Via Slashdot: “How to Deconstruct Almost Anything–My Postmodern Adventure.”
You know you’re in trouble when even nerds feel safe beating up on you.
Update: More interesting than Morningstar’s piece, to me, is the discussion on Slashdot, linked above. It provides an idea of what a certain class of non-insiders has to say about literary studies. The discussion is not, in my opinion, very well informed.
And check out this response from Steve Ramsay, a professor of English at the University of Georgia who specializes in humanities computing. He started a Slashdot thread back in August of 2002 on peer review in humanities computing. Many of the resonses to that post indicate readers did not really understand what he was getting at, taking the opportunity instead as an excuse to bash the humanities in general.
This is an old piece, and Morningstar’s a confirmed neo-con. Fooey says I.
Well goodness, if he’s a neoconservative nothing he says must be valid.
I notice that Steve’s post is only at mod 1. Too bad, most Slashdotters will never see it.
I had the same thought.
Neocon or nut or not either … there is an intriguing narrative pattern at work in the Morningstar piece… a squirmish leads to a conversation with a friend with a foot in the other camp which leads to a book which leads to more research… the components look awfully like the actants of blog world narrative paths: book, friend, public brouhaha. The book could be generalized to artefact (film, painting, object of urban planning, technological device, piece of code). The public brouhaha is of course the measure of chatter (entries, comments, track backs, hyperlinks).
Question: has anyone done any work on the nature of friendship in networked environments?
Now that I don’t know, Francois.
(Welcome back!)
Good question, Francois. Beyond mainstream discussions of Friendster, I can’t think of anything off-hand. I’ll keep thinking, though.
This meme is showing up everywhere:
CNWB (http://cnwb.typepad.com/cnwb/2004/01/is_deconstructi.html ) points to MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/30631 )
It was ranked in the top 3 in Blogdex, and I linked to it in passing, but didn’t really want to comment on the entry at length, but yeah, the meme is everywhere this week.