Agents can do better. We don’t have to destroy the world, but we do have to dissent.

Truth-seekers must be rebels.

Personally, I do not appreciate someone else designing my life for me deciding where I live, with whom and how I live. Infact anything near those types of lame design are infuriating.

Your article is a breath of air much needed in a smothering controlled, coerced social environment. It is a relief to know that others see the same thing that I do, have struggled with the games played and really want to change this behavior by lifting the veil so that all people see the charade for what it is. I just returned home from my University where I observed yet another unnecessary big dog and pony show. Times’ a wasting, a famous scene that comes to mind here from the movie “Jaws” is where Sheriff Brody asks for directions and they are given in nautical terms-which he can’t translate, so he says, “JUST POINT!”

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/stanford-professor-gives-up-teaching-position-hopes-to-reach-500000-students-at-online-start-up/35135

and sent an email to the Chronicle editors that said this

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Hi there

I just read the Stanford Article

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/stanford-professor-gives-up-teaching-position-hopes-to-reach-500000-students-at-online-start-up/35135

And you may be interested in some work I’ve been doing. I have started an online disciplinary journal call The Socjourn as a way of bringing Sociology to a mass audience.

http://www.sociology.org

The journal is not designed to break the connection with my institution, as the initiative of Sebastian Thrun appears to do, but to strengthen the connection between professor and institution by a) increasing market awareness and b) providing a kind of funnel for potential students into the institution so they may pursue individual courses or full credentials. How to do this? The goal is to have practitioners, rather than communicate within the balkanized world of “scholarly publication,” engage in a form of accessible public discussion, dealing with disciplinary issues, engaging in key debates, in an accessible fashion, and so on. Kind of like the old Greek philosophical model where the philosopher goes and stands in a public square and attracts students, but with the awareness that there is still value in the University as institution.

We’ve tagged some of the issues in the discussion component of this article

http://www.sociology.org/lead/redefining-reality-disbelieving
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Hmm. I like to think that what we are doing here isn’t quite so ridiculous and individualistic as Thrun. We are revolutionizing the scholarly world while still maintaining a place for its institutions, credentials, and so on. We are also protecting ourselves from the corrupting influence of commercialism as well. (Is it a surprise to find Google behind Thrun on this I wonder?). You can read an earlier article I wrote entitled The University, Accountability, and Market Discipline in the Late 1990s that might be relevant here.

In this context maybe The Socjourn provides a useful model for academics interesting in breaking through the limitations of traditional pedagogical models, while still retaining and supporting the institutions that we originally built to begin with.

That said, people also have an amazing capacity to initiate change. This journal is a case in point. When I was in graduate school, it took six months to review the first paper that I submitted to a traditional academic journal. I was invited to revise and resubmit my article and, upon doing so, it took another 6-8 months to complete the second round of the review process–which, annoyingly, resulted in another invitation to R&R from a completely different set of reviewers. In the end, I wasted more than a year of precious time, and, ultimately, a small group of small-minded academic gate-keepers prevented me from sharing my ideas with the larger academic community.

The Socjournal changes all of that–radically! The Socjournal is electronic and, thus, rather than taking months or years to generate publications, The Socjournal travels at the speed of thought. Also, try as they might, gate-keepers have not been able to fence in the Internet. As a result, The Socjournal is a venue that stimulates (rather than quashes) the free exchange of ideas.

In a fast-changing world, the more ideas that people generate and share, the better. Thus, The Socjournal represents the future of scholarship in a fast-evolving information society. The gate-keepers of traditional academic publication may not like it, but the stodgy, old hold-outs of archaic paradigms never like to witness the future passing them by.

Alas.

Second, there is the question of redefining reality. Even though I think people have the potential to redefine reality, I think most of the time they don’t bother and there are lots of reasons for that other then the suggestion that they are incapable. Time is a big one. Who the hell has time to redefine reality these days? Most of us are too busy performing in our jobs to take the time and effort to redefine reality even in response to the smallest disjuncture. Mass media is another obstacle. Mass media basically re-creates the status-quo version of reality (a reality full of disjuncture) and they do it with ridiculous amounts of resources, billions of dollars a year. How to compete against that. Motivation is yet another obstacle. Redefining reality in a significant way is a huge task and would probably take a committed individual many years to work through. That’s a big commitment. Of course, as professors I think it would be very easy to make the case that it is our job to help with that task. It’s our job to identify anomalies and heal disjuncture in ever more accurate approximations of the Truth. I think society has evolved a specialization for this and we are it. The problem is, we hide our thinking about things away in stodgy academic journals where, literally, only a handful of people might ever read what we write. in those conditions we can redefine all we want but its not going to ever make a difference since nobody is ever going to read it.

All this it not to take away from what you are saying, but simply point to The Socjourn here as disciplinary development with a uniquely revolutionary potential, embedded in exactly the sorts of issues and concerns you raise in your article here. What happens when the “reality specialists” like you and I begin exposing our discussions to a mass audience in this exact fashion? Kuhn may have been a conservative when it came to discussing the revolutionary (i.e. paradigm shifting) potential of science, but he was writing at a time when the only way scholars could communicate was in expensive scholarly journals, or in exclusive yearly conferences. I wonder what he would say about the paradigm shifting potential of science now?

Of course, just because there is potential here doesn’t mean the potential will necessarily be actuated. Scientists are going to have to step up to the plate provided by all these fancy new communication technologies, and that actually might be the biggest obstacle there is since they’ll have to overcome arrogance, elitism, a balkanized psychology, and their own lack of skill (I’ve met only one or two scientists who know how to write a good sentence). But still, and as The Socjourn clearly demonstrates, it is possible.

Anyway, Dr. Tim, at the risk of being accused of shameless self promotion, how do you think The Socjourn fits into the sorts of issues you and I are discussing here?