An article published last July in the Chronicle of Higher Education reappeared in my FB news feed the other day, and it says basically what I’ve been on about in trying to justifying this blog. You should read the whole thing, it’s called: Erasing the Pop-Culture Scholar, One Click at a Time.
For those of you without the time, I’ll summarize. Pop culture scholarship is important because media matter and have consequences “— a recent study found that children [perhaps the most vulnerable population] gaze at screens on their TVs, computers, and mobile devices an average of six or more hours a day.” So academics critique it, and so do popular reporters and fans.
The authors note that pop culture thinkpieces written by reporters and fans stumble on an idea, rush to publish it without doing any research (the really crafty ones hold onto the idea and try to monetize it), then it goes viral and they get told they’re brilliant by other reporters and fans.
Meanwhile, pop culture academics are reading it and saying, “No shit. That’s so-and-so’s theory, from 18xx (or 322BC).” In these writers’ defense, academic journal subscriptions and university libraries aren’t free, but it’s as if they didn’t even look.
Further, they “almost always get it wrong. The writers, like many a college student, simply haven’t done the reading.” In a class, it’s a “teachable moment.” IRL, it’s taken as news and therefore Truth.
It’s not that we want recognition for our ideas, though that’s a premise of copyright law. It’s not even that we think only experts should weigh in. By all means, give us your opinion, but take the time to ask if someone thought of it before. It won’t make your observations less interesting, just more accurate, more specific and more nuanced.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
Have you ever encountered something written by a reporter or fan that you previously read about in school, but the reporter never mentioned the original theory (let alone the author)? What did you think of the writer?
