Just tell him to drink his Kool_Aid.

2. Dude is scared of MySpace? He’s also probably one of those adults who gets uncomfortable around groups of teenagers in the mall.

3. Some of my friends who text me the most are over 30.

4. This is just total poppycock. MySpace in particular has been all over the everything the past few months – I’ve heard you talk about it, danah, but others too (even Siva Vaidhyanathan on The Daily Show, that counts in some weird way). Anyone who claims academics aren’t paying attention to online phenomena hasn’t, as others have pointed out, done even the most rudimentary background check on the subject.

That said, I think there’s something to the “but no one is listening” feeling. For one thing, academics are less likely to tell you to be scared than other sources, and the news pretty much thrives on scaring the hell out of people nowadays. For another, there’s a difference between tenured academics and academics-in-training. A ton of the work (I speak only for my discipline – this is certainly the case in linguistics) on the internet is being done by grad (and undergrad) students, not professors. I feel like danah, you’re pretty unique in that you’ve established yourself through your work as an expert on the topic, pre-PhD. But in most cases, a media source looking for an “academic” isn’t going to try to interview a grad student; they’re going to look for a professor, and if they can’t find someone with a “, PhD” behind their name, they’ll find someone with another title that seems to carry authority (director, chairman, president, senior analyst, author of ____, etc.).

More seriously: I’m an economist, and I don’t feel that I am not listened at (OK, those who have listen so far are the people who actually launched the Minitel, but there are great people; it just took them a while to admit the project of their life was overwhelmed by the American counterpart; now it is done and there are looking for an edge; not sure I’d be of much help, but that’s my job anyway).

In my mind, people hear about academia, but most of the time somehow distorted: how many people I talked with about my research topic replied: “Yep, the six degree stuff” without really thinking that the key point is how to define “someone you know”—a discussion they immediatly get into, much more easily than the rest of the results I use that them “have heard about” without really grasping the actual meaning. What would give science more attention is to export its clarity, humility, precision rather than a badly digested version of its findings. I would put the blame on journalists for that (but I always put the blame on them).

Dvorak might be right about not enough academics work on social computing—anyone reading this blog has a biased view. One thing is sure: we need someone to tell him the too few academics working on the subject have noticed e-mails a so passe for teenagers: this is like his second paragraph, and he is just proving his point with such strength! Yup: we’ll apoint you one, ’cause you do need it.

The last time I read one of his columns was in the early 1990′s when he claimed the French Minitel network was the future of computer-based communication, and this whole internet concept was full of hot air.

OK, three sentences.

Also, anyone who says “We need real sociological research done by people who can handle it objectively” knows NOTHING about sociology. (OK, I’m thinking specifically of ethnography here, to be fair.)

He says a few things that I think are right (yes, more good sociological work, cool, I can get behind that) but I think he’s only right on accident, because that guy is an ignorant PUTZ. Or, as Umberto Eco might say, he’s using moronic reasoning.