In the future...
Aug. 7th, 2007 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwex...everyone will be famously miserable for fifteen minutes. Social-science academics take note.
Warhol was right, but incomplete. I've been sort of offhandedly following the fifteen minutes of misery currently being experienced by danah boyd (*). Part of what's interesting and admirable about it is that she's willing to do class-based ethnographic research out in the public eye. For as long as I've been aware of the term it has been effectively taboo to talk about class outside of certain very restricted ivory towers. Pinko commie liberal fag, anyone? (This is pretty uniquely an American problem - Europeans manage to do all sorts of interesting class analysis all the time.)
Anyway, danah violated that unwritten rule, got horrible press coverage, got slashdotted, and generally has been beaten about the head and shoulders by a lot of people who either didn't read what she wrote or didn't understand it. I feel sorry for her, but am totally unsurprised. She's also tripping over the frontier of what is a blog, a blogger and how seriously one ought to take blog entries versus more familiar forms of publication such as academic articles and 'real' journalism. I think there's also a certain measure of "you can tell the leaders because they're the ones with the arrows in their backs" happening here, too.
The original essay: http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
Response to the critics: http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ResponseToClassDivisions.html
Related blog entry: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/07/25/responding_to_c.html
(*) Full disclosure: danah and I overlapped a bit at the Media Lab. I admired her then and we were sort of friendly colleagues at the time. I doubt she'd recognize me now if she fell over me.
Warhol was right, but incomplete. I've been sort of offhandedly following the fifteen minutes of misery currently being experienced by danah boyd (*). Part of what's interesting and admirable about it is that she's willing to do class-based ethnographic research out in the public eye. For as long as I've been aware of the term it has been effectively taboo to talk about class outside of certain very restricted ivory towers. Pinko commie liberal fag, anyone? (This is pretty uniquely an American problem - Europeans manage to do all sorts of interesting class analysis all the time.)
Anyway, danah violated that unwritten rule, got horrible press coverage, got slashdotted, and generally has been beaten about the head and shoulders by a lot of people who either didn't read what she wrote or didn't understand it. I feel sorry for her, but am totally unsurprised. She's also tripping over the frontier of what is a blog, a blogger and how seriously one ought to take blog entries versus more familiar forms of publication such as academic articles and 'real' journalism. I think there's also a certain measure of "you can tell the leaders because they're the ones with the arrows in their backs" happening here, too.
The original essay: http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
Response to the critics: http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ResponseToClassDivisions.html
Related blog entry: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/07/25/responding_to_c.html
(*) Full disclosure: danah and I overlapped a bit at the Media Lab. I admired her then and we were sort of friendly colleagues at the time. I doubt she'd recognize me now if she fell over me.
