved so much that the first peer-reviewed articles seem dated). Same goes for Second Life (which, while I know it's still a vibrant place, pretty much seems to have come and gone in a hurry in terms of popular interest). And technologies that launched and were abandoned quickly (e.g., Google Wave) may never get peer-reviewed coverage.

It's also instructive to use articles from the popular press when these tech trends happen. There's always the initial hype (and simultaneous warnings that the technology will ruin society) in the popular press, but eventually it evens out and scholarly work about the topic starts to have some meaning. I'm all for students looking at a variety of sources, so long as they're critically using them and have an appropriate amount of modesty in their claims.

One of the best student papers I've ever read critically engaged the writing of Perez Hilton and other gossip blogs and how those sources were important for mainstream media. When's the last time you cited Perez in your work?

db

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Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
School of Journalism & Mass Communication
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Carroll Hall, CB 3365
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
(919) 962-0676 (office)
(801) 633-4796 (cell)
daren.brabham at unc.edu
www.darenbrabham.com