Fan Male

Images on the World Wide Web such as the one above seem to indicate that Alice Robison isn't alone when she posts blog entries like "I Heart Paul Dourish" about UC Irvine Informatics professor Paul Dourish.

I've served on committees with Dourish and think Where the Action Is is a good read, but I probably couldn't tell you his height, weight, or eye color. Have I missed something about my supposed heartthrob colleague?

So, the follow-up question might be: what is a rhetorician supposed to make of this kind of online profession of fandom among self-described academics? Is it a violation of scholarly decorum and gravitas or is it a kind of new celebratory genre that's completely appropriate to the prosumer ethos being manifested in the broader culture?

After all, Henry Jenkins says unapologetically that he is an "aca-fan," and academics who use Facebook show their fandom for famous dead philosophers, theoretical schools, university presses, bands, or sports teams all the time.

On the other hand, traditionalists might argue that these kinds of emotional display show that the idea of the academic "star" is being taken too literally or that this digital commodification of a personality by faculty and graduate students is not becoming that different from the trivialization of academic work that comes into play when undergraduates give chili peppers for "hotness" on a ratemyprofessors profile.

For the meantime, my impulse would be not to judge and simply to observe how these discourse practices are taken (0r not taken) as conventions among those who take themselves to be part of the scholarly tribe. And I say this as someone who has never, ever been given a chili pepper on my ratemyprofessors page.

Update: This item was picked up here in the Wired Campus blog from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Ironically, the writer excerpts my comments so that it is not clear that I am making an argument for critical distance about academic fandom.