Aw, Samantha – I am so pleased that my book helped restore some of your passion for podcasting and audio storytelling! It's been great to communicate with a kindred audio spirit. 🙏 Thank you for this perceptive account of podcasting's fit with academia... judging by the vast numbers of PhD candidates researching podcasting, it's going gangbusters. 💪 💕 💚 🙌 For me, the connection between the podcast industry and academia is clear and unstoppable and academics can straddle both, as I aimed to show in this (#openaccess) article on the making of The Greatest Menace podcast about a gay prison. https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/9066
Kindred audio spirit indeed! Glad to hear about the growth in the universe of PhDs...if I was 20 years younger that would likely have been my own pathway. Love to see academics like you straddling both universes. That was always where I chose to get off the bus, when academia couldn't speak human. Onward students! Got get'em 🎓
What a synergistic day. I'm an old-time reporter specializing in crime. I try to stay up with the newest crime trends and to do so, I recently have repeatedly used Aaron Jacklin's listing service, The Art of Explaining Crime. New to criminology, and maybe somewhat averse to its jargon-ridden approach, I barely scratched the surface of the academic discipline until Aaron showed me now much is going on in the study of crime, investigation and punishment. I use the service so much that I became a founding member.
Then along comes SHodder who posts a long and valuable piece on how academia is becoming engaged in the serious/popular study of culture in general. Within an hour, I have two new data collection posts that point in the same direction. Now that is not coincidence. It is an example of the power of Substack and other sites.
When I worked in daily journalism, back in the 1980s, I regularly "stole" story ideas from journals an other specialty publications and translated their insights into news stories, a form that relies on unattributed theft of ideas from news sources. (So no, I don't agree that it is a bad thing. All writers are thieves, on way or another. Attribution might be fair but it robs the reporter of one of his trade secrets, so don't expect it to be precise.)
Anyway, Samantha, your dense piece was spot-on. I broke away from reading it to subscribe and to send this note. I think you are right in many regards and I will go back and read carefully. Thanks for validating my own intuitions. Thanks, even though I have always regarded myself as an antagonist of critical theory. (there's a story there, too.) 73s.
Hello Evan! Thank you for your close reading, and your sub. Glad to be that part of your day when things fell into place. Agreed, writers "steal," or perhaps embellish, or parlay, or continue...but attribution is ok too! I think the point here that Siobhán shared with me was that when she discovered this happened to her, it moved her to shift her position from author to academic, so that she could "own" her ideas. It's the slow march towards credentialism, which has dramatically shifted in the last 30 years...authors certainly 'own' their own ideas. But journalism still tends to be a sandbox of ideas where one idea shifts towards another. And definitely the lines start to blur...which I don't think I take exception to this. I was more pointing to a personal story as a way to highlight a potential pathway for someone else facing a similar crossroads.
My point here was that when she chose to move into the academic sphere, it had a longtail effect on the industry, as this piece aims to describe. She brought her production smarts inside the ivory tower, and slowly, along the way, the ivory tower began to adapt in that direction. She's not alone in this shift, and institutions worldwide have grown their offerings to be more "practical" or "hands-on," which brought certain disciplines out of the more /technical schools, and into the /academic world. It's not unlike the move towards co-op programs offered through academic institutions.
Think of critical theory as a way to debate and challenge your ideas, like a joust. It's there to push and move ideas along; which is sometimes a clunky process ; )
Samantha, thx for the explication. I think you are describing a legitimization process that is welcome. One point regarding ownership of ideas: copyright law says ideas can’t ne owned, only particular and specific expressions. Plagiarism of chunks of words, word for word. I share your affection for ideas. That’s why I don’t give whole book manuscripts to Hollywood producers, the biggest gonifs in the creative world. I don’t even tell them where I found “facts” preserved in documentary forms. They only have to read the same documents I dig up and they can claim my ideas were merely public record. A quandary for thinkers, a bonanza for content creators.
Aw, Samantha – I am so pleased that my book helped restore some of your passion for podcasting and audio storytelling! It's been great to communicate with a kindred audio spirit. 🙏 Thank you for this perceptive account of podcasting's fit with academia... judging by the vast numbers of PhD candidates researching podcasting, it's going gangbusters. 💪 💕 💚 🙌 For me, the connection between the podcast industry and academia is clear and unstoppable and academics can straddle both, as I aimed to show in this (#openaccess) article on the making of The Greatest Menace podcast about a gay prison. https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/9066
Kindred audio spirit indeed! Glad to hear about the growth in the universe of PhDs...if I was 20 years younger that would likely have been my own pathway. Love to see academics like you straddling both universes. That was always where I chose to get off the bus, when academia couldn't speak human. Onward students! Got get'em 🎓
What a synergistic day. I'm an old-time reporter specializing in crime. I try to stay up with the newest crime trends and to do so, I recently have repeatedly used Aaron Jacklin's listing service, The Art of Explaining Crime. New to criminology, and maybe somewhat averse to its jargon-ridden approach, I barely scratched the surface of the academic discipline until Aaron showed me now much is going on in the study of crime, investigation and punishment. I use the service so much that I became a founding member.
Then along comes SHodder who posts a long and valuable piece on how academia is becoming engaged in the serious/popular study of culture in general. Within an hour, I have two new data collection posts that point in the same direction. Now that is not coincidence. It is an example of the power of Substack and other sites.
When I worked in daily journalism, back in the 1980s, I regularly "stole" story ideas from journals an other specialty publications and translated their insights into news stories, a form that relies on unattributed theft of ideas from news sources. (So no, I don't agree that it is a bad thing. All writers are thieves, on way or another. Attribution might be fair but it robs the reporter of one of his trade secrets, so don't expect it to be precise.)
Anyway, Samantha, your dense piece was spot-on. I broke away from reading it to subscribe and to send this note. I think you are right in many regards and I will go back and read carefully. Thanks for validating my own intuitions. Thanks, even though I have always regarded myself as an antagonist of critical theory. (there's a story there, too.) 73s.
Hello Evan! Thank you for your close reading, and your sub. Glad to be that part of your day when things fell into place. Agreed, writers "steal," or perhaps embellish, or parlay, or continue...but attribution is ok too! I think the point here that Siobhán shared with me was that when she discovered this happened to her, it moved her to shift her position from author to academic, so that she could "own" her ideas. It's the slow march towards credentialism, which has dramatically shifted in the last 30 years...authors certainly 'own' their own ideas. But journalism still tends to be a sandbox of ideas where one idea shifts towards another. And definitely the lines start to blur...which I don't think I take exception to this. I was more pointing to a personal story as a way to highlight a potential pathway for someone else facing a similar crossroads.
My point here was that when she chose to move into the academic sphere, it had a longtail effect on the industry, as this piece aims to describe. She brought her production smarts inside the ivory tower, and slowly, along the way, the ivory tower began to adapt in that direction. She's not alone in this shift, and institutions worldwide have grown their offerings to be more "practical" or "hands-on," which brought certain disciplines out of the more /technical schools, and into the /academic world. It's not unlike the move towards co-op programs offered through academic institutions.
Think of critical theory as a way to debate and challenge your ideas, like a joust. It's there to push and move ideas along; which is sometimes a clunky process ; )
Attribution is worthwhile, I agree, but where there is money to be made people lose their good manners quick.
Samantha, thx for the explication. I think you are describing a legitimization process that is welcome. One point regarding ownership of ideas: copyright law says ideas can’t ne owned, only particular and specific expressions. Plagiarism of chunks of words, word for word. I share your affection for ideas. That’s why I don’t give whole book manuscripts to Hollywood producers, the biggest gonifs in the creative world. I don’t even tell them where I found “facts” preserved in documentary forms. They only have to read the same documents I dig up and they can claim my ideas were merely public record. A quandary for thinkers, a bonanza for content creators.