Interestingly, there has been a parallel thread on the SOCNET list in the last week or so... in which people who do study social networks (of the non-Internet sort) express some concern that the "study of social networking websites" variety of research (and the media's complete inability to see that there is more interesting work under the sun than just Facebook, MySpace, and the occasional Orkut article...) will do more to damage than promote the work of scholars who study the more general phenomenon. All-o-these-things-belong-together... kinda the same... made for each other... etc. </sesame street> --elijah On Mon, 17 Dec 2007, Christian Nelson wrote:
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:38:18 -0500 From: Christian Nelson <xianknelson@mac.com> Reply-To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Landrushes and Interdisciplinarity
My comments were about individual scholars, not disciplines. And, though I wasn't clear about this, they weren't about all scholars. I'm sure some of the earliest to investigate social networks (e.g., danah boyd) just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right interests and background. But the land rush mentality is still present. Once people see that there's gold in them thar hills, they rush for it and resent those who've gotten there sooner, hence the pettiness and even violence that's been directed at danah. --Christian Nelson
On Dec 17, 2007, at 6:02 AM, Nancy Baym wrote:
I haven't seen the evidence of a landrush mentality in which disciplines are pitted against one another in internet studies or the study of social network sites and the WP article didn't provide any to support that claim.
I would have thought that being so deeply invested and watching it from its gestation, I would be attuned to tensions between, say, sociology, communication and information studies, over who ought to "own" the field. I haven't seen it. To the contrary, I've seen people in all three of those fields realizing how much the perspectives of other 2 have to offer.
What I generally observed in a decade of working to move internet studies forward as a solid and legitimate field of study is people in every field feeling like internet studies was/is on the margins of their own discipline and therefore seeking connection across borders. If people were cloistering to try to keep it to their own field, AoIR wouldn't do as well as it does. Unless, I guess, we're just a big spyfest where we take the gems back to our own camps for polishing.
There may be landrush in the sense of all disciplines wanting a piece of the topic, but if the disciplines are after one another to own the field so they can corner the grants, it's news to me. The big grants I see getting funded generally involve people from multiple disciplines working together. All disciplines SHOULD be rushing to internet research because the internet does impact them all. It's the charge of disciplinary *competition* with which I disagree.
I have seen poor observations "dressed up in academic terminology" and don't challenge that there's some lame internet research (and I must point out that the WP writer did note after teasing everyone that there are good ideas in the work she mocked). I'd wager there's not a paper written, no matter how deep its insights, that has no lines than cannot be pulled from their context and inserted into another stream of discourse to look vacuous or dressed up in, shock horror, a language style more appropriate to its original genre.
Nancy
I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. The author of the Post article observes that scholars demonstrate a land-rush mentality when a new area of inquiry opens and substantial funds for its researching become available. They demonstrate this by hurriedly staking claims in the new area with supposedly academic observations that are merely the most obvious ones dressed in academic terminology. And they do so because the group of people who get repeatedly cited in the new area quickly narrows, along with the opportunity for acquiring the lucrative research grants. That fact is reflected in the resentment of the "sooners" expressed by scholars who feel they've been beaten to the punch. As I see it, these observations are pretty accurate, and predictably so given all the available research on academia as a social institution. --Christian
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