I don’t care if a thousand idiots in a captured academic field of mutual congratulation are writing journal articles at each other using a self-important internal lingo. If you can’t demonstrate your relevance in *public* terms of reference you deserve to be ignored.
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Not just accessible but relevant. Engineering has a natural advantage in that tech produces artifacts you can use whether or not you understand how they work. I don’t need you to study navier stokes equations before complaining about airlines. The airplane itself is “relevance”
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I was thinking about this question of writing to be understandable and it's a funny kind of canard. Klein's piece is pablum riding on McLuhan's popularity (and Postman). McLuhan's work is W-E-I-R-D...
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There has probably not been a single media scholar with that level of public uptake (he wrote NYT Op-eds actually) and it's weird. So I don't know. Is there not a building/hailing publics that work can also do?
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I definitely have a soft spot for semi-outsider types who pwn a discourse claimed by an academic field... like Christopher Alexander and Buckminster Fuller in architecture :D
I think it's a key check and balance to fields achieving regulatory capture on public-interest domains
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Do "media scholars" ever also have a working background in media itself? It's a bit unfair to expect in some ways, but also not entirely unreasonable. If you study virality maybe you should have one viral tweet before you get your PhD
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Some do, some don't I guess. What aren't media? Most media scholars probably don't study social media or virality.
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I was mechE undergrad and we had to design/build a few things. Aero undergrads had to do a glider flight. Grad, I was aero and taught a lab that included stuff like wind tunnel tests. There were a couple of drone projects but they were super expensive then.
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Today if I were running an aero program I’d definitely have a drone requirement. They’re so cheap to build now. Rockets are cheaper to do but run into regulatory shit for the truly cool stuff like remote guidance.
Most engineering except chemical has cheap hobby/ed versions.
Was talking to chemE clients if mine in fact about designing an “Arduino for chemE” type student program to market their tech. The problem is almost any level of chemE capability quickly enabled stuff like bomb making.
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And yeah many aero grads do also get pilot’s licenses…
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