Saturday, April 16, 2005
Village Voice was smart to pick up Geeta Dayal's "PhDotcom", (on blogging academia, which you should read in full here):
'For some in the academy, blogging offers an escape valve, a forum for free expression that's not bound to the constraints of their fields. "Academic work on music is so bloodless most of the time," says Jon Dale, who is finishing his Ph.D. dissertation on post-punk at the University of Adelaide in Australia and blogs at Worlds of Possibility). "There's a writing style common to so much academia, especially musicology and cultural studies, that saps music of all its life force." British cultural theorist Mark Fisher, author of the renegade cultural studies blog K-Punk, says, "The way I understood theory—primarily through popular culture—is generally detested in universities. Most dealings with the academy have been literally clinically depressing." For him, K-Punk "seemed like the space—the only space—in which to maintain a kind of discourse that had started in the music press and the art schools, but which had all but died out, with appalling cultural and political consequences."
Many academics are quick to establish a separation between their university work—which, after all, is what pays the bills—and their presence online. Wayne Marshall (wayneandwax.com), a lecturer at Brown, says that he blogs only in lowercase letters to drive home the distinction that his blog is separate from his academic work in ethnomusicology. ...
Josh Kortbein, a philosophy Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota, started his blog) Internet light-years ago—in 1999. To paraphrase Brian Eno on the Velvet Underground, not everyone read Josh's blog, but everyone who did started one. "I write my blog because I wish that things were different, and I'm thinking about how to make them that way." '
(via Joshblog)
(p.s. writer Geeta Dayal is known to post her thoughts on own blog, the original soundtrack) ¶ 4/16/2005 09:18:00 AM
'For some in the academy, blogging offers an escape valve, a forum for free expression that's not bound to the constraints of their fields. "Academic work on music is so bloodless most of the time," says Jon Dale, who is finishing his Ph.D. dissertation on post-punk at the University of Adelaide in Australia and blogs at Worlds of Possibility). "There's a writing style common to so much academia, especially musicology and cultural studies, that saps music of all its life force." British cultural theorist Mark Fisher, author of the renegade cultural studies blog K-Punk, says, "The way I understood theory—primarily through popular culture—is generally detested in universities. Most dealings with the academy have been literally clinically depressing." For him, K-Punk "seemed like the space—the only space—in which to maintain a kind of discourse that had started in the music press and the art schools, but which had all but died out, with appalling cultural and political consequences."
Many academics are quick to establish a separation between their university work—which, after all, is what pays the bills—and their presence online. Wayne Marshall (wayneandwax.com), a lecturer at Brown, says that he blogs only in lowercase letters to drive home the distinction that his blog is separate from his academic work in ethnomusicology. ...
Josh Kortbein, a philosophy Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota, started his blog) Internet light-years ago—in 1999. To paraphrase Brian Eno on the Velvet Underground, not everyone read Josh's blog, but everyone who did started one. "I write my blog because I wish that things were different, and I'm thinking about how to make them that way." '
(via Joshblog)
(p.s. writer Geeta Dayal is known to post her thoughts on own blog, the original soundtrack) ¶ 4/16/2005 09:18:00 AM
