Academic

Extra, Extra, Read All About It!

By John Inazu

I hope I am not alone in feeling a bit of anxiety over whether what I write is novel or interesting.  That is certainly the case with scholarship, but it feels amplified with this blogging experience, where yesterday?s news really is yesterday?s news.  The story, issue, or insight that intrigues me may have already been dissected on a zillion other blogs. 

Any hopes that I had to stay ahead of the information curve died yesterday when I came across this social media counter created by a guy named Gary Hayes.  Note that you can click on the various tabs in the counter to see the counts by day, week, month, or year.

Of course, the embedded irony here is that you may have already seen Gary?s counter somewhere else.  But if you haven?t yet seen it, the link is worth a moment of your time, if only to be astounded, overwhelmed, or chagrined. 

Gary makes it easy to embed his counter on other sites, but after far too much internal deliberation, I decided against doing so here.  As you?ll see if you visit his site, the counter is always changing.  My sense is that this inherent dynamism (similar to websites that automatically initiate flash animation or audio when you visit them and different than an embedded video that requires a click to begin) creates a different, unanticipated, and perhaps unwanted interface for the viewer than the posts more typical of this blog.  At the same time, the fact that you can?t stop Gary?s counter (at least I couldn?t figure out how to make it stop) is part of the power of the message that it conveys.  (There are probably some parallels here to the differences between mere text and visual images.)

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on May 26, 2010 (boomark / email).