Death Knell

Once again campus bloggers are publicizing and interrogating the causes of an untimely faculty death. In this case the anonymously authored Subversities reports about the death of a young scholar. Much as the death of Lindon Barrett was announced, researched, and mourned through parallel channels that were sometimes very different from official campus announcements, these blog postings also have been become integrated into official discourse within departments in the dissemination of "news." In this case, the bad news is about a Hong Kong cinema scholar who fell from a building to his death. While mass announcements from official university sources via e-mail are often imprecise about the cause of a violent death, bloggers who represent different stakeholders at the university sometimes are devoted to aggregating such information.