Decades of scholarship are erased by a single, viral essay that is presumed to be the first observation of some „new” phenomenon. Mainstream journalists don’t realize that the subjects they’re writing about, the patterns and shifts they’re noting for the first time, likely have numerous journal articles and possibly even full monographs devoted to them.
If it were just a question of crediting the work of scholars, most of us would lick our wounds and slink away. But it’s not just that. What pains us more than the absent citation is the unsupported claim, the anachronistic parallel, the apocryphal anecdote.
In other words, these thinkpieces almost always get it wrong. The writers, like many a college student, simply haven’t done the reading.
Amanda Ann Klein, Kristen Warner
„Erasing the Pop-Culture Scholar, One Click at a Time”