truce called!
Posted: September 5th, 2006 | Author: alicetiara | Filed under: internet culture | 9 Comments »Donna Bogotin wrote another column, this time about me and how uninformed I am. I’m really surprised a professional writer would stoop to such vitriol about a casual blogger/student (who has a readership of like 100 people). I am not going to talk about her any more on this blog, and I apologize for writing the words “what do you expect from a former investment banker”, which I guess justified all those personal attacks from her. Generally, when I critique an article or piece, I think it’s really important to look at the perspective of the person writing it. A person with a purely business background, for example, might look at a website and ask “how can it make money for me?” while a sociologist might ask “what are users doing on this site that is interesting?”
I guess she didn’t like the short summary of my Swan paper either; I can see how it might seem a little abstruse to a non-academic. I really like that one– I’m rewriting it right now and will be submitting it to journals soon. I spent more than two years studying plastic surgery and reality television. I guess if you come from journalism and don’t really understand academia, you might think this is a dumb project or something, but hell, I’m in media studies, and I think the Swan is a really rich text for looking at the construction of feminine identity.
Anyway, enough of all this. I leave tonight for Oxford and will try to blog a bit from the conference, if the guy at Radio Shack was right and my power adapter doesn’t fry my laptop, and there is wireless, two big IFs.
Sad, really. No need to defend yourself from Bogatin’s attacks – they refute themselves.
I do think that it’s a legitimately interesting question – for research, even! – just why it is that old-media fuddie-duddies (and as much as I dislike Web triumphalism, that’s what’s going on) behave like first-time flame-war teenagers when they do decide to engage with online commentary. Not just Bogatin but also, e.g., Marty Peretz, publisher of The New Republic and a man who not only publishes bizarre screeds on his magazine’s website but also then dukes it out in the comment section of said postings. Seriously, what is that?
A friend once told me you could consider yourself in The Big Time once people were talking shit about you on the internet.
Seriously, though, her post seems to come from her lack of understanding of the filter through which you view technology. Of course, your emphasis on social networking as well as your feminist outlook cannot be removed from this blog, which explains how she can think you are so unqualified – since she doesn’t seem to understand this emphasis.
Nice that instead of trying to understand that curriculum, she quickly dismisses it with a “who knows”.
Also, geez, I thought I was guilty of overusing sarcastic quotation marks.
Ugh, I’m still trying to figure out the coding on this. Here’s what I was trying to cite:
I can’t even claim to understand the discussion at hand, but I wanted to agree with this:
A friend once told me you could consider yourself in The Big Time once people were talking shit about you on the internet.
Congratulations! :)
Her post about this seems sort of unprofessional. I totally see your point about how she doesn’t seem to be able to see it from the users perspective. Users don’t care about how these companies make money.
Nice…
Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product.
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Look good…
Loose bits sink chips.
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Look good…
0 and 1. Now what could be so hard about that?
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