{"id":2766,"date":"2010-11-30T06:19:42","date_gmt":"2010-11-30T10:19:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=2766"},"modified":"2010-11-28T21:39:32","modified_gmt":"2010-11-29T01:39:32","slug":"black-friday-rambling-emails-and-the-uses-of-deviance-credits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=2766","title":{"rendered":"Black Friday, rambling emails, and the uses of deviance credits"},"content":{"rendered":"

The recent Onion piece about the (fictional) 75,000-word email from Barack Obama<\/a> hit the target in several ways. First, it apparently fooled Fox News<\/a> and a number of Fox website readers who thought it was real. <\/p>\n

Second, when this parody was attributed to the professorial president (and remember that like the majority of faculty in the U.S., Obama was a contingent faculty member), the idea of a rambling, blathering email reminded me of some of the emails I've received from colleagues. Not many, and not 75,000 words long, but I've received my share of rants. I suppose that's one side of academic freedom–the freedom to write emails that are self-indulgent. Heck, I've written a few hundred posts on this blog that one could consider self-indulgent to one extent or another. <\/p>\n

But I think my self-indulgent writings here I've learned at least one thing in more than two decades of email, Usenet, and the internet: long blatherings don't do much unless they're constructed for an audience. Expression for oneself is all very fine, and I suppose that's what LiveJournal became for many of its users, but most of the rant-like emails I've seen have at least putatively been for persuasive purposes, to accomplish something. And while email rants are one way to spend the deviance credits you earn on the job (see p. 66-67 of this Freirean book<\/a>), I'm not sure they're a wise expenditure. <\/p>\n

And since we're in the part of the year where all sorts of cultural signals encourage overspending, while I'd like to encourage you to help the world economy grow, I remind all readers that spending deviance credits does not necessarily expand GDP. So spend wisely. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent Onion piece about the (fictional) 75,000-word email from Barack Obama hit the target in several ways. First, it apparently fooled Fox News and a number of Fox website readers who thought it was real.  Second, when this parody was attributed to the professorial president (and remember that like the majority of faculty in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-higher-education","category-the-academic-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-IC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2766"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2793,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2766\/revisions\/2793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}