Over-promised and till now undelivered, this is the blogpost I have been putting in so much work on that it ate up my last three blogging days and you’ve had only apologies to read here for ages. Once I was halfway through the work for this, the sunk costs fallacy held me to the task – but it therefore behoved me to make it worth your while to read, and I’ve tried. It’s about a book which came out in 2013, an essay volume called Hacking the Academy, which, it proudly proclaimed, was "crowd-sourced in one week" (more on that below) and was a collection of essays forecasting, planning or just wishing for a complete revision of academic and university practices in the brave new light of the Internet as it was then developing (or, given print process speeds, as it was for the most part two to three years before).1
Although at the time I never read the book in full, there are a few bits of it which I did catch and still cite now and then, some in approval and some not, and because of this in July 2020 it occurred to me that I ought to grab it into my citation library.2 In doing so I was forced for the first time at least to skim the contents and it struck me with force how badly the thing seemed to have aged. That wasn’t unexpected, of course; it’s a book about the Internet, after all. Years and years ago, like, 2009 ago, I wrote a post about a conference paper I’d just then read from 1998, taking its author’s first tentative steps into what then passed for the scholarly Internet, and the main thing I found then was that almost all of what they wrote about had since gone.3 My first impression from reconfronting Hacking the Academy nine years on was not quite that, however, but that either the things it had to say were still true, and that this was a problem because obviously they hadn’t been hacked, or else they were failed anticipations or bad ideas in the first place. And at that point I stubbed a post to do another of those appraisals about this more recent piece of technical evangelism. But then, of course, I hadn’t done the background work… So if that sounds interesting then read on; if not, another post will be along soon with photos of tourism in it that might interest you instead. Continue reading
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 