Apple's Battle Against DIY

If you are in humanities academia, you likely notice a strong preference for Mac computing among your colleagues. Driving this phenomenon is at least in part the desire for the identity of a Mac user vs the identity of a PC user. Through advertising and branding, a Mac is perceived as a subversive rebel in the face of "the man," or in academic terms, "the dominant ideology," the PC. Counting all computer users, Mac users are truly in the minority. Still, I have sometimes found this configuration of PC vs. Mac in the popular imagination ironic because of the DIY possibilities available for modifying a PC, most of which are much more difficult, or impossible, to apply to a Mac. To me, DIY-ness adds subversiveness.

A new Slate article by Tim Wu elucidates this topic and sheds light on how Apple has traveled the spectrum from its first and extremely DIY-friendly computer to the Ipad, an antithesis to DIY computing.

Still, I'm sure folks have already begun to mod the Ipad.

And, let me not fail to note that if you are a non-Mac user but you use Linux, you are awarded double street-cred points within the academic milieu.

Tvtropes.org and What New Fan Scholarship Has to Offer

In today's Washington Post, an article discusses how world news reporting will henceforth have to rely at least in part on more amateur writers as US newspapers cut back their foreign bureaus. This made me think about how much I rely on fans, fan/scholars, and scholar/fans, to stay current in studying New Media.

Part of the importance of these other "non-academic" sources of knowledge is the sheer mass of media streaming forth. But like the Post article, I sense that the online work is seriously evolving. Further, I want to state that it is not that fan discourse needs to evolve into academic discourse, but that fan discourse is on a separate (if overlapping) trajectory and is becoming important and powerful in ways unavailable to academic discourse (just as the converse is true).

One perfect example of this type of non-academic (or fan-academic?) discourse is tvtropes.org. This wiki uniquely and exhaustively documents tropes that occur on virtually all of television, film, literature, video games, professional wrestling, etc. -- the list of media types is pretty all-inclusive. Because of its volume, this work could not be achieved in a purely academic environment, but its existence as well as the information it catalogs must be important to fans, scholars, and all combinations of the two.