Exactly. But those technical argots aren’t mere affectations and there’s no reason they should “dumb it down” for the lay audience when they’re communicating with each other. So too with academics who study culture, or any other field for that matter. As a physicist, I have real use for a lot of language that would be impenetrable to someone not trained in what it means in the contexts in which I use it. I would be a hypocrite if I expected other fields to abandon their tool kits.
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Probably the issue is we don’t expect to understand medical or scientific papers, but feel like we should understand social and cultural ones, despite being unqualified.
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True, but that’s our problem.
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Federation ranks.
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I too often feel as if I have been thrown into the deep end. But I just try to deal with what is presented as best I can, and hope to learn something. Conversely, it is the times when I feel certain in my knowledge that I start to really worry.
When ever these threads come up, and academic writing is part of the discussion, it become abundantly clear to me how little people who seriously study pop culture are valued around here. Since I do that, it makes me feel bad. maybe that’s wrong of me, but there it is. Most people weren’t arguing seriously about the article, but were instead just complaining about the words being used. If this were something about programming, this would not be the case.
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I see nothing wrong with feeling bad about being underappreciated simply because of what you study. That’s what’s wrong, not your reaction to it. I just want you to know that there are people here who appreciate your contributions, and your participation here is a big part of why I didn’t jump ship entirely after the fiasco last week.
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I’m literally the worst piece of shit here. That’s absolutely true. God forbid I care about history and pop culture.
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Gawdess, this thread…
I don’t remember a thread here that’s had this many comments that fail to discuss the Op’s actual content.
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I’m starting to think we should take off and nuke this thread from orbit.
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Probably my fault. You know how us academics ruin everything. /s
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I remember reading in one of the Detroit papers how Bowling Green State University was going to have a course focusing on popular culture; it was back in the 1980s, I think. I thought, “Damn, that’s for ME!”
Those who don’t mind, matter; those who mind, don’t matter. Or however that goes.
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Much of the upset here reminds me of how I struggle to understand the perceived academic/non-academic split with regards to cultural studies and criticism. How can it be “elitist” if it is the medium you are growing in? When people complain about the methods and jargon, what do they propose to use instead? Something verbose with specialized language would be much larger and more unwieldy if it needed to be reduced to more general terms. And dispensing with critical perspective does not sound beneficial either.
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There’s no hope of this ending up ontopic. Clearly my warning wasn’t in time. *sighs*
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