My experience with RSS had been limited to reading ticker-tape news headlines on websites. Until playing around with Google Reader, I had no idea that you could feed website updates to a nexus, so to speak. In fact, I find myself getting carried away with not only subscribing to blogs and websites about new media and humanities education, but have gradually included those to do with food, videogaming, tennis, and other personal interests and hobbies, thus actually creating a monstrous, unwieldy flow of RSS feeds that has become too overwhelming to follow. The efficiency of RSS feeds has much potential. Electronic bookmarking/favourite features already provide users with a certain level of practicality. RSS just takes the efficiency to the next level by having subscriptions flow in as they are published. But how useful is this really for academia?
If, for example, I’m writing a paper about Plato’s Gorgias and its distinctions of the rhetorician and the philosopher, I would be hard pressed to find useful RSS feeds. Plato does not have a blog because he’s dead. Nor is he much in the news, sadly, for the same reason. The only RSS feeds that may be of use to me would be from a niche (either academically or otherwise) group such as a rhetorical society that continues to study his works. If, on the other hand, I frame Plato’s Gorgias around current affairs, such as American literary critic/educational commentator Stanley Fish’s controversies (pick one), to perhaps debate whether the latter is an effective rhetorician, philosopher, or neither, many RSS feeds may prove to be more relevant.
What it comes down to is this: How much are the academy’s knowledge-making practices reliant on reading newspapers, magazines, other periodicals, and how much on reading relatively obscure materials that require specialised knowledge and skills to extract? I find myself required to do more and more of the latter.
If, for example, I’m writing a paper about Plato’s Gorgias and its distinctions of the rhetorician and the philosopher, I would be hard pressed to find useful RSS feeds. Plato does not have a blog because he’s dead. Nor is he much in the news, sadly, for the same reason. The only RSS feeds that may be of use to me would be from a niche (either academically or otherwise) group such as a rhetorical society that continues to study his works. If, on the other hand, I frame Plato’s Gorgias around current affairs, such as American literary critic/educational commentator Stanley Fish’s controversies (pick one), to perhaps debate whether the latter is an effective rhetorician, philosopher, or neither, many RSS feeds may prove to be more relevant.
What it comes down to is this: How much are the academy’s knowledge-making practices reliant on reading newspapers, magazines, other periodicals, and how much on reading relatively obscure materials that require specialised knowledge and skills to extract? I find myself required to do more and more of the latter.
RSS feeds may be very useful for academics in a general, professional sense—that is, to keep up with things like what pet theory everyone’s into this semester, and the like. It may, however, be of very limited use in terms of the rigorous academic study required of in-depth research projects, and highly dependent on applicability of current affairs to the subject matter.
Very interesting. Although one implication of your post is that RSS may help to draw academics into a wider public context and pull away from narrower disciplinary boundaries. That would at least be an interesting voyage . . .
ReplyDelete