even with such nascent topics as sexting, cyberbullying, Second Life, or Perez Hilton, I suspect there are relevant articles in at least some academic journal. for example, Google Scholar seems to indicate that their are articles on "bullying" at least back to the 1970s and 1980s. presumably, someone writing a paper about cyberbullying would want/need to cite sources about its non-cyber counterpart. I'm not saying that the citation of popular media is unnecessary or inappropriate, and I'm certainly not suggested that articles about the exact topic of interest will necessarily be published. however, I'm skeptical of the assertion that *no* relevant papers exist simply because the topic is so novel. "There is nothing new under the sun," and emergent online behaviors are almost certainly related to previously existing offline behaviors. ~Eric -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re:[Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 75, Issue 22 From: Brabham, Daren C <dbrabham@email.unc.edu> To: Tery G <teryg93@gmail.com>, Margaret Borschke <Margaret.Borschke@unsw.edu.au> Date: Thu Oct 21 09:22:58 2010
In addition to concepts and trends such as cyberbullying, sexting, and so on, there's also the technologies themselves. Twitter was a breakthrough technology in many ways, but it took a while for peer-reviewed stuff to get published about it (and by now it has evolved so much that the first peer-reviewed articles seem dated). Same goes for Second Life (which, while I know it's still a vibrant place, pretty much seems to have come and gone in a hurry in terms of popular interest). And technologies that launched and were abandoned quickly (e.g., Google Wave) may never get peer-reviewed coverage.
It's also instructive to use articles from the popular press when these tech trends happen. There's always the initial hype (and simultaneous warnings that the technology will ruin society) in the popular press, but eventually it evens out and scholarly work about the topic starts to have some meaning. I'm all for students looking at a variety of sources, so long as they're critically using them and have an appropriate amount of modesty in their claims.
One of the best student papers I've ever read critically engaged the writing of Perez Hilton and other gossip blogs and how those sources were important for mainstream media. When's the last time you cited Perez in your work?
db
--- Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D. Assistant Professor School of Journalism & Mass Communication University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Carroll Hall, CB 3365 Chapel Hill, NC 27599 (919) 962-0676 (office) (801) 633-4796 (cell) daren.brabham@unc.edu www.darenbrabham.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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