Mark Marino wants to shake up academic publishing. To declare his intentions, the associate professor of writing at the University of Southern California chose a format both fitting and provocative: a BuzzFeed listicle.
Posted on Thursday, Mr. Marino’s piece, “10 Reasons Professors Should Start Writing BuzzFeed Articles,” serves as a “manifesto” for BuzzAdemia, a new journal he’s creating to encourage “BuzzFeed-style scholarship.”
To banality and beyond! I shared this with Arthur for the lulz, and he responded:
Good idea, but they’d better start improving their writing style: be deep, but make it snappy, is the Darwinian directive, or else large numbers of the academic species will be eliminated by the competition. How catastrophic! Will self-referential pedantry survive the epochal shift from academe to acadeMEME? Who gifs a damn!
He then asked if I had been click-baited into the linked article explaining post-structuralism by means of hipster beards. I hadn’t, so I went back and checked it out, and, you know, I have to say, I’m all in favor of this idea now. Stripped of all the mystifying jargon, it’s somewhat bracing to see just how trite these struc/post-struc “insights” really were.