On social media, terrorism, and academia #dyr

working online also pushes education beyond the confines of school, allowing kids to broaden discussion of their work. And it forces them to do "authentic" work that gets tested out in the real world, as outside viewers see it and respond to it.

 

Today's online experience is really the experience of being part of a gigantic crowd of people, said Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell, in a lecture about what social media and other popular websites can teach us about ourselves, July 20 in Kennedy Hall.

When we go online, we do not just learn about an event, said Kleinberg...We also learn about the experiences, opinions and reactions of millions of people.

 

psychologists call it "deindividuation". It's what happens when social norms are withdrawn because identities are concealed...And it's why under the cover of an alias or an avatar on a website or a blog – surrounded by virtual strangers – conventionally restrained individuals might be moved to suggest a comedian should suffer all manner of violent torture because they don't like his jokes, or his face. Digital media allow almost unlimited opportunity for wilful deindividuation. They almost require it. The implications of those liberties, of the ubiquity of anonymity and the language of the crowd, are only beginning to be felt.

 

Don't talk, then, about the wildness in our rhetoric today, and its undeniable roots in that deep strain of political violence that runs through our national DNA, on a gene that is not always recessive. Don't relate Centennial Park in Atlanta in 1996 to Oklahoma City to murdered doctors to Columbine, and then to Tucson and to the bag on the bench in Spokane. Ignore the patterns, deep and wide, that connect each event to the other like a slow-burning fuse to a charge. That there are among us rage-hardened, powerless people who resort to the gun and the bomb. That there are powerful people who deplore the gun and the bomb, but who do not hesitate to profit from their use. And when the gun goes off or the bomb explodes, the powerful will deplore the actions of the powerless, and they will reassure the rest of us that We are not like Them, who are violent and crazy and whose acts have no reason beyond unfathomable madness. But above all, they will say, Ignore the fact that there is still a horrible utility in political violence, the way there was during Reconstruction, or during the labor wars of the early twentieth century. If there were not, it wouldn't be so hard to get an abortion in Kansas, and assault weapons would not have been accessories of choice at recent rallies purportedly held to discuss changes in the way the country organizes its health-care system.

 

Breivik wrote about different classifications of “traitors,” or individuals he felt could be killed during his imagined revolution.  In his handbook, he suggested that revolutionaries consider attacking both “literature conferences and festivals” and “annual gatherings for journalists.

 

Almost by definition, academics have gotten to where they are by playing a highly scripted game extremely well. That means understanding and following self-reinforcing rules for success.

 

Academic journals generally get their articles for nothing and may pay little to editors and peer reviewers. They sell to the very universities that provide that cheap labour.

 

I can only recommend graduate school in the humanities—and, increasingly, the social sciences and sciences—if you are independently wealthy, well-connected in the field you plan to enter (e.g., your mom is the president of an Ivy League university), or earning a credential to advance in a position you already hold