“Journals? Who cares?” anthropologist George Marcus said recently. Journals as we know them are a thing of the past, and the last to understand this fact are universities and academics, philosopher Mark C. Taylor says in an interview with E. Efe Çakmak in the new Eurozine issue:
For the most part, presses and journals as they now exist do not serve the interests of intellectual or cultural development. To the contrary, their proliferation is symptomatic of increasing hyper-specialization in which there is more and more about less and less. This is going in the opposite direction of history, in which there is increasing interconnectedness.
So my advice is to forget journals – I no longer read any academic journals and I stopped publishing in them years ago. The only function presses and journals serve is to authorize those who write for them among a dwindling group of peers. If ideas are to matter – and I believe it is crucial that they do – we must completely change the way in which they are communicated.
Taylor is critical of the “tyranny of the word":
What I want to stress is that language in today’s world is not primarily verbal but is, more importantly, visual. The problem is that we are visually illiterate – and nowhere is this more evident than in the university. In the “real” world, image trumps word every time; in the academic world, word represses image all the time.
If communication is going to become effective on a global scale, we must liberate the image from the tyranny of the word. This does not mean giving up reading and writing as they have been known in the past. But it is no longer enough. The multilingualism of young people today is multimedia. If we do not learn to communicate in this language, we will have nothing to say.
>> read the whole interview in Eurozine (link updated 18.8.2020)
Already in the early 90s, Taylor has experimented with new information technologies according to Wikipedia. See also his comprehensive website.
SEE ALSO:
George Marcus: “Journals? Who cares?”
Anthropology blogs more interesting than journals?
Excellent work in finding and sharing this with us, very provocative, and I have to confess that I fundamentally agree with him. But I also cheat. What I mean is that while I personally have lost any desire to publish in journals, anyone looking through my course websites will see that I use a great many of them for teaching purposes, so I am thankful that some continue even while I do not wish to personally. On the other hand, the articles I use are not generally of the kind that Taylor describes above.
My own writing and other production preferences are for online video, blogging, and if writing then books. I don’t think that the journal format is the right format for presenting ethnographic knowledge, it is largely an idea imported from the natural sciences (reports on experiments) and it should have been left there. And while I still use journal articles, on the whole I only find about one really useful article for teaching for every 200 articles that I peruse or read, that kind of statistic means that I basically find almost 0% of articles to be useful.
On the whole I think Taylor has the right vision of the broad historical trends at work here.