I’m on leave this year and enjoying catching up with old colleagues and meeting new ones. I was at a reception the other day and was graciously introduced by a famous senior sociologist to a visiting senior sociologist as an “[insert some very kind words] scholar who studies the social aspects of Internet use”. The visitor laughed. No one else laughed though so quickly, smile wiped from his face, he said: “oh, you’re serious.”
Yup, seriously, there is this Internets thing and there are some interesting and important social science questions one can – and * gasp * I will even claim should – ask about it. As shocking as this may be, some places might go so far as to give you tenure if you do it well enough.
So a shoutout to all of my amazingly wonderful mentors and colleagues over the years who’ve supported me in this endeavor, I certainly don’t take that for granted.
{ 41 comments }
Dave 09.14.08 at 3:38 pm
Everything new is trivial, until it becomes obvious…
fjm 09.14.08 at 3:44 pm
And no one would raise an eyebrow if you were writing about, say, the letter culture among the middle-classes in the ninteenth century.
Kieran 09.14.08 at 4:32 pm
You know those people for whom everything that’s happened since 1979 has been kind of a blur …
HH 09.14.08 at 7:48 pm
It is profoundly disappointing to me that university faculties do not accept the inevitability of a Phoenix-like transformation in which their geographically chartered institutions are left behind and global electronically-enabled faculties arise from the ashes, organized by discipline rather than real estate.
Clinging to quaint lifestyle values in the face of overwhelming evidence for the bloc obsolescence of the campus paradigm undercuts any claim “Internet scholars” have to intellectual respectability.
The gold-plated ivy university model currently enshrined and worshipped in advanced nations is an uneconomic absurdity, rendered multiply ridiculous by energy depletion, exploding poverty rates, and rapidly proliferating Internet education possibilities.
Any academic that cannot see the sunset of the $250,000 baccalaureate degree is living in a tenured dreamworld.
virgil xenophon 09.14.08 at 10:46 pm
Amazingly enough, there were science-fiction writers in the early fifties
who were writing about the social implications of a world “wired” by computers (the kind of modern-day computers that were then only literally dreamed of) and people obsessing on them time-wise. The first “Sociologists of the Internet,” as it were. It’s amazing to go back and read these stories and see how almost absolutely on the mark some authors were in divining the trajectory of their usage and implementation/integration into society at all levels–business, defense, and personal–and the many possible dysfunctional outcomes of various paths taken.
og 09.15.08 at 12:06 am
vx – which sci-fi stories do you have in mind?
vivian 09.15.08 at 12:37 am
You know, you’re young enough that he might have thought that Senior Scholar was gently mocking a favorite grad student who spent too much time online. Anyway, aren’t a lot of very successful academics generally uninterested in anything outside their own ‘citation cartel’? Even subfields that outsiders and undergrads would think are related. The worst of ’em think anything else is inherently uninteresting, but even the really nice ones find other stuff personally uninteresting. At least it’s like that in political science, dunno about sociology.
HH 09.15.08 at 1:45 am
Teilhard de Chardin theorized brilliantly about the accelerating linkage of human minds in the 1950s – before there was even a hint of the Internet. The myopia of current university-based “Internet Studies” is ludicrous in light of the vastly greater scope of extrapolation the current emerging structure affords us.
The global reorganization of scholarship and research along thematic lines will not come from the university community, just as the automobile was not a product of the carriage building industry. The governments of developing nations will eventually dump the ivy- covered model of education to leap ahead in the race to produce competitive workers and competent citizens.
The best hope for the current generation of “Internet Academics” is that they may secure jobs as historic re-enactors when a few of their campuses are converted into historic sites and adult theme parks.
Righteous Bubba 09.15.08 at 1:46 am
Amazingly enough, there were science-fiction writers in the early fifties who were writing about the social implications of a world “wired†by computers
The Machine Stops, EM Forster, 1909.
http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/prajlich/forster.html
Walt 09.15.08 at 2:36 am
I’m sorry that your sociology professor was mean to you that one time, HH. That really must have hurt your feelings.
Seth Finkelstein 09.15.08 at 2:54 am
The canonical example is Murray Leinster’s
“A Logic Named Joe” (1946)
Problems of court records, porn vs. censorware, bomb-making , etc. – all in one short story.
We’re living in the future! (and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be …)
salient 09.15.08 at 3:20 am
What Vivian said. About a week ago, I overheard one of my as-young-as-I-am colleagues described by a senior professor as a “[some very nice words] mathematician who studies the partial differentiation of the Internet” — and it was a joke, of course. Similar jokes no doubt occur everywhere. It’s not hard to see that the sociologist might have misinterpreted the statement.
I guess it would be more useful to know how he acted after the seriousness was cleared up – e.g. did he ask meaningful questions, or patronizing questions, or just act embarrassed and leave aside the entire topic?
Eszter Hargittai 09.15.08 at 3:29 am
Vivian, perhaps you had to be there and I guess I’m not doing a very good job of describing the situation. No one else in the crowd laughed, there was a bit of an embarrassing silence, albeit a short one. He was at a loss, no meaningful questions followed.
Salient, just to be clear, the introduction about my work was accurate, I do study the social aspects of Internet use. It was very clear that the person introducing me was not making a joke.
peter 09.15.08 at 8:45 am
Well, since most use of the WWW and thus of the Internet involves a person sitting alone at a computer, perhaps your visiting senior sociologist laughed because of the near-proximity of “social aspects” and “Internet use” in the description of your work.
Barry 09.15.08 at 10:12 am
HH 09.14.08 at 7:48 pm
” It is profoundly disappointing to me that university faculties do not accept the inevitability of a Phoenix-like transformation in which their geographically chartered institutions are left behind and global electronically-enabled faculties arise from the ashes, organized by discipline rather than real estate.”
Because that’s not the way that the money flows now, so anybody who tries to conduct their career like that would be hurting themselves.
James Wimberley 09.15.08 at 11:37 am
You’d get the same reaction if your field was Victorian pornography or popular music. It’s the content not the container. Yes, the subject actually includes the new ways in which particle physicists exchange information, but that’s not what people will think of first.
stuart 09.15.08 at 11:41 am
Well at least you weren’t introduced as studying 19th Century French poetry.
James Wimberley 09.15.08 at 11:44 am
PS to 16: add Victorian postcards and pictures of cats.
novakant 09.15.08 at 3:49 pm
Well at least you weren’t introduced as studying 19th Century French poetry.
Lol, funniest film ever.
Katherine 09.15.08 at 3:54 pm
It’s all very nice, people trying to make Eszter feeling better about being laughed at, but the fact is that this visiting person was insulting and rather ignorant. No getting around that.
Let’s address that shall we? Why would an apparently eminent find this a funny idea? Is this a comment on him, or the field of sociology in general?
HH 09.15.08 at 4:07 pm
“Because that’s not the way that the money flows now, so anybody who tries to conduct their career like that would be hurting themselves.”
Thanks for pointing out that the financial bankruptcy of our universities will lag their intellectual bankruptcy.
Eszter Hargittai 09.15.08 at 4:10 pm
Katherine, thanks, while I know many of the comments here are meant well, many also miss the core point (or possibly several points), which is interesting.
To answer your question, I think it’s definitely a comment on this person, but based on lots of other experiences accrued over the years, to some extent it’s also a comment on the field of sociology in general.
abb1 09.15.08 at 4:45 pm
Are you saying (it’s sounds like) that sociologists on average are more boorish and ignorant than other academics?
mpowell 09.15.08 at 5:42 pm
Yeah, I’m kind of curious as to what Eszter is really driving at here. Is it the case that this visitor should have instantly realized that this was not actually a joke? I guess in general it should be regarded as quite rude to laugh at the research someone else is doing. But it could be that the person had never considered the possibility of studying the internet as a sociologist and thought the local senior sociologist must be making a reference to Eszterer’s work in a possibly accurate, but very misleading way? He did say, “oh, you’re serious”, after all. In other words, is the point that the person was rude or just a technophobe?
rea 09.15.08 at 6:00 pm
Speaking as someone whose exposure to sociology consists primarily of an “Introduction to Sociology” course taken at a football factory in 1973, I have to say that I would have thought that the very first thing that would occur to a sociologist, confronted by a novel phenomenon like the internet, would be to study it from a sociological perspective. Isn’t that the whole point of sociology? Isn’t that what sociologists do?
rea 09.15.08 at 6:06 pm
It is profoundly disappointing to me that university faculties do not accept the inevitability of a Phoenix-like transformation in which their geographically chartered institutions are left behind and global electronically-enabled faculties arise from the ashes . . .
The phrase, “Phoenix-like transformation”, is pretty funny under the circumstances . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix
virgil xenophon 09.15.08 at 6:07 pm
Seth Finkelstein, HH, Righteous Bubba, Og, et al.
Not to divert too much from the main thread of post, but Sci-Fi provides the perfect example of the amazing powers of both the human mind and the power of “the collective” scholarship-wise, as various aspects of the human condition (both real and imagined/projected) are mulled over by disparate minds. Whether it be over-population, germ warfare, food production/shortages, the thirst for oil, the cold war, the nanny state, civil liberties vs CCTV, post nuclear apocalyptic societies–all, all, have been treated in what, in hindsight, seem to have been proof of the remarkable powers of imagination to project realistic (and of course some not so probable also) possibilities for the course of man’s social evolution.
As a child in the fifties a very hip/cool Aunt of mine (Actually not an aunt at all but my Mother’s roommate in her first job out of college, but “Aunt Evie” to me, who was–get this–a cryptologist for the NSA whose “cover”–such as we knew it–was as an “ordinary” secretary- typist at the CIA!) gave me a subscription as a charter member of Galaxay Science Fiction magazine in 1950 as a Christmas present and I was off to the races ( and yes, she drove a black Volvo, way back then, and very, for that time, exotic.) I devoured anything and everything in the genre–hardback/paperback books and magazines–until Sputnick seemed to announce that the future had arrived and with the academic demands of H.S. , the genre lost it’s allure. Still, that experience of immersion in the almost infinite possibilities of life has been helpful in oh so many ways in keeping one’s mind open to alternate ways of the structuring of society and the (thank’s to Sci-Fi) potential pitfalls therein. Plus it’s was great fun!……….I owe Aunt Evie a lot…..big time.
virgil xenophon 09.15.08 at 6:18 pm
PS: By now it’s pretty common knowledge that studies have shown that the more liberal faculty members are more likely than not to drive Volvos, but did you know that those same studies/surveys show that faculty members most characterized as “far-left” ideologically speaking are prone to drive SAAB’s!
Seth Finkelstein 09.15.08 at 8:15 pm
Virgil: I’ve actually gotten a lot more pessimistic over the years, as I’ve found that being right – and ahead of one’s time – seems really to be worth very little, besides maybe a personal sense of satisfaction. This may connect to Eszter’s point in an oblique way.
HH 09.15.08 at 8:24 pm
As long as the scam pays, university presidents will continue telling middle class parents that $50,000 a year is a bargain for exposing their children to four years of substance abuse. While only 25% of the entering class will be problem drinkers, upon departing from college 44% of the college-educated will have attained this distinction.
It may seem radical, but providing university education over the Internet, without elevated risk of alcohol poisoning or drug overdose, may be a valid alternative educational model.
virgil xenophon 09.15.08 at 8:26 pm
Seth, in many ways I’d have to agree with you…the ancients were keen judges of human nature, and just as intelligent as ourselves, after all,
thus there is no wonder the Cassandra legend was created. Most people only remember half the legend–that she was never listened to–they forget the other half about her being always right.
virgil xenophon 09.15.08 at 8:43 pm
HH: There is no little savage irony that the very people who so quickly champion totalist solutions to problems of “public health,” i.e., prohibition, banning of trans-fats, public smoking etc., would be the very first people to savagely, forcefully, protest the closing of all non-internet universities in the name of the “Public Safety.” Somewhere Robespierre must be chortling…….
HH 09.15.08 at 11:24 pm
The theme park universities are in no danger of being closed by the authorities. They will price themselves into oblivion as energy depletion renders their economics untenable and Internet competition makes their parochial offerings uncompetitive. The few that survive will be viewed as quaint finishing schools and drinking clubs for people with more money than sense.
virgil xenophon 09.16.08 at 12:59 am
HH: To show you how out-of-hand tuition costs have gotten, I’ll regale
one and all with my personal story. Although I was a Merit Scholar and
could have gone to school anywhere, I was a ranked tennis player who wanted to go somewhere to escape the Mid-West’s rain and wind and went South so I could play year-round (this was in the days before practically every school large and small had excellent indoor facilities–come to think of it such present commonly swank facilities are part of the tuition problem, n’cest pas?) When I would go through registration and pick up my tuition waiver as a scholarship athlete, the costs would still be broken out as line items. Want to know the out-of-state tuition fee add-on to the basic tuition charge in 1962 for my school? FIFTY DOLLARS/SEMESTER. By the time I graduated in 1966 out of state add-on to instate fees had risen to the “horrid” amount of $150.oo per semester. As they say, long, long ago in a Galaxy far, far, away….
Barry 09.16.08 at 1:47 am
Katherine 09.15.08 at 3:54 pm
” It’s all very nice, people trying to make Eszter feeling better about being laughed at, but the fact is that this visiting person was insulting and rather ignorant. No getting around that.
Let’s address that shall we? Why would an apparently eminent find this a funny idea? Is this a comment on him, or the field of sociology in general?”
Neither. I have a friend who interviewed for a law school position, who told me some stories. There was a visiting professor who specialized in IP and internet law; the faculty didn’t think that these were important.
G 09.16.08 at 3:00 am
The problem with an Internet-only educational environment would be the tendency for participants to get off-track in online discussions, to ride their own hobby horses, to ignore the point of the original discussion prompt.
Perhaps someone here could think of some examples of this behavior…
Katherine 09.16.08 at 7:33 am
Barry @35 – you think it is a generational thing then? Either way, it is shocking blindspot.
Barry 09.16.08 at 1:42 pm
That, or a product of what was important during your decade of so of incredibly hard work to establish your career.
virgil xenophon 09.16.08 at 9:04 pm
G:
You aren’t seriously considering calling the police to investigate a thread-jack are you? As if off-track discussions never take place in the
classroom proper. Please…..Off-track discussions are the sine qua non
of academic life. You want to see focus? Try sitting in on a bunch of pilots briefing an upcoming combat mission–THAT”S FOCUS–everything else is free form poetry.
vivian 09.17.08 at 1:19 am
Eszter, I wasn’t there and trust your sense of the room. I am really glad that the rest of the room supported you, and have no information about whether this case reflects badly on sociology in general, or in some places, or just on the one senior scholar. Computer problems yesterday or I’d have seen the rest of the thread and apologised sooner.
G 09.17.08 at 1:32 am
Seriously, perhaps an example close by… You know, the kind where random things are brought up that have nothing to do with the topic being introduced for discussion.
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