Unpacking the communication styles of Social Justice advocates, and how the harmful effects perpetuate themselves. Grab your favorite beverage.
Weaponized Metacommunication
If you want to understand how Social Justice, Safe Spaces, Trigger Warnings, and “Cultural Appropriation” came about, you should learn about metacommunication.
The Insanity of Higher Education – Social Justice Report Card Edition
[Updated: 2017.12.19] An ongoing, curated list of insane administration policies in Higher Education in the name of “Diversity” and “Social Justice.” Is your alma mater here?
Post-Mortem Analysis of the Feminism Debate, Part III
[Update 2017.10 – This series has gotten a lot of attention lately. It appears that it’s become an ancillary part of another discussion on a discussion forum. Welcome! I encourage you to read the followup to this series, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Forums, for an epilogue to the discussion.] This is the final article in …
Post-Mortem Analysis of the Feminism Debate, Part II
This is the second in a 3-part series on an analysis of the Feminism Debate between Sargon of Akkad and Dr. Kristi Winters on April 30, 2016. This was a formal debate between two prominent YouTube personalities and tackled the highly-emotional topic in a structured and formal fashion. In the first part, we gave a short overview of the debate …
Post-Mortem Analysis of the Feminism Debate between Sargon of Akkad and Kristi Winters
Post-Mortem Analysis of the Feminism Debate between @Sargon_Of_Akkad and Kristi Winters, Pt 1
My Response to Snopes’ Response to Me
Claim: Snopes claims that Emory University students didn’t lose their minds over chalk graffiti that said “Trump 2016” What’s True: Snopes focused on the media aftermath What’s False: Everything related to the event itself I woke up this morning to a message from a friend that I had been included in a Snopes article. In particular, Snopes had decided to …
Balancing Act: The Struggle Between Orality and Linearity in Computer-Mediated Communication
This is a recovery of a peer-reviewed article published in 1996 in the New Jersey Journal of Communication (now the Atlantic Journal of Communication). Full Citation: Metz, J. M. (1996). Balancing act: The struggle between orality and linearity in computer mediated communication. The New Jersey Journal of Communication, 4, 61-70.000
A Brief History of the Internet
You probably thought that the Internet was created to survive a nuclear attack. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the true origins of the Internet had no military usage whatsoever. How do I know? I talked to several people who actually created the Internet (well, it was called the ARPANET back then). I took the material from …
Misunderstanding Cyberculture: Martin Rimm and the ‘Cyberporn’ Study
Reprint of a peer-reviewed conference paper on the Martin Rimm “Study” and its consequences.
Global Warming, Intelligent Design, and The Null Hypothesis
You’re probably not going to read this. It’s long. It’s technical. People just don’t want to read long, technical material any more. There aren’t going to be any pretty pictures, and there will be a minimum of snark. What’s more, this is one of those posts that is going to upset a lot of people, both liberal and conservative alike. It’s …
Common Core Math: So Clever It’s Incorrect
A few months back I came across an example of a Common Core math problem that really set me off. I mean, it actually offended me. This was the key question for a 6-year-old’s math exam: (If you’ve never seen this problem before, feel free to try to work it out before reading the Answer after the “read more” link …
Yet Another Social Media Misunderstanding
Today I saw an article float by in the Twitter river: “Why do only 7% of managers consider social media skills most important for employees?” Go ahead and read the article, because the attitudes are pretty interesting. The author, however, conflates a couple of things and winds up 180 degrees from the direction he should be facing. First, “social media” …
The Chronicle of Highly Educated Whining
The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) has been getting a lot of flak lately as some of the more conservative (read: Matt Drudge and Neal Boortz) have found some of the typical CHE leftist articles to be showing up on their radar. CHE has always, as far as I can tell from the time I was a professor, been rabidly leftist. …
Non-Linear Communication (a.k.a. Being Neil Postman’s Bitch)
Everyone has some brush with fame. In my life I’ve been fortunate (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) to have several moments where I have been exposed to either great, popular, or paradigm-shifting people. When I was a freshly-minted Ph.D in the 1990s, I was a rising star in the field of Media Ecology and found myself …