Sep 11th, 2007 | Opinion, Web 2.0 | No Comments
From this piece in Douglas Gray’s blog:
I’ve been arguing for years that hypertext does not represent any threat to the book. Here’s a case of the web’s influence to preserve a traditional aesthetic in writing while revolutionizing the economics of publishing, for the benefit of writers and publishers and the public.
When you have unlimited reach, your physical product simply can’t lose market share to its digital reproduction. But it’s the idea of unlimited reach for all of us that we’re still adjusting to, I think. Even digital files were still scarce in a sense before everything became networked. But since that has changed, the idea that we can sell more of a thing because we restrict access to its digital reproduction seems patently stupid to me.
Aug 14th, 2007 | Blogosphere, Media, Opinion | No Comments
Douglas Gray wrote a wonderfully concise piece about what you could call ‘the blog stereotype’ a little while ago that I thought I should mention. The subject of his commentary is this article by Edward Champion, which is actually not concerned with blogs at all, but with the fact - surprise, surprise - that you might find having a blog quite convenient if you happen to be a famous (or at least notorious) exhibitionist. That, and Champion needs to consult a dictionary. As Gray notes:
The number of stereotypes and sweeping generalizations Champion manages to compress into the opening paragraphs of the article is truly dazzling. If only he’d taken the time to consult an undergraduate-level textbook on modern literature, he might have also gotten some of his terminology right.
The “confessional” writers were a movement of poets (primarily) who in the 1950s and 1960s began treating an autobiographical “I” as the primary subject of the work, delving with stark frankness into emotional and sexual experiences in a way that violated previous taboos about what constituted proper poetic material.
Champion conflates confessional material with introspection, though they are not the same thing at all. T.S. Eliot, for example, was a deeply introspective poet, but he avoided personal revelations in his own work. I’ve heard it argued that Anne Sexton, one of the leading confessional poets, was herself not terribly introspective.
Of course, among other things, introspection is also a scientific methodology. For example, to decide whether or not a sentence is grammatical a syntactician may resort to introspection, i.e. his intuitive judgment. Obviously that has very little to do with him revealing his private secrets to the general public. In fact, if you look at linguistic blogs you’ll find disappointingly little outrageous personal revelations. Heck, if you ask Google what introspection means it becomes quite clear that it’s not the same as exhibitionism. This journalist is in need of a plain old dictionary, it seems.
Jul 17th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Google, Opinion | 3 Comments
I’ve decided to take this long comment from my previous post on the Google-Sicko incident and republish it here, mainly because comments tend to be overlooked and it may be interesting to some readers. Please note that I have no knowledge about the identity of “Mike G” and what he says about the way Google has dealt with this issue may be accurate or complete speculation (where are your sources, Mike?). Frankly, I have very mixed feelings about giving a public forum to anonymous voices (especially considering the kind of mudslinging involved) but the point made about the responsibility of senior staff at Google in regards to the incident is valid.
Just take this with a grain of salt.
And here are two short responses that I wrote after receiving “Mike’s” comment.
My comment number 1:
Thanks for your interesting comment. It makes perfect sense to me that the problems that have arisen can’t really be blamed purely on Mrs. Turner, but that those who gave the her the assignment and approved it dropped the ball. I still think there’s a stylistic problem there (well, or an “audience design” one - it’s a sales pitch that reached the wrong people), but you are right that it isn’t exactly fair from her point of view.
Strange though, communication is usually very well handled at Google and they excel at not sounding like marketers. This is clearly an exception.
My comment number 2:
(quote Mike G) “Get with the program: you work for an advertising platform company. Your free healthcare and free lunch come from advertising revenue. Wake up and smell the words “public company.” Google isn’t a start-up anymore.”
True, it certainly isn’t, but it’s a company that has a lot to loose in terms of image. The question is: why would they want to even try appeal to pharma companies in this way? Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand that they want the ad revenue, but don’t they get that anyway, without the sleazy, reputation-damaging sales pitch? I’m not saying that they aren’t about a profit, but this whole story seems anything but beneficial to their bottom line, evil or no evil.
I should add that I don’t support any of the seemingly internal finger-pointing going on here (and obviously I am not affiliated with Google). It’s true that Turner has taken an awful lot of criticism for something that must have been approved by other people. On the other hand, if it has your name under (or above it) you are responsible for the content. Blogs are highly individual channels of communication and as long as you have a choice you should think twice before playing human shield for your company.
All that being said, let’s not overrate the whole issue. Given the attention span of the blogosphere, I’m confident no one will remember any of this a month from now.
Jul 1st, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Blogosphere, Opinion, Other Stuff, Web 2.0 | 5 Comments
After reading a number of interesting comments in the course of the last few days, I thought it would make sense to follow up on danah boyd’s blog essay concerning socioeconomic status and social networking sites with a second post (read the first one here). As with my previous piece, I’m especially interested in the reception and in how boyd herself is reacting to the (shoddy) journalism of the BBC and others.
Last week, boyd posted this on the heels of her essay:
Dear esteemed members of the press,
I am in the field collecting data and then will be attending a conference. I am not able to respond right now. Do not call my house phone. Do not pester my department. And do *NOT* hound my subletter. All press inquiries should be sent to press [at] danah.org. When I can, I respond. When I can’t, I don’t. Do not use other email addresses - I check the press one from my phone and answer them in order when I have spare cycles. Other requests are typically ignored.
The BBC coverage of my blog essay is hugely problematic. If you want to discuss what I’ve written, please read the essay itself. This is not a formal report. This is a blog essay based on observations from the field. And this is not a 6-month study; it is a 4-year study with a tide shift that I’ve noticed in the last 6 months. Again, read the essay. At some point, I will turn this into a formal article, but this is not that. Cover it as you see fit, but do not call it a report.
Thank you,
THE MANAGEMENT
(emphasis mine)
From the viewpoint of anyone who has ever done genre studies, this is a pretty interesting text. Obviously the genre categories boyd uses - blog essay, formal report, study, formal article and report - are important. boyd essentially claims that the semantics of these terms place them in distinct distance from one another. In other words, the fact that a) her blog essay is in fact a blog essay (and not a report, study, article etc) and b) the knowledge of what a blog essay is should both have been available to the BBC’s reporters and their failure to use the correct terminology to describe her piece suggests incompetence or even a willful misrepresentation. They are calling it a study although it isn’t, because they don’t understand how ethnographic research works.
And of course this is perfectly true. All the labels used by the mass media to describe Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace are their invention -nowhere does boyd use the terms report or study.
Some of the comments I’ve read capture the problem quite well. Says Marianne Richmond:
I think perhaps that the fallout of Danah’s blog essay is a case study in new media participation and consumption in and of it self: Her observations were interpreted, misinterpreted and remixed within the context of academic research that is more typical of the author…even though the standards of academic research were specifically stated by the author as not applicable.
The last statement is actually incorrect. boyd made the explicit statement that the piece was not an academic article after the initial posting. This short paragraph originally preceded the text, followed by the essay proper.
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.
The paragraph following it - what could be called the ‘disclaimer for academic readers’ - was added retroactively:
For the academics reading this, I want to highlight that this is not an academic article. It is not trying to be. It is based on my observations in the field, but I’m not trying to situate or theorize what is going on. I’ve chosen terms meant to convey impressions, but I know that they are not precise uses of these terms. Hopefully, one day, I can get the words together to actually write an academic article about this topic, but I felt as though this is too important of an issue to sit on while I find the words. So I wrote it knowing that it would piss many off. The academic side of me feels extremely guilty about this; the activist side of me finds it too critical to go unacknowledged.
boyd also later edited the blog post announcing the piece. Sadly, I have no way of retrieving the original text to check what changes were made, but it seems she highlighted the word essay multiple times to emphasize the status of the publication as something other than an article/study/report etc. Of course, she also made no claim going into the other direction. When using a descriptive label for her piece, she consistently calls it a blog essay or essay. As I’ve noted before, the semantics of the compound term blog essay are bound to be unclear to her readers, as she is one of very few people who use this phrase at all.
That being said, I fully agree to Marianne’s observation. In the media ecosystem we live in today, an author constantly risks losing control of her text and it being recontextualized by others in meaning-changing ways that cannot be predicted. Such recontextualizations can be deliberately misleading or the result of a misunderstanding. It’s often a thin line.
In this vein, Elaine Young sides with boyd and notes the inaccurate reporting:
You go girl! Fancy that. Asking the media to READ something before they report on it. But … there is no guarantee that they will full comprehend what they are reading and there in lies the challenge in posting “information” that is somewhat controversial on the web in an open forum.
The way “information” is put in quotes here is interesting to me, as it seems also to point once more to the unclear status of the piece and a lack of clarity regarding boyd’s investigative methodology. Note that I’m not saying that her methodology is in any way unsound. It’s a perfectly well-established practice in a range of disciplines that produces highly valuable results. I am saying that Young’s way of phrasing it suggests that she is not clear about the kind of evidence that ethnographic methods produce (is it information or just “information”?).
This blog gives a very good summary of the sequence of events:
Berkeley PhD candidate Danah Boyd, has the web astir after she posted an informal essay on her blog about the class divisions associated with the popular social-networking sites Facebook and MySpace. Boyd, who is already among the most prominent of academics of the Internet’s social sphere, posted the essay on Sunday. On Monday morning, the BBC reported on Boyd’s “conclusions”, and by midday Monday, nearly 100,000 readers had flocked to Boyd’s original entry. Though many have written in support of the essay, others have taken major offense, calling the work “racist” and academically unsound. Boyd sees the negativity towards her essay as a product of its misrepresentation in the press–specifically in the BBC’s “hugely problematic” coverage of her essay–which she says referred to the essay as a final product of academic research, rather than the exploratory mid-process musing it was meant to be.
Kevin P comments over at Tuttle SVC:
I’m not sure. I can’t decide if we should blame danah for not being *more* clear it was not research or the media for not being *more* clear that it was not research.
Certainly she’s getting flamed, and boy is she getting known.
The topic is being discussed like crazy.
Blogs are confusing with standards and danah is firmly on the crack, but I think it’s put her out as a leader.
Would her problem have been solved if she had moderated comments like you do and just taken out the really nasty ones?
It’s interesting to conclude that the essay is “not research” (which is again not phrased that way by boyd). If it were not research, or based on research, the idea that there is a socioeconomic split between Facebook and MySpace users would merely be an opinion. Instead, it is supported by research data - just not by data of the right kind, in my view. Whereas a large volume of quantitative data could answer the question of the Facebook and MySpace user communities’ makeup with relative precision, the qualitative data that has been used cannot. That does not mean that the assumption isn’t true, it just means it can’t be validated.
This post also caught my attention:
Ms. boyd is a quite accomplished scholar of social systems and her thoughts tend to carry a fair amount of weight. She’s an acknowledged expert in a given field, yet as an academic, she has two different “modes” of presenting her thoughts. One is very formal, involving calculated and well researched statements reflecting research and study and highlighting correlation and conclusion. In other words, your typical research paper.
The other is the equivalent of sitting at a coffee shop for an hour.
The funny thing is that it’s often those latter statements that seem to have the highest likelihood of spreading like an Atlanta lawyer on a transcontinental flight.
Kent and i got into a quick discussion about this and i think he touched on something kinda key. He noted that it won’t be long before academics realize that they don’t necessarily need the structure and peer review that they previously always had. They can be more open and have greater impact without it. i disagreed, since i know that often that peer review system exists for a good reason and a lot of folks actually like it since it helps them refine and defend their assertions instead of just shouting them into the void.
Peer review is regarded by many as a guarantee of scientific integrity, yet to others it means elitism and expert-worship. I agree with the author though - without peer review, the scientific process can turn into a popularity contest. What can be proven often isn’t what’s generally believed, what is plausible or popular.
Ken Cousins of Augmentation is impressed by the potential of blogs as a publishing platform for academics:
Think about this - a grad student publishes preliminary fieldwork notes to the web, and within 24-48 hours has drawn the attention of a mid-sized city. Granted, danah is a rock star, and not all of the comments were appropriate or well-conceived. But I think most academics would consider their careers a success if they commanded an audience of such size over their entire careers.
Is danah a super-hub? Are the rest of us scattered throughout the long tail? Clearly, on both counts. But at the very least, this suggests an emerging mode for scholarship, a new means of engaging the broader community (both scholarly and pedestrian) in our work.
The awareness that you can communicate with an enormous number of readers almost effortlessly via your blog has still not reached the majority of academics, who are used to thinking in very tightly knit groups and don’t really consider the importance of addressing a wider audience. I’d be very surprised if the majority of researchers in the humanities and social sciences isn’t blogging 10 years from now. Why? Because I think these areas have suffered from a lack of knowledge about what they do and how, on the part of the majority of the population.
Finally, I want to quote a full post by Michael Clarke on the topic that I found very insightful.
The reaction to Danah’s essay in the newspapers suggests that mainstream media are still very fond of privileging expert, authoritative discourse - when it suits them (i.e. when it gives an opportunity to discuss/reinforce class divisions, say “Oooh, it’s bad this Noo Medjaa stuff, isn’t it?” and so on…). Three days previously, Weinberger and Keen were debating the “…value of authority in a connected world…” and it’s fascinating how much of the attention given to Danah’s post accrued from her status as an academic (and how much hatred that this seems to have generated on the comments on her most recent post).
This is in line with studies such as the Edelman Trust Barometer (see slide #22). Academics are still generally trusted as credible, though a democratization of trust is taking place (”someone like myself” is now considered the most trustworthy source of information in many areas).
One might argue that perceived “expertise” has always been related to demagoguery both benign and sinister (Gina Ford of Contented Little Baby, Scoble, Hitler, Alain de Botton, Ghandi…) - social media just democratises people’s access to becoming a demagogue (lowers the entry requirements).
I find that observation both keen and very amusing, though I don’t think Robert Scoble deserves being mentioned along with mass-murderous dictators.
Perhaps “experts” then, in a constructed sense, are still very much with us but social media renders them more open to challenge than ever before. The Danah cited in a slightly sloppy piece by the BBC is thoroughly mediated by their take on her work but it’s one click away from her blog. On her blog, she’s speaking for herself - and people can answer back.
No doubt the openness of the social media is a good thing, but the diversity of opinions and the lack of accountability also make it hard to figure out whom to believe. That isn’t a catastrophe, but the market for things which are simply untrue (but nicely serve to compound our stereotypes) is definitely there.
Any conclusions? Expertise is accountable on Web 2.0. And perhaps more useful as a result of this, as any socially mediated means of distribution makes the consumer of expertise equally accountable for the uses they put it to. Well, that’s my optimistic take on it, anyway…
Expertise is only truly accountable if you have it yourself. In other words, I have to be physicist to understand an advanced physics problem, social web or no social web. If I don’t, my only alternative is to trust someone who knows more about this stuff than I do. Believing what the majority finds plausible can be a dead end. That doesn’t mean that the social web is not a boon for academics, but since earning and keeping trust is vital to what we do, we should make sure we do our job well.
The initial lack of clarity regarding the genre-status of the piece is what caused all this fuss. While it would be nice if journalists and the general public knew more about different forms of academic writing, I believe that danah boyd intended the piece to be both more than just a blog entry and less than a real research paper - and therein lies the problem. I don’t think you can have it both ways and make it authoritative for those who believe and “just an essay” for those who don’t, which is what this looks like.
Jun 26th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Blogosphere, Opinion, Web 2.0 | 10 Comments
Hmm, funny how these things go. Originally, I just wanted to write a short entry about an essay by danah boyd, but then things turned out differently, in the sense that the entry became anything but short (a blog essay, if you will) and that it ended up concerning more than just one piece of writing and its reception.
Let’s see.
boyd’s recent post on class divisions on MySpace and Facebook caught my attention because it raises a number of interesting questions (the full essay is available here) and I was eager to blog a detailed comment.
But on the Web time works against you and others were a lot more prompt with their responses than me. Many others. So many, in fact, that boyd was taken off guard by the mass of reactions, which were provided by both the mainstream press (1, 2, 3, 4 - many more if you search) and of course by countless bloggers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, …. the list is endless). So instead of adding my nitpicking to what has already been written – much of which is strongly decontextualized and hyperbolic – I want to look at the dynamics of the situation instead.
-
A PhD candidate writes up her impressions regarding the socioeconomic status of users on two social networking sites and puts the resulting text on her web site.
-
The new and old media pick up the piece and present it as the result of scientific inquiry (see below).
-
People hotly debate whether a) the claims made in the piece are accurate and b) what the (negative) implications are.
-
The essayist qualifies her writing, calling it “problematic” [1] and noting that “as an academic… I feel guilty” [2].
Looking at this course of events, I realized that I was actually more interested in the reception and interpretation of boyd’s essay and in what it means for the relationship between science and society in the digital era than I was in the content of the essay per se.
Why?
Because it is a perfect example of how genre conventions can be creatively subverted to gain prestige and authority (though I am not implying that this is boyd’s goal). Furthermore, the essay’s reception demonstrates how the lack of reliable formal criteria to distinguish between emergent digital genres can cause uncertainty, and that the news media reinforces this uncertainty through shoddy and inaccurate reporting.
The result of this process is a sort of Scienciness – a set of opinions and impressions which are supported by the experience, intuition and (most importantly) prestige of an academic, but not by empirical data. This last fact is not problematic per se, since there are many interesting questions that simply cannot be answered in a satisfactory way by relying purely on quantitative data. In countless areas of investigation the ethnographic methodology as employed by boyd is ideally suited to the question – just not here, where the question is a simple socio-demographic tidbit: are the user communities of Facebook and MySpace economically stratified or not?
In the following paragraphs, I want to look at how boyd characterizes and classifies her own writing and how it is in turn interpreted and (badly!) recontextualized by some of the news sites that cite her. In that context it is worthwhile to point out that the popular reception of the essay is partly due to its usefulness in confirming what we suspected all along.
Is anything a scientist says scientific per definition? Is it our job to find proof for what people suspected all along (for example, about the unwashed masses and the digital Las Vegas they have created on MySpace, to use boyd’s example)? In other words, is what we (as in “we scientists”) do about finding the truth, or about finding answers; the difference being that the truth can be rather fuzzy and inconclusive and answers are, by contrast, meant to satisfy the inquirer?
Let’s start by looking at some of the points made in boyd’s essay and blog entry:
There is indeed a change taking place, but it’s not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Which go where gets kinda sticky, because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.
(from the blog)
The assertion made is simple enough: the migration of people from one site to the other is not age-related, but influenced by socioeconomic factors. boyd notes that she lacks both a concise definition of class and the empirical data needed to back up her claim that there is a migration from one platform to the other and that this is indeed socioeconomically motivated:
(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. 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 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 a point can be made through it all. Hopefully it works. If not, sorry.)
(from the essay)
(A “meta point” that could be made here is that her piece is not so much descriptive as it is impressionistic. In order for something to be descriptive it has to accurately describe something.)
Now, although having empirical data on the users of Facebook and MySpace and their demographic and socioeconomic status at hand would be convenient, lacking such information by no means precludes any kind of analysis. boyd has conducted countless interviews and analyzed a large number of profiles in the course of her studies. The unique advantage of an ethnographic methodology is that it allows the researcher to capture contextual information that is simply omitted when just looking at numbers on a spreadsheet.
But the problem is that the kind of question boyd asks doesn’t require or even allow an ethnographic methodology. It requires a large-scale, representative quantitative analysis. I fully agree with boyd when she notes that, to pick a prominent example, income is not a single sufficient indicator of “class”. But this does not impact the central issue at all: when making judgements on two internet communities with a size exceeding 125 million users having conducted a series of interviews seems grossly insufficient.
It is interesting that boyd reacted one day after initially publishing the essay by appending the following to her foreword (without marking the change in any way):
For the academics reading this, I want to highlight that this is not an academic article. It is not trying to be. It is based on my observations in the field, but I’m not trying to situate or theorize what is going on. I’ve chosen terms meant to convey impressions, but I know that they are not precise uses of these terms. Hopefully, one day, I can get the words together to actually write an academic article about this topic, but I felt as though this is too important of an issue to sit on while I find the words. So I wrote it knowing that it would piss many off. The academic side of me feels extremely guilty about this; the activist side of me finds it too critical to go unacknowledged.
(from the essay)
Several aspects of this qualifying paragraph are interesting. Firstly, she specifically addresses the academic community when stating that her piece is not an academic article, which almost creates the impression that this caveat does not apply to those outside of academia who interpreted it as such a text (e.g. the news media). Secondly she presents the defect of the article as a linguistic problem – she isn’t able to find the correct terminology for the phenomena she believes to have noticed. Thirdly, her motivation for writing and publishing the text despite of its self-attested weaknesses is that of the activist who finds the issues “too critical to go unacknowledged”.
But what exactly is it that shouldn’t go unacknowledged? That the use of social networking sites may be socially stratified? Not only would that be hardly surprising (if it could be proven), but it would also hardly serve as a grounds for any kind of activism (should we ban Facebook for elitism, or MySpace for appealing to the proles?). Or, does boyd mean it is an important issue that American society is shaped by its socioeconomic makeup, or that this makeup should be changed, or that this is a new, pressing issue that needs to be urgently addressed?
All of these things seems ridiculously implausible.
And what about the second problem – that she is lacking the words to describe the problem. The claim frames scientific inquiry as the application of obscure jargon to an issue, a jargon that wouldn’t change the quality of the facts presented in any way. A discussion about the implications of how the user bases of social networks are socially stratified may be highly political, but the data itself certainly isn’t. In other words, the issue isn’t what to call things, the issue is whether or not they are there in the first place. Accurate quantitative data precludes a careful description – there is no language fix to that problem.
This “message to the academic readership” echoes similar remarks made in boyd’s blog:
I think some folks misinterpreted this piece as an academic article. No doubt this is based on my observations from the field, but this is by no means an academic article. I did add some methodological footnotes in the piece so that folks would at least know where the data was coming from. But I didn’t situate or theorize or contextualize this at all. It’s more like publicizing field observations. There’s much work to be done before this can be anything resembling an academic article. The “citation” note at the top of my pieces also confuses this. That was meant for when people picked it up and stole it whole from my page or when people got to it indirectly. I put that as a standard for my blog essays a while back because of this issue. I guess I see my blog as a space to work out half-formed ideas. I just didn’t expect 90K people to read it. Blog essays to me are thoughts in progress, blog entries that are too long to be blog entries. But I can see where there’s confusion.
(from the blog)
The last highlighted remark is what genuinely puzzles me. When is a blog entry too long to be a blog entry? The software imposes no natural limit on how much you can publish in one entry. In fact, I have individual posts in my corpus that exceed 5,000 running words of text. Whether that is typical is another question, but there is certainly no technical reason to limit the length of a blog post any more than the length of any other piece published on-line.
But instead of publishing it in her blog, boyd evokes a new genre of writing: the blog essay. Googling for that compound term results in 26,500 hits, a tiny fraction of the number of results found when searching for either “blog” or “essay”. It can thus be assumed that boyd is either an early adopter of the term, or possibly its inventor. The blog essay is published on boyd’s website danah.org, which also contains a full biography and information on her to-date research. By contrast, her blog apophenia is located at http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/. The meta-description she provides in the side-bar there reads: “I use this blog to express random thoughts about whatever i’m thinking about.“ By contrast, the essay is stored at http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ - the only text currently in that folder. The danah.org/papers folder is linked to in several places and referred to as “my research papers” and “formalized reflections” [1, 2].
Here’s the layout of the essay’s header, as published at http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html:
Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
danah boyd
June 24, 2007
Citation: boyd, danah. 2007. “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace .” Apophenia Blog Essay. June 24 . http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
(If you have comments, please add them to the related entry on my blog. Thank you.)
[text body]
The citation, as noted by boyd [1], serves to reinforce any assumption on part of the reader that this is a scholarly article, or at least the draft of one.
Let’s summarize: the text is on a separate HTML page, located in a folder that contains research papers. It is deliberately published in another place than the blog (that is used to publish thoughts and opinions) and instructions are given for how it should be cited.
And yet it is not an academic article.
It appears that those citing the piece are under an entirely different impression (and I’m not saying that this isn’t largely their own fault). The BBC mentions a study, calling the essay a “preliminary draft”, to Mashable it’s a “case study”, BoingBoing also uses the term “draft”, blogger John Scalzi uses the more specific label “draft of an academic paper” and finally, MonstersAndCritics.com calls it “a new six-month interview-based study”.
Looking again at the novel genre label of blog essay doesn’t help to clarify the issue, as the semantics of the term are confusing (to me at least). Looking up definitions of essay nets explanations such as these:
an analytic or interpretive literary composition
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Essay, a short work that treats of a topic from an author’s personal point of view, often taking into account subjective experiences and personal reflections upon them.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essay
A short literary composition on a single subject expressing a personal view.
www.peabody.jhu.edu/index.php
I think most people would agree that these definitions are equally applicable to a blog, with the difference that the essay is a pre-digital genre and one that is usually associated with traditions of learned or academic writing. boyd makes a choice when calling her text a blog essay: she assigns it a certain degree of authority by delineating it from the pieces published in her blog. Together with her status as an academic – at least that is the role that virtually all news sources assign her – the implication for most readers is clearly that what she is saying is the result of scientific research. In other words, it is an assessment based on empirical facts that tells us something about the world we live in. It is verifiable, objective and the result of thorough inquiry.
I know I’m applying the most drastic view possible here, but you can probably see the problem. boyd has – whether deliberately or not – positioned her blog essay in an ontological nirvana between scientific research and impressionistic argument. She has creatively remixed different forms of publishing in a way made possible only by the push-button power of the Net. By placing her blog next to her archive of research papers, she has created a hierarchy – here a few loosely connected thoughts, there a collection of structured ideas. The blog essay is the hybrid form that reaps the benefit of both text types but is under none of the constraints. To those who find it convincing it can be research, to those who are skeptical it is supposed to be just an opinion piece.
It’s like science, just without all that rigor.
Maybe that is what is causing boyd’s uneasiness about the impact of the piece, expressed in her closing note:
I also need to get my head around the fact that sharing something problematic has sparked more of a conversation and reflection than being precise. In some senses, this bothers me. At the same time, inciting people to think is exactly what I want. So I am feeling very bewildered. Is the way to make change to present something problematic so that people have to engage by disagreeing? Hmm..
(from her blog)
It’s the truth vs. answers conundrum again. Scientific investigation leads us to more questions, not to any definite, final answers that are easy to understand and confirm the stereotyped expectation we have, based on our own anecdotal experience. It isn’t science’s job to spark “conversation and reflection”, as harsh as that may sound. I don’t mean that it’s not great when that happens – I mean that that shouldn’t be the primary goal. Because if it is our goal, we are putting social gratification before investigating the truth, since in the end “conversation and reflection” largely accomplishes social ends. It’s not a popularity contest, it’s a truth contest. But of course I’m probably looking at this from an entirely wrong angle.
In a way, Robert Scoble summarizes the appeal of boyd’s blog essay chimera aptly:
Here’s why I was interested in her paper last night where some of her other, more “researched” writings just leaves me cold.
1. It clearly defined a conflict. And a big one at that between two classes of people.
[drama makes for great entertainment]
2. It fit my already pre-defined stereotypes. My brother, Ben, for instance, is on MySpace […] Of course these kids totally fit into danah’s post last night.
[stories are told to reinforce our view of the world]
3. Most of danah’s posts are written for an academic audience. Put a little simpler: they are information dense and hard to get through. The one last night had a breezy, conversational feel to it. It was more approachable than her usual writings. I think that in our RSS “J, J, J, J” fast track world we just give up on posts that are too academic and not interesting to us as humans.
[please don’t make me think]
Oh danah, do you forget that we live in a world that pays 1,000,000 times more attention to Paris Hilton in jail than we do to whatever our President is doing? And you wonder why your article yesterday got so much attention? You hit the same nerve that Paris Hilton does.
Perhaps it is just me, but I am not entirely sure boyd enjoys being framed as the Paris Hilton of internet sociology. At least, I can see that not working out so well with her feminist activism. Mass appeal is just one form of currency and in the academic world it’s not the one with the highest value.
In the end this is not about one piece of writing, its author or how it’s being received though. It is about how we communicate what we do as researchers in a networked world. When everyone suddenly has a voice, authority is crucial – and absolutely invaluable. Scientists have authority not because of academic titles or the prestige of universities, but because they play by certain rules and present their work in specific formalized ways. These ways are changing, invariably, along with the way we communicate digitally. The academic community (and especially an innovator like mrs. boyd) should actively engage this change. Academic publishing won’t take place on paper in the future and the genre labels we’ll use will be different. But we will need clear labels nonetheless; we will need peer review and we will need other measures of authority that are as objective as possible, because otherwise there is the danger that authority and popularity become synonymous and that our job is merely to validate what the majority finds plausible. We should let the priests and the politicians do that.
I know that in the context of the Web as a democratizing force this probably all sounds medieval, backwards and elitist. But my concern is trust, plain and simple. We are trusted for basing our claims on facts and we should do all we can to prevent incompetent journalists from misrepresenting what we do. I know that that’s easier said than done, but to me at least it’s something to strive for.
Feb 13th, 2007 | Linguistics, Opinion, Style | No Comments
Krishna Kumar has written a great post summarizing what I’ve been doing lately with f-scores in blogs. My favorite quote:
The complexity of language exists not because some people are pretentious and want to sound different (maybe they do), but because life and people’s behavior is essentially complicated and has different levels of subtle variations.
I don’t think there is any better way of saying it. Many people have the idea that how we express ourselves can be judged purely on a good-to-bad scale. They believe that style is essentially a matter of personal discipline and that keeping things simple should always be the maxim. Of course it is advisable to be clear and concise, but there’s a reason why legal documents aren’t composed with a subjective, first-person point of view and why a blog post about C# from MSDN won’t read like the new Harry Potter novel. Complex information often requires complex expression and relating facts is just one of many, many things we do with language (think about flirting, bartering, begging, lying, promising, joking, swearing, storytelling, testifying, praying and lecturing). The complexity of these expressions and of the abstract system that we all constantly use to create them - language - is what linguistics is all about. And it is for that reason that people like Geoff Pullum get testy when they are faced with students who believe that one should omit adjectives because they are ‘needless words’*.
Language as a system decides the basic shape of an utterance. The sentence
To fruit the man woman give
is not a comprehensible English sentence, no matter in what kind of context I use it. It isn’t bad style. It simply doesn’t parse, because it isn’t grammatical. We have an idea that different things and people are involved (man, woman, fruit) but no idea how they relate to each other. When does what is being related happen (past, future, right now)? We simply don’t know because the grammatical information is missing.
By comparison, the two sentences
A blast of snow, gusty winds and plunging temperatures in the Midwest created headaches for travelers Tuesday with canceled flights and slick, slushy roads.
and
i like *totally* LUV coffee
are both perfectly grammatical, even though the second one contains non-standard spelling, a discourse marker (like) and an intensifier (totally), which prior to the advent of the Web and text messaging weren’t commonly used in that way in written communication. But the sentences aren’t just stylistically different. We can easily recognize that they are taken from different contexts and that they are likely to be used for expressing different things. Spoken conversation has an important social function, while traditional written composition seeks to create texts which are durable and context-independent, because it is assumed that author and reader are socially, spatially and chronologically distanced from one another. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between publishing and communicating, and one doesn’t need to think too hard to realize that blogging and other new forms of text-based communication are muddying that distinction considerably. On top of these things, there are factors such as personal stylistic preference and genre that have significant effect on how we write. So, communication is indeed complex - as Krishna notes - and gaining an understanding of its complexities means gaining an understanding of our culture and society.
That’s the bigger picture.
* He is talking about this rather famous publication and calls it a noxious and misguided little book […] a book full of recommendatory maxims that have been elevated into fascist edicts. Nope, you won’t find a lot of people in the field who have anything nice to say about Strunk and White. 
Jan 25th, 2007 | Opinion, Other Stuff | No Comments
I apologize for interrupting the regular scheduled program for a brief rant.
Since being a researcher mostly means burning taxpayer dollars, it is widely understood and accepted in the scientific community that we need to explain to the public what on earth we’re actually doing and why any of it matters once in a while. Personally, I enjoy this very much - so much, in fact, that I tell people without having been asked. Blogging is obviously one of the best ways of talking to virtually any interested individual on the planet about your work, and I think that is partly because it attracts people who otherwise wouldn’t go through the arduous process of finding a paper publication, buying it, and then contending with an unwieldy format and inaccessible jargon that only the anointed are able to understand.
In other words, talking about your research on the web is a great idea, because all sorts of people who are not members of a tightly knit in-group might listen and contribute with their perspectives. Or, if you’re some kind of grant agency that supports scholars, having a blog to talk to your clients might be a really good idea.
Which is why the website of KoWi, the office for the coordination of scientific institutions in the EU (my rough and dirty translation) frustrates me so much. They state their mission as follows:
Via email, phone, in the KoWi offices in Bonn and Brussels or at your institution KoWi gives advice regarding proposal-writing and project management. Particularly, this is valid for the European Research Council (ERC) as well as the funding of young scientists and European and international consortia in collaborative research (quote)
Being both a young scientist and a citizen of the EU, I strongly support this goal. The trouble is: the advice and information KoWi provides appears on the front page in the form of anonymously posted news bits. Not only do I have absolutely no idea who writes this stuff (and therefor little reason to find any of it relevant), but it also seems to exist independently of their AiD newsletter (which they’ve been publishing for an impressive 13 years). The disconnect between the news on the web site and the newsletter is just a minor issue though - the newsletter itself is where it really gets weird.
Instead of simply containing news items in the message body, each email issue instead consists of a table of contents. For each item in this table a PDF attachment is included, even if the news piece is a mere three or four sentences long. But that’s not all. In a recent issue, only two of four newsletter items were actually attached to the email as PDF docs. Why? Because, as the disclaimer tells me, “you only receive those items which match your profile” - that is, a list of interest areas that you have to specify when signing up for AiD. Of course I was interested in one of the items that wasn’t attached and wondered how I’d be able to get it. They don’t provide a link or anything else that would be, you know, useful. In the end I had to google their web site to find what I was looking for. To summarize: they’re using email for something that could be realized much more effectively through a blog, they apparently don’t know what RSS is and they’re making it unnecessarily difficult for me to find what I’m looking for. Oh yeah – and I have no clue who they actually are and what precisely they do, which is something a blog could tell me.
The closing irony of it all is that the news item I wanted to read was about communicating the results of your research to the general public (for example via the Internet!). They apparently had a conference on the subject. Now, a bit more than a year later they’ve published the proceedings.
As a book.
Dec 19th, 2006 | Corporate Blogging, Opinion | 7 Comments
Reading about blogging can be a lot like having too much candy in the pre-Christmas season. At first things are wonderful, but then at some point you’re just full, and when the day finally arrives you simply cannot stomach any more of the stuff. Especially when what you get is “who shouldn’t blog”-style advice.
I’ve just finished this post by Douglas Karr and all I can say is wow. I shouldn’t even opine (let alone complain) and leave that stuff to others, but in this case I just can’t stop myself. So let me blog my advice to Doug Karr’s advice on giving blogging advice. Or something like that.
<sarcasm>
I have recently realized that there are certain things that I believe to be right and other things that I believe to be wrong. To help you understand the difference without having to think too much, I have carefully assigned each term in question a side. Observe.
On the left:
- war
- poverty
- cholesterol
- traffic jams
- Satan
On the right:
- love
- happiness
- a cure for cancer
- eternal joy
- bunnies
But that isn’t all. I also have this picture to prove my point. 
Just in case your eyesight is limited: it shows a sad, old, confused guy on the left and a cool, hip, clued-in dude on the right. There is clearly a pattern there!
Here’s another pair. I have put a descriptive adjective in brackets, just in case you were getting confused by all those different sides.
Left (bad):
- apple pie
Right (good):
- ice cream
Wait, you don’t think apple pie is t3h lam3? You can’t be serious. Everyone agrees that it SUCKS. Like, totally. You should really think twice about disagreeing on this one. You don’t want to end up on the left side, now do you?
Ice cream is like way more superior than apple pie. Studies prove it. Apple pie is so last year. That’s why I suggest that lame people like you stay the hell away from ice cream. You’d eat it all wrong and make a huge mess and the ice cream is like totally too good for that, capiche? Eat your crummy, dull, uncool apple pie instead.
Now back you go, to your corner of the playground.
</sarcasm>
Note #1: I’d love to see Doug Karr and Brian Clark fight it out in some grand battle for the One True Blogging Philosophy(tm). I don’t think I really agree with either one, but my money would probably be on Brian.
Note #2: My point isn’t to bash. I just think there’s a lot of advice and opinion out there, considering how little we actually know about why people read or write blogs, or what kind of impact the social media will have in the long run. Maybe facts (like politics) are also dying, hated and unpopular, but – call me a leftie – I still kinda like them.
Sorry for the diatribe. I blame the sweets.
A few points:1. Google clearly has not communicated to its employees how to blog. Multiple people were involved in approving the blog entry, some senior on the PR team. They messed up, not Turner. The entry was an *assignment.* From what I know, the messaging to Turner was to speak to healthcare advertisers. It was a sales pitch. Who even knows if the message was Turner’s view. It could easily not be. Remember, it was a sales pitch assignment. Perhaps the advertising teams should not be pitching on blogs, but that does not make it Turner’s responsibility to decide that. Seems like a more senior problem. As for her second post, it was obviously crafted by PR. It’s not like it just appeared on a Sunday morning at 9am because she thought, hey, I’d like to get up early on a weekend. Advertising as democratic…sounds like something straight from PR.I’d love to know who’s responsible for reviewing all the blogs. I wonder why this person is not at the center of the storm. Does anyone know who was ultimately responsible for approving the post? 2. What’s the matter with letting healthcare companies promote their prescription assistance programs and philanthropic efforts? Personally, I’d like to hear more about them. What’s funny is that Turner’s group does not serve health insurance companies. Another group, one that serves all kinds of insurance companies, serves that part of the industry. This blog was intended for pharmaceutical advertising readers.3. Raph Levien [Cornelius: he is refering to the comment that Raph has left on my post], I hear you’re pretty lacking in the professionalism department. I heard you crossed a number of lines within Google by slandering this girl in a public forum. Ever heard of “Do no evil”? Hypocrisy at its best. I hope Google is slapping your hand pretty hard because it sounds like you really beat up this girl. The difference is: she endured slander due to an assignment from her team, approved by senior people and you just jumped on her without knowing the whole story. Shame on you. Get with the program: you work for an advertising platform company. Your free healthcare and free lunch come from advertising revenue. Wake up and smell the words “public company.” Google isn’t a start-up anymore.
I don’t work for Google, but if I did and had seen the things you were writing, I would have started asking for *your* resignation. Poor form, man. Poor form.