Re: Evgeny Morozov and the Perils of "Highbrow Journalism"
Organized envy sounds like a fair characterization. But the organization is small and centered on a few friends and associates of Medina. Then there are others engaging in opportunistic one-offs on Twitter and Facebook, at various levels of engagement. It's far from clear that Morozov has "made a mistake." Everyone admits there is no plagiarism. The basic problem seems to be that there has only been one notable book written about Cybersyn, and given that limitation, it is easy to contend that the topic, the ideas it generates and the primary sources are the "property" of the author of that work. When Morozov published an account of his research, and a photograph of the materials, the response was along the lines of "oh so you ransacked her bibliography too." It was also later alleged that not only did he make off with concepts from the work, but that he also failed to steal the best ones. Twitter forensics, however, have yet to produce one suspect paraphrase, let alone a verbatim borrowing. It's not like the Zizek thing. The melodramatic narratives constructed around his personality aren't very convincing. He seems resilient and agile, judging by his conference appearances rather than his Twitter feed. Maybe it's the odd career arc that's problematic: successful author first, graduate student second. He got to swing his axe before he ground it. So it's easy to suggest he's a clumsy ideologue. That's another trope: he's only seeking an advanced degree to sharpen his existing biases - as if that's a bad thing. All of which makes it difficult to critique whatever shortcomings are actually present in his work. On 10/14/14 6:17 AM, Geert Lovink wrote: >Dear nettimers, > >did anyone of you follow this story? What's behind all this? I suppose >Morozov is human and makes mistakes. He is part of the mainstream media >landscape and has to deliver his journalistic pieces in order to stay into >these circles. That's when one starts to make mistakes after a while, I >suppose. As a journalist it would be easier to forgive him copying without >attribution (even though he mentioned the author in this case). The problem >is: Morozov is a very visible public intellectual, a critic, and maybe soon >even an academic (after he has gone through the longish American PhD >ritual). Morozov is the most wellknown and visible net critic, let's face <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Evgeny Morozov and the Perils of "Highbrow Journalism"
On 10/16/14 3:17 PM, t byfield wrote: Again, Morozov should've done a better job of crediting Medina's work, and everyone should have been more attentive to the gender aspects. But too many critics have batted around quantitative-lite factoids -- how many paragraphs, how many mentions, how many years they've been reading the _New Yorker_, etc. This shows just how much of the kerfuffle boils down to accounting (and rules-based accounting at that). It's no mystery why. Every academic knows that citations are the coin of the land and the key to the kingdom: renewal, promotion, tenure. So citations, apart from their bibliographic function, also have a social-economic function, like likes, or @mentions, or excellent employment reviews. Unlike the purloined letter, which fails to arrive at its intended destination, and continues in an arterial circulation, unread, the purloined idea, lacking citation, fails to regress infinitely towards its real origin, and its genealogy ends prematurely, interrupting its veinal return. And it is read. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Evgeny Morozov and the Perils of "Highbrow Journalism"
On 10/17/14 6:30 AM, d.garcia wrote: The Morozov article is indeed very misleading. There is nothing in the New Yorker headline to indicate that this is anything other that an article full of the ideas and research by Morozov himself. A headline does not usually have a dual function as a footnote, although that's an interesting concept: the proposition that an essay's head should eat its tail. That sort of circularity would surely promote good circulation. There's been a good deal of theorizing about comment counts, likes and mentions. Is there anything out there which relates that familiar type of networked social accountancy to academic citation? Zero Footnotes? It is also true that obsessive bureaucratic procedures to avoid any inference of plagerism in academia frequently have the effect of strangling good writing at birth, turning so called rigour into rigor mortis in all the ways that Ted has described. His -accountancy model- and its relationship to the well known political economy of academia, feels spot on. <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Evgeny Morozov and the Perils of "Highbrow Journalism"
On 10/19/14 3:01 PM, John Hopkins wrote: On 19/Oct/14 08:53, David Mandl wrote: It seems clear that the New Yorker is no longer home of the best fact-checking/copyediting humankind can achieve. It takes time and energy to impose order on a system. Clearly many many segments of the 'developed world' are manifesting the inevitable decrease in the energy available to maintain their own order. Or, the perceived decline in fact-checking could rather be the result of a continued ascendance of the formal rituals of accountancy which t bytfield mentioned, combined with a networked innundation of "facts." <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
