Danah Boyd on Class, Facebook and MySpace

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I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been traipsing through the country talking to teens and I’ve been seeing this transition for the past 6-9 months but I’m having a hard time putting into words. Americans aren’t so good at talking about class and I’m definitely feeling that discomfort. It’s sticky, it’s uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don’t have the language for marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally descriptive, but in being so, it’s also hugely problematic. I don’t have the language to get at what I want to say, but I decided it needed to be said anyhow. I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I’m going to face the stickiness and see if I can get my thoughts across. Hopefully it works.

danah boyd
June 24, 2007

Boyd’s piece is short and impressionistic but quite effective for what it is. Even the comments on her blog are fun to read. What’s fascinating to me is the way she feels compelled to remind readers that she is just testing out ideas, not writing an “academic essay.” She’s not defensive, but she’s puzzled by the often fierce response to her piece.

“I can’t decide if the response is good or bad,” Boyd writes, “I’m clearly getting raked through the coals by lots of folks from lots of different perspectives.” One problem, she thinks, “is that I also clearly pissed off the academics by inappropriately appropriating academic terms in an attempt to demarcate groups.”

Why such a rapid shift away from a discussion of class and towards a focus on Boyd’s authority? As she says, class is a loaded subject in the United Sates. “It’s sticky,” she writes, and “uncomfortable.” I also think she hit a nerve by hinting at a critical view of the material and social privilege associated with high-status universities. This debate is really about class in academia and the way professorial privilege is policed through language.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Professional, Writing

The Cult of the Amateur

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The Encyclopedia Britannica is often cited as an example of a best result of the professional system, usually in contradistinction to the amateur efforts of Wikipedia.

However, Britannica’s spectacular failures to report on Einstein’s 1905 writings that fundamentally changed our understanding of this entire universe, along with their simultaneous refusal to change a centuries old attitude towards racism, the roots of World War One, just to name a few instances of brittle Britannica bias, should be enough reason alone to encourage other sources of information.

Marvin Minsky, arguably, “The smartest man in the world,” at least by the standards of Isaac Asimov, says that, “You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”

How can you learn anything more than one way if the professionals’ attention span is that of a myopic gnat?

What we need is MORE information sources. . .not less!

Michael Hart, Friday, 22 June 2007

Here’s a spirited defense of the flat-hierarchies enabled by the web in general and encouraged by wikis and Wikipedia more specifically. Michael Hart is, as his by-line says, “Founding Member of Project Gutenberg, World eBook Fair & General Cyberspace.” Hart is responding to the book of the same name, and to what he calls, “paid professional punditry,” who find their authority challenged.

It’s odd that there always seems to be this ‘sky is falling’ attitude among some critics, as if you had to have professional opinions or amateur opinions but not both. Interestingly, the pundits fear that the amateurs have an unfair advantage, as if sheer enthusiasm could swamp clear thinking. That may be true in some cases.

It suggests, though, that we need to continue to promote and teach and model skepticism, as Hart suggest. One good rule: never trust a single source of any kind. Perhaps another rule is to never trust one kind of source; to play amateur against professional and vice versa. It’s also important to remember– again, as Hart emphasizes– that the system of expertise always exaggerated the accuracy of its knowledge.

Posted in: Language, Online Places, Professional, Writing

Online Etymology Dictionary

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This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.

The dates beside a word indicate the earliest year for which there is a surviving written record of that word (in English, unless otherwise indicated). This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since a word may have been used in conversation for hundreds of years before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries.

from the Online Etymology Dictionary

I’m going on vacation for a week, so there won’t be any posts until July 11. How about some etymology before we go? Did you know that ‘cool cash’ is one of the oldest uses of ‘cool,’ dating from the 1700s? Or that ‘groovy‘ is related to grave and ditch, and took on its slang sense in the 1930s, like ‘cool’? Yet another debt we owe Black Jazz. Hip, by the way, “probably a variant of hep” (as in cool or groovy) is as old as the airplane.

Posted in: Language, Writing