Stuart Noble

folksonomies in academia

Read “The Age of Digital Citation,” no doubt already part of the growing para-academic folksonomic canon. Via academicdave’s tweet.

It is an age for the flourishing of scholars who have the time to read deeply and the energy to think outside of the canon. This is what’s scary about it: to keep up in the age of digital citation, scholars will have to master a series of intellectual prostheses – tagging circles, artificial reading bots, quick skimming – that will help them navigate through the masses of texts. The age of digital citation will punish scholars who merely reduplicate the canons of their mentors. This is what’s exciting about it: you no longer have to go to a university to find out what books are on the canon.

A call for action?

Numerian offered an interesting (if too forgiving) take on Jon, always the right-wing concern troll in centrist clothing, Meacham’s latest frontpage charade. But what concerned me most was not so much the article, which isn’t entirely horrible, but the cover image and what it communicates.

Keep in mind that Newsweek’s covers reach a huge segment of the population in contrast to the number of actual magazine readers. Despite an ever deeper shift towards digital information, Newsweek covers remain a dominant feature of our daily visual culture. Millions and millions of eyeballs glance these images daily at grocery stores, airports, public street corners and private waiting rooms. And Newsweek has been on a role lately.

Without digging too deep into our bag of semiotic analytical tools, the blood red cross suspended against a solid, pitch black background no doubt will evoke different meanings for different readers.

But the black, which could represent;  the abyss, the apocalypse, or perhaps even Obama, doesn’t inspire much, “gee, I think its a good thing America is becoming a post-Christian nation.” Is the red not just symbolic of the blood of Christ but the blood of Christian Americans sacrificed to the new “secular liberal order?” The text of “Christian America” is crushed under the weight of the “DECLINE.” Might  the arrangement of the text then also suggest that it’s not only Christian America but America in general which will be consumed in darkness? Christianity under siege? A call for action?

What do you see (and feel) when presented with this image?