Jonathan hearts Raymond.
"Yet like scholars in other fields, Internet scholars have a tendency to universalize their own subjective impressions and dispositions, thereby grossly overestimating the impact, magnitude, accessibility, and universality of their object of study." -Jonathan Sterne, who, if you haven't heard, hearts Raymond Williams.
Isn't that what Sterne was doing though? What makes Sterne's approach to the study of the Internet any less subjective, impressionistic, and removed from his disposition? Not a thing. Don't give me any "Cultures of Internet" changing the meaning of a book otherwise titled "Cultures of the Internet." You want overestimation? There you have it. And while I do agree with much of what Sterne was saying about the Internet not being autonomous and relating to other cultural phenomena, I think he overestimates the universality of "a cultural studies book entitled the Internet in the style of Raymond William's Internet." Anyone can make a good point, but cultural studies folk can't do it without boring the hell out of me or using more than one paragraph. I've decided that Academia is an art.... the art of trying to sound smarter than your peers. Academia is just like the water in my toilet. When I get done using it, it's not very clear, and usually very shitty.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Much of the time I agree with you about academia. When I don't, it's because academics, especially cultural studies academics, really try to go after the complex explanations for why things work. At its best, Cultural Studies also takes on the ideologies of the academy that sanctify these wordy, pretentious approaches to knowledge. I guess I am tolerant of Cultural Studies specifically and academic approaches to culture generally because they do battle with cliched opinions about popular culture full of oversimplified, ideological, un-historical, overwrought psudo-analysis.
In the interest of full disclosure, Raymond Williams taught Stuart Hall who taught Larry Grossberg who taught Jonathan Sterne. Larry also taught me. These sorts of connections or genealogies are part of how the academy works, and this is just one of several "family trees" I could draw about myself.
We all heart Raymond Williams because he was one of the first to refute the commonsense about TV. Part of the purpose of this class is for us to fight commonsense about the internet and the web.
You are not, however, expected to write fond and glowing things about me, your own teacher.
Post a Comment