sardonick

A few weeks ago, Sarah Lohnes put out a call for lunchtime discussion topics for the upcoming Social Software in the Academy Workshop.

Well, the more controversial and future-looking the better, I thought, so I suggested the following:

What will happen to the Ivory Tower as social software makes advanced research more accessible to the armchair academian?

Well, as of a few days ago, I got to taste the repercussions of this firsthand.

As a Doctoral Candidate student, I’m not exactly an “armchair academian”–at least not in my areas of focus (Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition, Artificial Intelligence/Natural Language Processing). When it comes to Information Architecture, though, I’m as novice and {self-,half-}educated as they they come.

In his blog, Jess McMullin takes a few lines to beat an earlier post of mine to a bloody pulp saying

“The New School of Ontologies is just so off the mark… The article reads like a jumble of classification buzzwords stirred once and regurgitated.”

Ouch!

His complaints about things being “off the mark” seem to be more directed toward folksonomy in general. And the “jumble of classification buzzwords” bit?

By nature, the Ivory Tower has always been exclusive, and therefore filtered. The good part about this filtering is that it filters by quality. PhD applications/screening/quals, submissions to papers, conferences (well, most conferences), submissions to journals… these are all good quality filters. But there’s also a filter on content, too. Anyone involved in upper academia has seen the ebb and flow of “acceptible” (read “fundable”) theories. Research in neural networks was dead for decades because some of the fathers of AI didn’t think it was feasable. And then there’s the Cult of Chomsky, and its strangelhold on Linguistics–just try giving a talk at USC that doesn’t agree with the tenets Generative Grammar, X-Bar Theory, or UG. On the remote possibility that they even accept you to speak, asbestos underwear would be a must for the after-talk discussion.

As social software puts windows (phone lines? cracks? what’s the metaphor I’m looking for here?) into the ivory tower, it’s going to break down this exclusivity. Whether this is benefit or detriment I can’t say for sure. On the downside, it definitely increases the noise:signal ratio. And it empowers people like me who will then {pontificate,spout off} without full knowledge of either the jingo or the theory. This can, of course, be annoying to the educated reader. But on the upside it encourages cross-pollination of ideas, and exposes the idea-filtered elite to new (or out-of-vogue) ways of looking at the same old problems.

This isn’t anything new. We’ve seen it happen over and again, fifty million different ways, every time new technology is introduced. Blogs vs mainstream media sources. Home video cameras, VHS, and cassette tapes allowing amateur distribution of music/video. Copy-machine zines. But this might be the first time the Ivory Tower has felt the crumbling

Note: This wasn’t the place to address McCullin’s criticism of my folksonomy paper. Perhaps in a later post…