The Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 16–On online academics

Heh. This one’s kind of funny to me now in retrospect. It’s just kind of a goofy one that doesn’t actually make a terrible lot of sense, but the reason it makes me laugh at myself now is that I just yanked out the word “sociolinguistics” as a very scholarly, import-sounding kind of word. I had some idea of what it meant, but not a very detailed one. Since that time I’ve actually studied sociolinguistics, albiet on an introductory level. I also know enough about lingusts to say tha they would have no qualms about doing an in-depth study of the phrase “your motherfucking ass” if there was anything particularly interesting about it–although I doubt such a study would be sociolinguistic in nature.

I’m not really sure where the basic idea of this one comes from. It may be from a book I was reading onto a tape for my part-time job. I read a book about research design once, and it had a section on qualitative research, which may have been what got me thinking about online ethnographic research.

That book-to-tape reading job was pretty awesome, actually, although I don’t think I would want to do it at a college that, unlike the college I go to, mostly assigns readings from actual textbooks. But because the stuff teachers assign here tends to be super interesting it was an odd fun mishmash of things. I remember reading a book on visionary mystics in medieval Europe, a book of essays on art and culture, a collection of Native North American oratory, a book on Native North American art, a book that laid out a theoretical model of how social movements work and a bunch of other random fascinating stuff.

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