akaKenSmith.com

The normal path for many academics is to ignore the wider uses of their research:

“I saw a number of studies [at an academic conference] this weekend that working journalists would find fascinating and helpful. Yet they’re not available in forms I’d feel comfortable sending around the newsroom. In fact, I’ve never seen scholarship cited in the newsroom that wasn’t accompanied by a readable narrative translation of its findings. I understand that most scholarship is pointed at the academy rather than the industry. But that shouldn’t preclude industry-relevant conclusions from being written up in industry-readable language.”

Quoting Matt Thompson, who is “currently undertaking a year-long research fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, previously the deputy Web editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.” Newsless.org

“All over the world serious work is being made in all sorts of unauthorised ways. Old-fashioned opinion, meanwhile, is tying its shoelaces and not noticing.” (“Mere Fact, Mere Fiction,” 4/17/10, Guardian)

That is David Hare, from an essay on writing, theater, and journalism. If he’s right, then the next thing to hope for would be for everyone to know it and think it’s for the best…which surely it is.

Sadly, Posterous no longer exists so the links below are dead.

For those who might still want to listen in on the 4/6 Lundquist lecture about social media, literacy, and democracy, four segments of the talk are available as streaming audio with annotations giving clues to what each portion of the talk addresses.

Part 1 — Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman give a few clues about the nature of literacy in the public sphere.

Part 2 — Otto and Elise Hampel use postcards to protest against the Nazi government in Berlin in the early 1940s.

Part 3 — Twitter alters the balance of power in a case of corporate secrecy.

Part 4 — Some thoughts about the ways social media allow citizens to make their messages in the public sphere matter.