sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

I'm very excited to have settled on a thesis topic. It still needs to be ironed out quite a bit, and I'm not sure if I'll discuss it publicly for quite a few months, but it relates to Karl Marx, Linus Torvalds and David Korten... and it will be beautiful.

I just took a quick coffee break to read Wading in the Deep: Supporting Emergent Anarchies, a short article by Naeem Inayatullah at Ithaca College, which was given to me last week by a close friend of mine and a former student of Naeem's. Quite frankly, I was blown away... it has been at least three years since I read such a provocative piece on pedagogy in higher ed.

Stanley Fish recently wrote two posts on the intersections of politics and academia. While I agree that Fish's commitment to academic rigor is admirable, and his own ability to keep political views out of his coursework commendable, I've also always felt that he took his Ivory Tower positions way too far (I've also wondered whether he actually has political views).

I've been reading "The Wisdom of Crowds" today (and blogging about it elsewhere), and came across several instances of the thing I hate the most about economics.

"Plank-road fever was a vivid example of a phenomenon that economists call an 'information cascade.'" (Surowiecki, pg 53) [bold mine]

Why have I fixated on this sentence? I'll answer with two questions:

To clarify, this is why I'm a reluctant academic, rather than an enthusiastic one...

While researching for my current paper (on symbolic exchange in open source software), I stumbled across this excellent blog by Erik Davis, a PhD candidate in History of Religions at the University of Chicago.

When my prof suggested I read Marcel Mauss's book The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, I'll admit that I was less than thrilled, for several reasons.

First, I'm sick of reading theory translated from French... it tends to be exhausting, circuitous, and self-involved, and I've simply read too much of it lately.

As long as I'm recapping all of my papers, I might as well recap my courses too. So here are my general reactions to the three courses I took last fall.

Intro to CCT
This is the only explicitly required course in the CCT program. At the time, I found the class incredibly frustrating but, looking back, I appreciate it at the very least for bringing all of the new students into one room and building a sense of community and connectedness, as well as a common vocabulary and reading list.

My final paper for my class in "Media and Political Engagement" was called The Baker What? - Examining the Brief Life of the Iraq Study Group Report. I'm noticing that I have a tendency to give my papers sarcastic titles. I'm not sure why. Anyway, here's a quote from the intro, which gives a solid explanation of what the paper does:

I just got out of my postmodernism course. I hadn't done the best job on the week's readings, and I was totally hopped up on coffee, so I said absolutely nothing during the discussion, but at the tail end my mind started making connections that I felt were worth recording...