N.B. This essay also appeared on the University of Iowa's Next Generation Humanities PhD blog.
Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism, "The medium is the message," has taken on new poignancy in a world of tweet storms, Snapchat imagery, cellphone videos, 24 hour cable news, and ubiquitous digital communication. Within this dizzying cacophony, Paul Simon's prescient lyrics from The Sound of Silence, which found a new audience in Disturbed's recent cover, ring ever more true:
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
How does one gain mindshare and precipitate reflective analysis when Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame seems so quaint, a Q rating window both languorous and prolix? If you have braved my prose to this point, you have already followed a cognitive causal chain that spans five decades of cultural referents, something increasingly rare as attention spans in our hyperkinetic echo chamber asymptotically approach the de minimis.
Thus, it is no surprise that by today's standard of truncated discourse, the long form, reasoned and buttressed scholarship of a Ph.D. dissertation may seem an anachronism, an obsession that Cap'n Ahab would recognize as his own. All too often the dissertation is an embodied variant of Twain's classic book, praised but not read. This "write only" attribute is one of the biggest challenges we face in academia. Increasingly, we are writing only to one another, and all too often, to almost no one, using a vernacular and style both learned and discipline idiosyncratic.
Let's begin with the fundamental question. As scholars, why do we write? We seek to preserve the insights from our scholarship and add a new tile to the great mosaic of human knowledge, an entirely secular but consecrated goal whose motivations can be traced to the birth of writing itself. Equally importantly, we seek to energize others with the power of our ideas, shaping and reshaping social and intellectual discourse. Simply put, we want to be remembered, and we want to make a difference.
Laid bare, these laudable, twin goals of knowledge preservation and transmission need not be pursued via the same media or mechanisms. In this sense, McLuhan was absolutely right; the medium and the message are inextricably intertwined, mutually shaped by evolving culture and technology. We ignore these shifts at our peril, as the demise of many daily newspapers and news magazines has shown.
Let me be clear; I am not suggesting we abandon the long form dissertation. (See my comments in an earlier blog post on reflective communication.) Rather, I am positing that we remember our elemental objectives and disaggregate the historically convolved elements of academic scholarship: chronicling and archiving (dissertation writing); provenance and attribution (dissertation committee approval); and dissemination and engagement (publication and communication).
A book length dissertation has long been the permanent chronicle of the new scholar's research. However, this is mere tradition, derived from 19th century German academic practice. Like the man's legs in Lincoln's story, a dissertation needs to be only long enough to reach the ground (i.e., cogently encapsulate the research), and it can – and should – take whatever form and length are most appropriate to the task. Choose a medium appropriate to the message.
Likewise, writing a dissertation should not be a consensual and extended, sadomasochistic partnership between advisor and advisee. The goal is not to solve one of life or nature's most vexing problems nor to include a reference to every possible prior insight. Rather, it is to demonstrate competence to conduct independent scholarship and record sufficient evidence of having done so. It should not be a decade long, soul enervating experience.
The key role of a dissertation committee is assuring the originality and sufficient intellectual contribution of an aspiring scholar's work. This certification of provenance and attribution is the committee's affirmation of scholarly worthiness, as documented in the dissertation.
Finally, successful scholarship gains currency in the marketplace of ideas. As academics, we teach and prize artful and effective communication, yet all too often we fail to practice what we preach. Yes, plumbing the depths of a novel idea often requires extended and subtle explication, but that is not the place to start. It begins with engagement and meeting others on their literal, intellectual, and emotional territory, not our own. Why might the idea matter to others? How can it advantage them? What is the attraction and the excitement? How to we reach an audience, both in academia and broader society?
The Three Minute Thesis competition captures the essence of this idea, as do public speeches and popular articles. In this light, a tweet isn't such a bad idea after all. All these are the beginning of a conversation, not an extended colloquy. In the spirit of an aphorism attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
Make some noise; use all the available media; rise above the cacophony; make a difference.
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