On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 17:46:06 +0200, Susanne Berg <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
[two short extracts:]
>Responsibility for the solution to inequality and ostracism should be put
>on those with power to change the situation which causes it. The practical
>problems might be ours, but their solution is bloody well the
>responsibility for everyone in society.
....
>and just now I have this nagging voice in my head saying "This is an
>academic list. What are you doing preaching about this stuff in this forum?
>Shouldn't you just shut up?" The dominant ideas within research shouts to
>me: "This is an academic forum. It's not allowed to be personal." Another
>voice responds: "It's my life, my right to participation that's researched,
>why shouldn't I be personal?"
****
The desire to have one's own shout, including personal stuff, is quite
understandable, whether in a park, or in a pub, or in an academic forum
(paid for, incidentally, by Joe and Jane Public, who seldom get entry to
what their taxes provide). However, there are some consequences of the
cumulative shout.
One of the main responsibilities that separates people engaged in research
from people not engaged in it, is that of questioning and testing whatever
is believed to be the current state of knowledge and theory in their
field, weighing up the different sorts of evidence employed, bearing in
mind particularly the weaker points in such evidence, and seeing whether
stronger evidence might be obtained, and how far it could be known to be
stronger, and might contribute to new and improved knowledge and a greater
theoretical understanding.
These are not easy tasks to face, and there are a great many distractions
and diversions, and opportunities to continue going through the motions
without actually engaging in research. If engaged in seriously, research
activities may involve violence... in the sense of the violation of what
is "commonly believed", of what "everybody knows". One consequence of such
violation may be that "everybody" starts shouting, calling for the
researcher's blood, or her dismissal from post, or for him to be sent to a
corrective labour camp for 18 years.
This disability-research list has provided some interested non-researchers
with the opportunity to express some of their pain and anger and mistrust
of researchers. That's not necessarily a bad thing; but the same message
has been repeated, very clearly, year after year. Understandably, a number
of researchers have stopped reading. A few have stated their reasons, but
most have simply withdrawn, when the noise-to-signal ratio became
intolerable, or when they simply had too many other things to do that
seemed more valuable than reading the opinions expressed on these screens.
(Nobody now succeeds in keeping up with the journal literature even in
their own field, which has at least got past some gate-keepers, and has
been in competition for limited journal slots, and has been partly
rewritten maybe 30 times and boiled down to meet word limits, and thus
tends to be a little more succinct and coherent than the average post to a
discussion list... So every half hour spent reading shouts or whispers on
this list is half an hour less that could be used to skim through abstracts
and pull out a couple of papers which look as though they might add
something new to one's understanding...)
A similar process of attrition has taken place on some other research-based
lists that I have followed over ten years. Some lists collapse. Some go
private. In the US, where there has been experience in much greater numbers
and over a slightly longer period, I believe most surviving lists are
moderated. Any viewpoint can then still be opposed by argument - but not
opposed by shouting, nor drowned nor discouraged by the volume of trivia
and utter fatuity.
One of the 'laws' of public media is said to be that the easy and demotic
tends to colonise any space allocated to the difficult and cerebral. At the
end, everyone has had their shout - but the researchers have moved
somewhere else to ply their dangerous trade (or, as others might see it, to
play thir dirty games...)
m99m
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