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08/07/2005 Archived Entry: "represent"

Represent
Jenny asked me this morning why folks like me tend to get up in arms over Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed pieces about teaching, research, or technology. The best answer I can muster right now is representation. I have a problem with how such outlets represent the work we do. Even though a good chunk of the writing comes from the field itself, it seems to come from the most mundane, basic, old school, outdated thinking imaginable. The point is also true for academic journals, but these online/print publications designed for popular consumption are problematic for the very public representations they project. The most recent Chronicle column picked up by Collin, Steve, and others acts as if the Web was invented yesterday ("hey, if you have a book, you should make a website for it!"). This was the problem with the hypertext column in Inside Higher Ed Collin and I attacked months ago (and whose author got upset with us). The wriitng doesn't recognize any of the work already being done. But the writing is projected and (often) accepted as a "new" "revealing" or "good" contribution to academic work.
I don't want to minimize the same problems in academic (so called peer reviewed) journals. I have had a two year struggle with one journal who accepted a critical piece and since has delayed publishing it because the essay takes to task this very attitude in academia (and our profession in writing, in particular). Once the bottom falls out for good and the journal finally admits it won't publish the essay after all, I'll no doubt be very forthcoming with details (what, me not rant?). What is so troubling in this instance - and the ones noted above - is the fear factor involved: those who look to represent academia in writing through the power of publishing are often too afraid to work with the new ideas. The new ideas, as we are told over and over by many of our colleagues and journal editors, are too confusing, too complex, too technological, too "time consuming" to work with. The fear factor = the dumbing down equation. We academics (and we are told this by fellow academics), should remain dumb and stupid when it comes to innovation. Let's settle for the mundane instead. After all, the mundane is the easiest to understand.

http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=banish

Posted by Matthew Reyes @ 08/09/2005 12:36 AM EST

As I already noted on Collin's blog -- my first time commenting there so he's got to approve it before it shows up, Bugeja's song and dance seems to be that the power of marketing trumps all (see his Inside Higher Ed piece on Duke's iPod experiment and my take on it. At the moment, he's got the final say in the comment section at the end of his article and he writes:

Yes, iPods would be great for poetry. They also are valuable for journalists, especially photojournalists using digital cameras, thanks to their storage space.
But these uses, while valuable, cannot overcome the widely marketed music downloads and applications.
As my book, Interpersonal Divide, documents, we're in a new media environment in which marketing has so much more of a powerful voice than in previous eras.

Posted by John @ 08/07/2005 12:28 PM EST