If a mediocre mind falls into academica, do they still get a PHD?

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

--George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Let me just go ahead and preface what I'm about to write with some background: I have a serious, bordering on obsessive, dislike for certain types of academics. If you come from a Cultural Studies department, or use words such as "post-structuralist", "post new left", "hegemonic" or numerous other phrases seemingly aimed at confusion and obfuscation rather than explanation and elucidation, the chances that I will have a hard time taking a single thing that you say seriously are pretty high. In fact, there is a good chance that, smelling bullshit and a certain mental weakness, I will feel a somewhat primordial urge to take you down and will attack, sometimes viscously, regardless of the merits of any particular point that you might have.

This urge may have been present before I entered college, but it certainly grew and took its present form while I was in the undergraduate and graduate programs at the New School, in New York City, where I received both a bachelor and masters degree, and which seems to have a disproportionately large student body of loquacious losers.

I remember, during the first day of my first graduate level sociology class (I was a Junior at the time), the teacher asked us a question about social status and education. I can't remember exactly what that question was, nor can I remember my the answer that I gave, but I remember very clearly that the class looked at me as though I had three eyes for what I thought was a pretty reasonable statement (even if was made, pretty crudely, using my Philly slang, which was definitely more pronounced at the time). A moment later, another student raised their hand and gave the same damned answer that I did, accept this student threw in a bunch of words that I either knew, but would never use, or words that I had never heard of, but would become very familiar with as I sat through 5 years of classes at the New School. Needless to say, the class applauded loudly to this girl, and I was left feeling a bit lame brained for not having the language to express myself to this crowd, and a bit peeved that they didn't seem to get what seemed to me to be a perfectly clear explanation of my thinking.

As my schooling continued, and my vocabulary improved, it became increasingly clear to me that many, if not most, of these students were not using these big words because there wasn't another word that could be used. They were not using these words because they couldn't think of anything better to say. They were using these words because they had heard a professor utter them, or had read somebody "important" write them, and so they adopted the words that they felt would give their thoughts more weight, without having to actually think things through in any deeper fashion. They also seemed to gravitate towards these words, and the thoughts associated with them, when they lacked evidence to back up their claims or when they were faced with evidence that contradicted their point. These words also seemed to be codes used by academics to signify their status within higher education.

I mention this because my reaction to the Danah Boyd piece that Mike linked to fell somewhere between mild disgust and outright hostility. Danah claims in this piece that she is clarifying her stance from her previous blog post, that supposedly dealt with "class and social networking sites", but which seemed to me to be more about Danah's mental state than the subjects she set out to study and describe. I want to again prefice this with another disclaimer: Danah seems like a nice and smart enough person, who is studying a topic which definitely deserves broader attention (social groupings in the online world), and who clearly sees some of the problems with her writings. But (and you knew that was coming) I think that this piece should stay within the halls of a Cultural Studies department, where it will not get burned by the bright light it is subjected too in this open public space.

The first thing that strikes me about this piece is what I see as Danah's "intellectual" arrogance. For example, take a look at some of these passages (emphasis added):

Qualitative and quantitative data show different things. The greatest mistake that I made in this essay was not clarifying why this piece needed a qualitative lens. This had to do with my failure to prepare for how far this piece would spread. In my local world, everyone understands why qualitative has value. I'm realizing the hard way that this is not generally understood.
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Many have been outraged that I appear biased towards one or the other (although no one seems to know which - I've been accused of being condescending towards subaltern teens and I've also been accused of fetishizing them). Perhaps I should've located myself. As a teen, I would've been caught in between - a smart kid whose friends and world were very much in the subaltern camps (geeks and burnouts primarily). As an adult, I have more privilege than I ever thought possible and my world is extremely hegemonic and I'm always trying to fight against that. Thus, I probably have more sympathy with subaltern teens but my friends are all raising hegemonic ones who I adore. Thus, I'm definitely caught in the middle.
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I realized very quickly that people read the BBC article or the Slashdot coverage or their friends' blog posts and decided to critique from there. I have been astonished at how lazy people have been. My article is not that inaccessible and it's not even that long. What was even funnier was that when I wrote a response to the BBC article on my blog, people then took that to say that I saw the essay as based on no data and otherwise meaningless. The essay is based on data; it is rooted in a very long ethnographic study; but it is just not a formal report of my findings.
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One reaction often makes me giggle: "duh." To me, that is the reaction that it should've evoked. Duh. It makes sense. Of course. What I'm marking in this essay should've been obvious to everyone. What amazes me is that so many folks are shocked by it and so many others refuse to acknowledge it.

In all of these examples, Danah is making claims at understanding something, in my opinion, simply by using a label that may confuse (qualitative vs. quantatative) or which have so little meaning that the overall point is obscured sub-altern vs. hegemonic). In each case the words are meant to signify her seriousness and intelligence, though I assume that she believes she is describing something important. And if you don't get it, it's just because you don't understand her, not because she is wrong or because she doesn't explain herself clearly, but because you clearly aren't intelligent enough to comprehend her glorious work.

She also continually refers to data, which only she has access to, which supposedly backs up her claims. If only we could see that data we would understand the truth behind her statements and we would just go "duh", Danah is right, I was a slightly sub altern teen with hegemonic tendencies.

Last, she makes the most serious intellectual mistake, that everyone, including yours truly, makes: she assumes that her views are common sense. Unfortunately, as science has repeatedly shown, common sense may be common, but is does not always carry a lot of "sense".

The second thing that strikes me about this piece is the almost complete lack of precision in describing what she thinks she sees. Of course Danah admits as much, but that doesn't make up for the fact that she continues down the road towards what she hopes to explain:

Most teens are not jocks OR burnouts, but those terms evoke images of extreme camps that work as signposts in 1980s high schools. Those extremes signal opposing values and activities, ideas and ideologies. Most teens draw from both in framing their own world. There are caricatured jocks and caricatured burnouts but the reality is somewhere in-between.

I did not do a good job of fleshing this out in my article. You will find an astonishing number of teens who have both MySpace and Facebook these days. At the same time, they are more drawn to one or the other (another way in which quantitative data that asks about which they use will not get at this). They have a sense that their friends in each are different or that each site represents a different side of friends who are on both. Few teens have identical profiles on each and often even the baseline photo is different. (Adults tend to copy/paste from one SNS to another.)
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Not only did folks misread all over the place, they perpetuated their misreadings and others' interpretations. The most insidious of this was the MSNBC coverage. Not only did MSNBC not contact me directly, the author took my quotes out o context all over the place. She set me up to be mocked through their framing of my name and scary quoting the blog essay term and implicitly supporting the ways in which people attacked me for racism. She then went on to mock me for failing to realize the way the Internet works. Of course, she did conclude by pointing out that journalists are lazy (herself too?), but still, it sickens me that this kind of coverage is considered appropriate. Needless to say, the MSNBC article has prompted all sorts of mean-spirited emails and blog posts against me and it did not clarify any of what I was attempting to say. (Instead, she shows her own class biases by talking about MySpace as ugly.)

This is the most obvious place where Danah exhibits her Cultural Studies ways. It is much easier to make up a few easy boxes to fit people into, and then claim that while everyone, or even most, might not fall neatly into one or another category, they still must fall someplace in between. The assumption that there are two categories is the silliest one of all, and instead of actually addressing this fact, Danah continues to trot out the tired duality she believes exists.

In the end, I do think it's very important and very valuable to study, both quantitatively and qualitatively (and yes Danah, I do know what those mean, thank you), what social divisions exist and how they effect our lives, both online and in the real world. But creating false dichotomies that ease our ability to explain things, and trying to force much more complex realities into one of those boxes (or someplace in between), doesn't actually increase our understanding of this complex dynamic, not even by a little bit.

But then again, maybe I'm just too hegemonic to see the truth of this.