More Reasons I’m In Grad School

From the “my research is dangerously close to web surfing” department, I bring you another titillating video that summarizes why I want to study the internet even better than the first (sorry, can’t seem to embed)! This one is Clay Shirky talking about his book Here Comes Everybody, which (if his talk is any indication) is fantastic. Actually, this talk contains a much better argument than I’ve ever made about why studying the internet is important. Shirky articulates why the two-way nature of the internet as a medium is revolutionary, and how we’ve only just scratched the surface of its potential because social systems are slower to evolve than technology.  Some of his examples are fascinating.  I learned a little something about flash mobs that I didn’t know before, for instance.

Here’s an interesting little side note about Shirky. As far as I can tell, he has a B.A. only. He’s absolutely brilliant, but he’s not an academic (though he does guest lecture at NYU, I think). His book is not published by an academic press. So this means that, much like Rebecca Blood’s seminal book about blogging, it’s not really, fully “legitimate” to cite him in academic work, although people do.

Now, the other day I had a conversation with an undergrad who had cited sources like The Economist in his paper. I told him that his sources were not appropriate and that he needed to use articles from academic journals. The problem with this student is that he had not grasped the meaning of “academic journal” and “peer reviewed” and all that jazz. I get the difference. I just want to use Blood and Shirky and… well, I am using them. But it’s interesting, isn’t it? There’s a lot of amazing stuff out there - especially stuff about the internet - that is not published by an academic press or not published at all, even. Theses and dissertations, articles presented at conferences, books and articles written by people who aren’t academics… there’s more of this sort of information out there about the internet than there are peer reviewed journal articles, I think. Of course it’s the internet that makes them available, and if you look at Google Scholar, some of these unpublished works are cited tens of times in academic articles.

Does this sort of free-wheelin’ behavior represent a barrier to being published?  Are onlne-only journals  like First Monday more friendly toward it, or are they actually more stringent so as to protect their already-tenuous reputation as a truly peer reviewed journal?  Maybe some of this is obvious, I just don’t know because I’m a greenhorn.  That’s right, people, greenhorn.  I live in Texas.