My first reaction to the article linked above was that Danah Boyd sure likes to use big words. Luckily she used all those big words well. Nothing makes me crankier than a writer who just has to use big words but then doesn't use them properly. Also, as this is an article in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal it is not inappropriate to use higher level vocabulary and/or jargon. I just hold a personal prejudice that authors who are exceptionally fond of big words tend to be worried more about sounding smart than about communicating clearly.
My second reaction was almost as snarky as my first. Where are the citations? As noted above, this is an article in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Even an expression of opinion and call to action in a scholarly journal is typically backed up by citing relevant work.
Quibbles about writing style aside, the author offers several thoughts that sound reasonable to me. It describes social media as “a set of tools, practices, and ideologies” developed by “folks who had grown up with Usenet and BBSes, email and AOL’s instant messenger” who wanted to create tools to “take community and communication to the next level” (Boyd 2015). From what we’ve learned in this class and other bits of information I’ve picked up along the way, I believe Boyd is correct here.
Boyd (2015) notes that “few who got online in the late 1990s and early 2000s moved past the user-friendly world of the web browser and easily configured email.” Although I’ve slept since then, I do remember all but the staunchest computer geeks moving to near exclusive use of web browsers and more user-friendly email systems in the late ‘90s.
I may smile with nostalgia when faced with a command line interface, but I suspect that many of my classmates would be traumatized. It’s not that they couldn’t figure out how to use older computer systems. It’s just that they’ve never had to work in that kind of environment. User interfaces have changed drastically since the first computers I played with. Most of my classmates have never heard the sound of a dial-up modem except maybe in a movie.
Boyd (2015) argues that “social media emerged as the new paradigm for connecting to information, people, and ideas.” This is another statement that I have to agree with. The amount of interconnection that social media allows between people dramatically changed the way we share information and ideas. Now we are a society of too much information. People need filters just to find what they need from the grand mass of available information.
The article concludes with a call to analyze social media as a phenomenon important to “contemporary digital life” around the world. I agree that social media is a phenomenon of growing importance to our world and therefore definitely worth studying.
P.S. In the informal writing of a blog post, a link back to work under discussion is generally considered more than sufficient as a reference. Just for fun, here's a formal citation of article being discussed.
References
Boyd, D. (2015). Social media: A phenomenon to be analyzed. Social Media Society, 1(1). doi:10.1177/2056305115580148
I do find the dial up modem sound incredibly unpleasant myself. But it also triggers fond memories of a time when email was exciting and not a chore.
ReplyDeleteThis is a fabulous deconstruction of this essay and, like others, the lack of citations is a problem area. Perhaps it would be wise to read this as an editorial, which seldom have cited sources, rather than a full-on scholarly article. Another example of this sort of writing is the Digital Native Twitter post I used, which ended up getting published in a scholarly journal as an editorial.
ReplyDeleteYou have a good point. If I were looking at it as an editorial, the lack of citations would not have troubled me.
DeleteCongratulations on getting your post published!