class

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.

A few weeks ago, I linked to an article by Danah Boyd about class divisions and community formation in MySpace and FaceBook. There was a bit of a controversy over the article, which caused a stir in the technology blogosphere, academia, and even the mainstream media (who stopped talking about sexual predators for about 5 minutes).

Danah has a new article up responding to the many, many, many criticisms of her initial article. Even if you disagree with her thesis; even if you cringe at the use of elitist (dare I say hegemonic?), grad-school jargon; the essay still has some important information about the ethnographics of MySpace and FaceBook - information that can and should be used for political outreach just like the Repubicans use traditional marketing data.

At the very least, these two essays will be talked about in just about every conversation about politics and social networking for the next year and a half. Read them just to be current.