http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpwH9csFid8

I enjoyed this piece on Read Write Web (“Do Kids Read Blogs? New Study Aims to Confuse“) becuase it does a great job of talking about the various ways that a survey can be designed and or manipulated to make the points that you want to make. In this case, it’s BlogHer and iVillage ‘s apparent desire to make blogs seem younger and so, presumably, more marketable, than what was recently reported by Pew Internet. What I find most interesting, though, is the way these debates illustrate the role of consumerism on new communication technologies.

In a general sense, blogs became the “thing” a few years back and as such were used to illustrate that these new technologies…

I’m going to start a conference paper today– really, I will!– that focuses on the need for a stronger critique of consumerism in the study of computers and writing, in part to avoid a potential backlash against new communication technologies, and in part becuase without that sort of criticism our field risks intellectual and social irresponsibility. The backlash, as a recent Washington Post piece illustrates (“More colleges, professors shutting down laptops and other digital distractions”), continues to gain momentum.

In the liberal arts, a certain segment of the academy always believed that these new technologies are alienating, if not anathema to the traditional transformative goals of higher education. In computers and writing, we’ve long argued that this was both…