Digital Humanities

Where do you seen Anonymous arguing that “not everything needs to be public”? While I think the conflict over compulsory publicity, as we might call it, constitutes a subtext of Anonymous’ post, I don’t see him / her making this point, specifically. Providing direct references to the text would help me to see how you’re interpreting these claims.

What, in particular, did you find convincing about Gannon’s “points,” as you call them? Can you be more specific?

Nicely done — pat on the back for a Halloween-themed pun.

I want to agree with this but I feel like, in reality, people aren’t as accepting of opposing views as we would like. I think confirmation bias gets in the way and we reject information that contradicts ours. However, in an ideal world where we wouldn’t be so defensive of our own opinions, social media would be a perfect intellectual meeting and discussing ground.

In the paragraph before this, you talk about how ranting and wars on Twitter aren’t necessarily a bad thing but here you’re saying that you have to be careful what you put on social media. This creates an interesting paradox. Should social media be used to expose our true thoughts or as an extension of our professional identity? Every individual must decide for themselves and if they feel strongly about both, then they could make two accounts; one for rants and one for professionalism. The only problem with this two-account approach is that the rant one will probably need a pen-name and then it will be more difficult to claim credit for anything positive from that account. On the other hand, maybe the academic world could create their own Twitter, like LinkIn but better. The academic Twitter could be for people to represent themselves professionally, unless they prefer to rant there as well. I don’t think this is the ideal solution because it might discourage regular citizens from becoming involved and it would add another thing for scholars to do. Even if it is not perfect, I do think the academic world needs to do something towards solving the conundrum of Twitter that young scholars are facing: to post my opinion or to not post in case I might offend someone.

I feel like this part of your response was influenced by Bogost. It is exciting to see that even though we all thought he was too harsh, the core of his argument still affects us. Maybe his idea had some truth to it but his execution was just lacking. I particularly like this because I enjoy people trying to rattle fields of academia; the reaction to the work of such people is usually negative but they still influence future readers of that field. Bogost at least made a strong impression and got us thinking about the relative isolation of the humanities.

I find this so interesting because I really thought it sounded male but maybe that’s just because I picture grumpy old men when people complain about technology. What made you think Anonymous was a woman?

Interesting choice for gender?  I definitely thought it sounded male, I’m not sure if it’s because they feel entitled to this unpopular opinion, the science PhD, or what.