Pre-internet era: You walk into a room and sit down at a table. Someone brings you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Perhaps you are a vegetarian, or gluten-free. Doesn’t matter; you get a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda.
Usenet era: You walk into a room and sit down to your turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Someone tells you that over at the University they are also serving BLTs, pizza, coffee, and beer.
Web 1.0 (aka The Great Schism): You walk into a room. The room is lined with 50 unmarked doors. Someone tells you, “We have enough food to feed you and a hundred more…but we’ve scattered it behind these fifty doors. Good luck!”
Web 2.0 (present): You walk into a room. Someone points at the buffet and says, “Enjoy!” You turn to see a 100-foot-long buffet table, piled high with every kind of food imaginable. To be fair, some of the food is durian, head cheese, and chilled monkey brains, but that’s cool, some people are into those…and trust me, they are even more psyched to be here than you are.
Tumblr (a hell pit): You try to serve yourself a baked potato. An angry child runs up and slaps the plate out of your hand. “NIGHTSHADE PLANTS ARE POISONOUS,” the child yells. You are hungry. The child gives you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a kick on the shin.
The fact that a potato is replaced with a different form of potato is what makes that last one so accurate.
you know why I like redemption narratives? because a redemption narrative says: no matter how broken or wrong or bad or stupid or ridiculous or harmful or sad or terrible, you can atone.
there is still a road back. it might be rocky and steep, complicated and messy. walking it may take all your life. you may lose your foothold, slip and fall back into the abyss, but the wall is still there. the ascent is still there. hard is not the same as impossible.
you are never too far gone. you are never beyond saving.
It’s not okay to bully someone and it’s especially not okay to tell them to go kill themselves just because their beliefs or values don’t match up with yours. How can you consider yourself even a decent person if you send hate or death wishes to another human being?
I don’t care what your reasons are, that’s never okay and it never helps you prove a point. It only shows how immature and unkind you are.
Ohio State University took the extraordinary step of revoking a graduate’s doctorate last week. Now her future at the University of Arizona, where she is an assistant professor of communication, is unclear.
Jodi Whitaker’s problems started in 2015, after scholars in two countries noticed irregularities in the data in her 2012 paper on video games. The study in Communication Research, called “‘Boom, Headshot!’ Effect of Video Game Play and Controller Type on Firing Aim and Accuracy,” found that playing a violent video game improved real-life shooting skills. Initially, it was something of a boon for both Whitaker, then still a graduate student at Ohio State, and her co-author and dissertation committee chair, Brad J. Bushman, the Margaret Hall and Robert Randal Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication there. That’s because Bushman served on President Obama’s committee on gun violence and his research challenges what he calls myths about violence, including that violent media have a trivial effect on aggression.
But Patrick Markey, a professor of psychology at Villanova University – whose own findings on video gamesclash with Bushman’s – soon challenged the paper, as did Malte Elson, a postdoctoral researcher in educational psychology at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Together they alerted the Committee of Initial Inquiry at Ohio State to what they called irregularities in some of the variables of the data set. The values of questioned variables could not be confirmed because the original research records were unavailable, according to Communication Research, which in 2016 decided that a retraction was warranted.
Bushman was cleared of wrongdoing by Ohio State, but he agreed to the retraction. He also agreed to the retraction of another paper in which Whitaker was not involved – one finding that watching violent cartoons inhibits children’s learning – earlier this year, as reported by Retraction Watch. Data on a second 2016 paper by Whitaker and Bushman (on which Bushman was the lead) also have been corrected; that study found that “catharsis beliefs” attract people to violent video games.
But Whitaker, the 2012 paper’s lead author, was found responsible for the errors. And Ohio State’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously last week to revoke her doctorate, granted in 2013.
