Ghost in the Wire

Recently, a number of my favorite bloggers (Collin Brooke, John Walter and Jeff Rice, among others) reacted to a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a piece called "Master (or Mistress) of Your Domain," by Michael Bugeja. The article promotes what Bugeja terms "academic branding," the use of the web to promote one's academic pursuits by using the marketing and outreach potential of the Internet. This branding is, as Collin has noted, already going on, though it seems to be happening in a different way than Bugeja describes. I don't have much to add in that regard, as I think the many takedowns and/or cautionary assessments of Bugeja's piece are worth agreeing with and leaving alone.

But I do want to raise one objection. Bugeja celebrates his model of branding because it preaches what he practices. His first example, in fact, is his current website, a site that promotes his new book, Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age. According to the website's marketing efforts, the book argues, as so many others have (yawn) that the Internet is a harsh mistress, yada yada, and a danger to the value of community. I haven't read the book - I might at some point, as I often like highlighting these sorts of arguments in order to demonstrate the current limitations when it comes to thinking mediation and technics - but I have read the website. And having done so, here's my objection: The website sucks.. No, I'm serious, the design looks like something put together circa 1996, not something put together to sell a book published nearly a decade later. It's almost entirely built around antiquated tables, the number of span tags are almost blinding, and it still uses the deprecated tags <i> and <b> rather than the correct markup tags <em> and <strong>. If this is an example of successful, well-done academic branding on the web, I weep for the future of academia's brand potential. And for a book dealing with the destructiveness of the Internet, in which the author theoretically demonstrates that his unique knowledge and insight helps us understand how the Internet works in deleterious ways, the web site couldn't be more at cross purposes, as it demonstrates that the author in fact has very little knowledge of the web as a technology, and doesn't even take the time to learn more before writing about it.

Thankfully for Bugeja, I may still grab a copy of the book for the reason noted above, but had I serious interest in the subject matter, that interest would have vanished by the time I finished skimming his front page.