I like Shirky's writing very much, he is fluent and brings great perspective and ideas, not to mention great soundbites, but i will admit that the problems presented in this counter article make sense.
It seems digital media analysis and the media studies derived from them share this mild case of schizophrenia, or put another way a case of academic attention deficit disorder, the nature of the commentary is similar to the environment in which it is conceived.
I probably muddled what i was trying to say, but when you actually slog through a scholarly work (of say historical analysis) that presents an exhaustive attention to details, and reference you are struck by a wholly different kind of academic style, one that seems increasingly old school and unfashionable, which is very sad.
This mode still exist in the hard sciences, but in certain humanities it is viewed with suspicion, even disdain, at least that is my anecdotal observation.
It can be summed up as brilliant ideas, that fall apart due to lack of rigor in research.
It can be summed up as brilliant ideas, that fall apart due to lack of rigor in research.
The insidious part of this is that brilliant ideas and pithy quotes and the essays that result from them are so memorable, that in a way the bar for research disproving them is even higher that it would be if the statement in question was some dusty historical or physical science hypothesis.
I'd say media studies is actually one of the better areas for that, because its methodologies are so varied that there's quite a lot of good stuff. Marshall McLuhan's ideas, while at times extreme, are pretty rigorously developed, for example.
There's a lot that imo really has problems in the other direction. A huge part of modern media studies is obsessively empirical, not publishing a paper unless it has a study and a p-value (see e.g. all the people publishing papers on MMOs). Empirical research can often be great of course, but I feel there are significant areas where nobody's really done the conceptual or philosophical work: just reporting the outcomes of studies is very surface-level knowledge, not really getting at mechanisms and relationships and how or why they exist.
Story-telling is what struck me (and what I liked) about the New York Times and the New Yorker when I first started to read them, especially as I'm a Briton and not use to that style.
Argument by analogue, and story-telling, reminds me of what I found unsettling about freakanomics and gladwell's work. Not that I didn't enjoy those books, I did. But I was oftentimes only left with the story.
I too immediately thought of Freakanomics and Malcolm Gladwell, as well as Thomas Friedman. There seems to be a trend of writing books around "anecdata", as the OP calls it - anecdotes presented as patterns, while failing to account for selection bias in the process.
Of course, there's probably an irony in the fact that I drew a trend from merely four anecdotes as well...
If you haven't read it, I do highly recommend Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies as a worthy attempt to quantify the process of collapse as a function of diminishing returns on added complexity.
I recall it being damned expensive to buy, but you should be able to borrow it from a well-appointed library.
It seems digital media analysis and the media studies derived from them share this mild case of schizophrenia, or put another way a case of academic attention deficit disorder, the nature of the commentary is similar to the environment in which it is conceived.
I probably muddled what i was trying to say, but when you actually slog through a scholarly work (of say historical analysis) that presents an exhaustive attention to details, and reference you are struck by a wholly different kind of academic style, one that seems increasingly old school and unfashionable, which is very sad.
This mode still exist in the hard sciences, but in certain humanities it is viewed with suspicion, even disdain, at least that is my anecdotal observation.
It can be summed up as brilliant ideas, that fall apart due to lack of rigor in research.