Digital Culture Studies

On a HigherEd specific online forum, a post that was meant to exhibit how odd academic life looks to non-academics told the story of a recent proposal defense. I am a consummate lurker there, although I don’t have a login, which is probably for the best, because the post that took my breath away describes how the Chair of the student’s committee decided to invite the defender’s husband to her proposal defense. And I cannot quite wrap my head around that. Does he also invite the wives of male students who are defending their proposals? If he does, well, consider my feminist ire placated. But I suspect that he does not, and I cannot understand why the responses to this post don’t start out questioning why a woman’s Chair would invite her husband to what is, essentially, her workplace and her professional life.

If the student herself had invited her spouse, well, her choice. But that her Chair decided to do it without her knowledge makes the action very different, and not a little patronizing. This notion of spousal deference always hits a sour note for me, probably because I live it every time I make a major purchase, or generally try to conduct business with a man when my own partner is in the same room.What is next, really - should women bring notes from their Dad in to school, giving them permission to attend, which was often the case as little as 40 years ago at some schools?

Dear R1 Institution,

Please accept this note as permission from me that my daughter be allowed to READ BOOKS and WRITE STUFF. Call me if she gets uppity, or starts thinking on her own - we try not to encourage independence in her, in the vain hope that she will come to her senses, drop out of school, and marry a nice doctor.

We did it, even though most of our neighbours did not. And although we live pretty green, we learned that we still have too many things that plug in. More frustrating was how little changed the Chicago skyline was during the hour - big buildings did turn off their lights, but plenty did not.

Scrabble by candelight is hard. Or maybe it was the wine. Better pictures than mine of Earth hour events can be seen in the Earth Hour Flickr Pool. But the big question is, did participation make a difference? Time says, maybe. Sceptics say no. Believers say yes. ComEd says there was a 5% reduction in power useage between 8-9, as compared to last Saturday. Is 5% enough? I don’t think so.

Of course the essential problem remains: people who think this is a problem will always be looking for ways to lower their carbon footprint number, and people who don’t think it is a problem will not, and as long as there are more people in the second camp than the first, very little will change, and that seems like a great shame.

It is my firm belief that sociologists are the most prolific bloggers amongst the professoriate - at least, all the blogs I read are written by professors, and chances are, if someone forwards me a link that relates to academia that they found on  a personal blog, that blog will be written by a sociologist. I am sure that if I ever took the time to investigate this and write it up, I could find a higher education journal to publish it - they love to publish articles about faculty - but then again, I would need a 20 page lit review explaining what a blog is, and then my internal rant about how it is 2008, not 1995 would start rolling, the one where I rant about how  we ought to expect  a baseline of knowledge about the internet amongst college-educated readers, and there isn’t enough antacid in the world for that to happen again.  But I digress. Sociologists blog, and I read their blogs, and I get some great information from them. Today’s gem: tips for article writers, by Ezra Zuckerman at MIT Sloan School of Management, via OrgTheory.

Crgslist.com: so web 2.0 we don’t need vowels.

High up on the list of ‘worst ways to break up’ might be this: via Wikipedia. It gets more salacious, what with the saved IM chats, etc. She is known as Ann Coulter 2.0, he is a creator of Wikipedia, and when they broke up, it got public and ugly.