I’ve just added a new category to my side menu, with links to websites additional to my ‘core’ resources (Wiki, Twiitter, Delicious etc.). Most are those bounded, special interest ‘Ning’-type community thingies that I always seem to be signing up to. I’ve added these mainly for my own purpose as I often sign up, say hello, create a basic profile page and then barely contribute. There’s probably a few more that I’ve forgotten about completely…
After explaining that ‘Eichmannism’ is “that form of bullshit which accepts as its starting and ending point official definitions, rules, and categories without regard for the realities of particular situations,” Neil Postman adds:
“One final point about Eichmannism, and I would like to state it as Postman’s First Law – so perhaps you will want to write this down: “Everyone is potentially somebody else’s Eichmann. So be careful.” Postman’s Second Law is: “Everyone is already somebody else’s Eichmann. You weren’t careful enough.””
This extract from Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection* – a paper delivered at the National Convention for the Teachers of English, Washington D C in 1969 – is typical Postman. In fact, Eichmannism represents one of many forms of bullshit. Others he suggests include:
“What,” asks Postman, “can be done about all this bullshit?” In developing the process of ‘crap-detecting’ – a phrase borrowed from Ernest Hemingway – Postman emphasises art over technique.
Fundamentally, he sees crap-detecting as a “set of attitudes toward the function of human communication: which is to say, the function of human relationships.” Not that language isn’t important. Indeed, according to Postman, it’s the most precious thing we have. But communication is located within social and discursive practices, with deeply embedded and profound hidden agendas.
His point is that crap detecting – or critical thinking if you prefer – is more than developing a set of skills or literacies, but is embedded in the values and belief systems of each of us. “If you want to teach the art of crap-detecting,” Postman suggests, “you must help students become aware of their values.” After all, as his ‘Third Law’ states:
“At any given time, the chief source of bullshit with which you have to contend is yourself.”
* There appear to be a number of different versions of the text online, several of which seem to be truncated. I’m assuming the longest is the most authentic, though I may be talking crap.
It has been necessary in my PhD research to track my participants’ ‘off-radar’ social media activities. This is the term I use to describe any active contribution to sites that I am not routinely observing – such as commenting on a blog I am not following. My participants took on the responsibility of reporting such activities, and some found it useful to use Evernote.
Evernote is a private online annotation tool that enables the user to ‘grab’ specific content (such as a paragraph of text or an image) from web pages, and collect them on a personal site as ‘notes’ stored in folders called notebooks. Evernote also enables users to set up confidential links through its shared notebooks facility.
Not all my participants chose to use Evernote, preferring instead to keep a log or simply e-mail updates. But those that did generally found it a quick and unobtrusive method of self-reporting, and one participant adopted it into her everyday practice.
Here’s a guide for researchers who may want to use it in this way:
Set up
The researcher and each of the participants will need to first sign up at http://www.evernote.com/
Click the Create Account button, complete the Register for Evernote panel and follow instructions. Evernote is free for a monthly upload allowance of 60mb.
Create a Notebook
Each participant will need to set up a notebook for all the content they specifically want to share with the researcher.
In the Notebooks panel (top left), select New Notebook and give it a name
(They can set up as many notebooks as they want for other purposes if they wish.)
To save files
The easiest way for participants to save content to Evernote is using the Web Clipper tool. This is a simple ‘bookmarklet’ that adds a button to the browser toolbar (Evernote supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome). To set this up, they need to go to:
http://www.evernote.com/about/download/web_clipper.php
Once this is set up, participants can simply highlight any content on a web page and click the Evernote button. They do not need to have their Evernote site open at the time, but the next time they view it they will see the content has been added as a note.
To share Evernote notes
This is the set up procedure for participants to allow the researcher to access the notes they wish to share. They will only need to do this once:
In the Share drop down menu (top right), click on Share Notebooks…
In the Notebook Sharing panel, click the Start Sharing button next to the notebook to be used for the research
In the Share with individuals panel, select Invite individuals to access this notebook
In the Email invitations to box, type in the researcher’s e-mail
Under the heading Recipients may:, select View this notebook
Keep the Require log in to Evernote box ticked
Click the Send invitations button
Some alternatives to Evernote can be found here.
In a celebrated scene from The Jerk (1979), dim-witted Steve Martin – excited by a dog’s apparent ability to save lives – is rebuked by an aggrieved observer, who suggests he calls it something very different – which Martin proceeds to do for the remainder of the film, to comic effect.
Similarly, it’s easy to get enthusiastic and passionate about a specific technology, sometimes to the point where it seems we cannot live without it. But it’s worth remembering that we draw on our own experiences, knowledge and culturally defined values to determine the affordances of technologies, and that our desire to share our excitement with others might not always be appreciated.
Following my previous post on Professor Pat Thomson’s new blog, a few things have been nagging at me in terms of the wider context of professorial blogging and the nature of influence in social media practices across academic hierarchies.
It is reasonable to assume that professors who choose to blog play a role in inspiring early researchers within their disciplines to do the same, but does this necessarily lead to adoption? If I see a professor presenting at a research conference, I might be inspired, but I may not be eager to jump up there and do the same.
In my experience, some of the most crucial barriers to postgraduates starting to blog centre on perceptions of academic quality, reputation and audience – something along the lines of:
We might reasonably assume that senior academic bloggers are highly knowledgeable, confident and articulate, with a rich portfolio of research and experience to draw on, and an ability to attract a critical mass of fellow academics. However, whilst they may inform and inspire, might the apparent maturity, assuredness and gravitas of their blogging practices actually deter early researchers from blogging themselves?
Of course, we should not necessarily assume that senior academics have the experiences and competencies of using blogging platforms. They may be new adopters to social media generally, and cautious of the potential implications to their own professional identities and reputations.
But we cannot realistically expect these busy academics to spend any amount of time on informal online dissemination without good reason. I’ve written before on the multiple purposes of blogging (that are often interrelated in complex ways), and there is no reason why a professor should be any different. For some it may be no more than a minor box-ticking exercise in demonstrating research impact, an online platform for self-promotion, or a resources dump. Others may seek to develop more dynamic, discursive and reflective blogging environments, which invite debate, engage with their current practice and research, and demonstrate a willingness to share ideas and expose their own inconsistencies, doubts and challenges.
Which of these are the most likely to influence and affect social media practice in their field?
Pat Thomson, Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham, has just launched a new blog with a batch of interesting posts.
Having attended a number of her tough but highly effective sessions on academic writing in the School of Education, I am particularly familiar with her post on Swales and Feak’s exercises in skeleton writing. Her book with Barbara Kamler, Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision, has rightly become recognised as a key text (don’t be misled by the title – it’s just as useful for PhD students). The recently published Routledge Doctoral Companions (for students and supervisors), which she co-edited with colleague Melanie Walker, have also been indispensible in my own research.
Of course, these represent only part of Pat’s research interests and experiences, so it will be interesting to see how she decides to develop the blog. As @PatParslow suggested in a subsequent Twitter discussion, professorial blogging is all too rare. Yet in my experience of talking with other PhD students, professors who do blog can be enormously influential (probably far more than they realise) in legitimising blogs as platforms for research dissemination, particularly in under-represented disciplines.
During yesterday’s Doctoral Conference at the London Knowledge Lab, Martin Oliver, Neil Selwyn and Rebecca Eynon, editors of Learning, Media and Technology, presented a useful session on getting journal articles published. Here’s a summary of my notes.
THE PUBLISHING PROCESS
Developing Journal Articles from a Thesis
Identifying Journals
Submitting
Corrections
WRITING A GOOD JOURNAL ARTICLE
Abstract
Literature Review
Methodology
Ethics
Presenting Data
Discussion / Conclusion
References
“Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”
Stephen Jay Gould | The Mismeasure of Man (1981)
Coming across George Lange’s photo of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates from 1991, I was struck by how well the postures, the attire and the interesting perspective capture what Apple and Microsoft represented at that time.
How different might a photo taken today look?
George Lange | Fortune Magazine (July 21, 1991) (Getty Images)
I briefly mentioned the notion of an ‘imagined audience’ in my recent post on PhD blogging for The Thesis Whisperer. In his thesis, David Brake (2009) uses a symbolic interactionist approach to examine imagined audiences in relation to personal blogging in the UK. He suggests blogging practices incorporate a range of ‘envisaged audience relationships’ where a blogger’s “construction of the meaning of their practice can be based as much on an imagined and desired social context as it is on an informed and reflexive understanding of the communicative situation” (p.3). Drawing on Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology, Brake explains how the marginal role of blog audiences is partly encoded in the socio-technical characteristics of the blogging platforms themselves.
Interestingly, the notion of ‘audience’ assumes a broadcast metaphor. How does this compare with the idea of a blogging community, and the participative web generally? How do we perceive audiences in the social media we use? How are these perceptions formed? And how do they differ across different platforms? Do we transfer audience identities from one platform to another?
Viewing indicators (visitor statistics etc.) are limited in what they tell us, whilst acts of participation and reciprocity (comments, retweets etc.) are often fewer in number than we’d like. Even when a network is largely identifiable – such as followers on Twitter – we have little or no idea of their actual viewing behaviours. I purposely keep the number of people I follow on Twitter to a manageable figure (I’d like to follow more) to be able to most efficiently view my twitter feed on a regular basis. I assume users who follow several thousands of people don’t do this, but rather engage in more inconsistent viewing habits, do more skimming, or employ some sort of filtering.
A number of participants in my PhD study have expressed concerns over the ambiguity of social media audiences, particularly around blogging. As I have discussed previously, doctoral practices can require negotiating a number of different contexts, which, even within my small cohort of participants, can include conflicting academic, entrepreneurial and activist activities. By choosing to use social media, they are committed to engaging in more public, distributed and persistent dialogues. The way they blog, tweet and create other digital artefacts across interrelated platforms and audiences incurs potential inconsistencies and tensions. When those audiences are ambiguous, practice and identity agendas are further compromised.
Reference
Brake, D. R. (2009). As if nobody’s reading’?: the imagined audience and socio-technical biases in personal blogging practice in the UK. PhD thesis, London School of Economics. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/25535/
