[SIGCIS-Members] Should we aspire to be featured in or write for the New Yorker?

Wed Oct 15 09:55:04 PDT 2014

I second Ian's plug for Sarah Rich—and Lee Vinsel's plea for reaching
across unfortunately-drawn boundaries as well!

As Thomas Haigh's counterfactual suggests, this is a problem of boundary
work (at least, that's what it suggests to me). I'd like to resist is the
agonism of rigor v. immediacy, or public impact v. knowledge production.
Indeed, both journalism and scholarship have their standards with respect
to rigor, sourcing, and claims to truth. They're articulated in different
rituals and craft practices in each respective domain (and there's a good
deal of diversity within the domains as well)—but in each domain, the best
work offers much that practitioners from the other side can admire.

While scholars covet the seeming impact and audience of popular cultural
journalists, the journalists desire and idealize many markers of the
academy: time & license to pursue questions wherever they lead; the
fellowship of intellectual community; the imprimatur of the ivory tower.
(As someone who resides fitfully in both camps—or, in the estimation of a
more jaundiced eye, divigates dilettantishly between the two—I make bold to
compare.)

We're all knowledge-makers, myth-talkers, and storytellers in the end, with
much reason to make common cause. I risk appearing Pollyannaish or
Panglossian here; I do know that we're far from the best of all possible
worlds. But I remain reluctant to sort work into the esoteric and the
exoteric, or the scholarly and the popular, as I think such invidious
comparisons tend to diminish and discipline work of varied tempers. Rather
than sorting ourselves into a received bicamerality, we might look for ways
to bring our stories, and the epistemic virtues by which we structure them,
into richer resonance.

Whatever THAT means!

On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 12:25 PM, Ian Bogost <ian.bogost at lmc.gatech.edu>
wrote:

> Sarah Rich is terrific as is her re:form channel (I wrote a piece for
> their launch, which I hereby immodestly link:
> https://medium.com/re-form/welcome-to-dataland-d8c06a5f3bc6). It’s also a
> great way to reach a substantial audience (somewhere around 100,00 readers
> in the case of my piece).
>
> The Medium crew also does a bang-up job with design and art, the likes of
> which are basically inaccessible to scholars.
>
> Obviously, I also urge everyone here not to give up on popular
> publications but to take this opportunity to reinvest in them.
>
> Ian
>
> On Oct 15, 2014, at 10:59 AM, Lee Vinsel <lee.vinsel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > I second Janet's plea that we not give up on popular publications too
> soon.
> >
> > Tying together Janet's email and Ian Bogost's, I am pasting a bit of
> text below regarding a publication opportunity that a friend sent me a few
> months back. The publication on Medium, Re:form, is edited by Sarah Rich,
> who has written some nice pieces on technology in the last few months.
> (Rich also happens to be married to Alexis Madrigal, so the two of them
> make a dynamic tech duo.)
> >
> > My friend, who is a comic artist, and I are dreaming up short graphic
> novel-esque stories illustrating (pun intended) lessons about the history
> of technological change, mostly drawing on my work on auto history.
> >
> > While the bit I've pasted below focuses on graphic stories, I think
> Re:form is also interested in textual ones.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Lee
> >
> >
> >  Medium has just launched a new publication called Re:form, edited by
> Sarah Rich, that focuses on design. I worked with her to help get a Rich
> Stevens     comic in there and we're now looking for something longer and
> more journalistic from a cartoonist.
> >
> >  I'm sending this out to some of you I've worked with before to see if
> you might pitch us.
> >
> >  The focus is fairly broad. Rich explained some about her vision for the
> section in her inaugural post a few weeks ago and wrote me this about what
> she is    looking for in a piece.
> >
> > I'd love to have stories that look at an object either from the
> perspective of its history or its current cultural context. Could be a
> totally ordinary thing like a ball point pen or a beer bottle opener or a
> seatbelt. If someone wanted to do research it could relate to how that
> thing came to be a common object, or if they wanted to just do cultural
> commentary (like with the iPhone) it could be more about how it plays in
> current environs. I could also see something that shines light on an object
> of design that is so "hidden in plain sight" as to vanish unless a writer
> or artist puts it in front of us. For example, I have someone writing about
> the tags that are embedded in city sidewalks to indicate to municipal
> utility workers where they need to do repairs. It's a language and a way of
> reading the city that most of us completely overlook because we don't speak
> the language, but if someone gives us a little lesson, suddenly we can read
> the city in a new way.
> >
> > Re:form can pay pretty good for something too. Frankly, it's higher than
> what I can pay for on The Nib.
> >
> > If you have any subjects in mind that you think could work, put a pitch
> together and send it my way.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate at vt.edu> wrote:
> > Dear Colleagues,
> >
> > I don't think one bad experience, or even several, should make us give
> up on engaging with more popular or widely-read media. We've probably all
> had bad experiences with academic peer review as well. The point is not to
> excuse these occurrences but to "censure and move on," as the saying goes.
> >
> > I for one would welcome sharing of information on how to be published in
> these more popular outlets. I don't mean general writing advice, but
> practical information specific to each publisher: whom to contact; what
> sort of topics, length, format they are looking for; what they want to see
> up front (an idea or an entire draft), etc.  I appreciated Ian Bogost's
> post about the Atlantic, for example. Having this type of information would
> give me a more concrete goal to shoot for than just "write something
> popular."
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Janet
> >
> > Dr. Janet Abbate
> > Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society
> > Co-director, National Capital Region STS program
> > Virginia Tech
> > www.sts.vt.edu/ncr
> > www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055
> > www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
> >
> > --
> > Assistant Professor
> > Program on Science and Technology Studies
> > College of Arts and Letters
> > Stevens Institute of Technology
> > Hoboken, NJ 07030
> > AmericanScience.Blogspot.com
> > Twitter: @STS_News
> > _______________________________________________
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-- 
matthew battles
associate director, metaLAB (at) harvard <http://metalab.harvard.edu/>
fellow, berkman center for internet and society
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu>
twitter = @matthewbattles <http://twitter.com/matthewbattles>
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