“If there are all these brilliant papers out there about the gender politics of 4chan, why the hell can’t I read them? Oh yeah, because thesi are long, academic papers that are totally inaccessible to mainstream audiences. Maybe they’ll wind up in a journal that some scholars who have no idea what a URL is will read while smoking cigars, but what good does that do for society? Instead, colleges should teach people to write in either Chuck Klosterman or New Yorker style about all their super new age topics of intense study.” – Becky Lang, The 10 Most Useless Things About College

I spent three years of my life writing my doctoral dissertation. It was read by exactly three people: the members of my faculty committee. Though it’s technically been published, even if you wanted to read a 309-page manuscript about the history of children’s media, you’d have to pay $37 to download it or—the option I would recommend—pay $108 for a bound hardcover copy. (Weirdly, you can also buy a copy on microfiche for $70.)

Last April, I went to see Video Games Live, an event at which clips from popular video games were shown on a giant screen at Orchestra Hall while the Minnesota Orchestra played the accompanying music. Writer Neil Gaiman was at the event, and afterwards he recommended that his 1.5 million Twitter followers check out my review of the event, which had taken me about an hour to write. By the next morning, that review had been read by 700 times as many people as had read my dissertation.

When I was preparing to leave academia and write for a popular audience, I was given the implicit message that I was forever abandoning the pursuit of truth and knowledge—because if something isn’t peer-reviewed by the most knowledgeable experts, how can it be trusted?

That’s a good question, but not a rhetorical one. As Becky notes, non-academic blogs, magazines, and books are full of interesting ideas proffered by smart people. Feedback can be instant, and peer-to-peer review quickly rewards with praise and readership those who are useful and entertaining, while punishing the boring and useless with silence or—worse—unfollowing.

As the PhiLOLZophers point out—and illustrate—Twitter and other social media can be superb platforms for rapid-fire intellectual exchange, and unlike in academia, you’re rewarded rather than punished for being pithy, witty, and stylish in your expression.

But of course that’s a major reason why academics are suspicious of writing that takes place outside the official channels of academic discourse. The fear is that some slick mofo who can turn a phrase will win a debate over a well-informed but inelegant writer.

And that does happen. Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most dangerous thinkers in America, because he’s such an extremely good writer that he can get you to buy just about any argument. Most of the empirical arguments in his book The Tipping Point are highly dubious, but Gladwell illustrates them with vivid examples and brings them home with such flourish that by the end of the book you’re sure that he’s figured it all out.

Social scientists have studied the same topics Gladwell writes about, but they don’t have such conclusive, convincing things to say. Why? Because they’ve realized that the social world is enormously complicated and the best we can do at the moment is to reach conditional understandings of certain broad patterns. Did you just yawn? Sorry, had to drop a little truth.

The academic peer-review system is tremendously valuable, and there are some things I miss about it. You wouldn’t want your physician reading The Tangential instead of the New England Journal of Medicine when she’s trying to decide what blood pressure medication to prescribe, and the mechanisms that make medical journals useful and reliable for this purpose also work for journals of social science and the humanities.

Let’s take that theoretical paper on the gender politics of 4chan. If I write it for an academic audience, I can be certain that before it sees the official light of day–that is, before it’s published in a peer-reviewed journal—it will be vetted by numerous people who have spent their careers thinking about gender politics, and if I’m saying the exact same thing someone said ten years ago about MySpace, or 50 years ago about self-published pamphlets in Morocco, they’ll let me know.

Am I just saying, “whoa, there are a lotta naked chicks on 4chan,” or am I saying something that might have implications for our overall understanding of gender politics? Does my argument hold up? Have I gathered adequate evidence to support my argument, or am I relying on anecdotes? Those are all valid, important questions, and they’re not questions I’ll have to answer before publishing a blog entry on my Tumblr or even necessarily before publishing a book-length manuscript with a trade publisher. Major media outlets like the New York Times routinely publish op-eds that are not technically factually inaccurate but make unsupported and biased arguments, and social media are chock-full of half-baked sociological arguments that don’t hold water when you unpack them and look for empirical proof.

So the academic system does have its place, and its virtues. That said, though academics may be on the side of the angels, they are not angels—and in reality, the peer-review process is deeply political. Sure, anonymous reviewers aren’t told your name—but they can often guess who you are, and the editor of the journal (who chooses the reviewers) certainly knows who you are. Your job matters, the conferences you go to matter, and your skill at writing in appropriate academic style—a skill I never mastered, for which I was often chastised by reviewers—matters.

That’s what I miss least about academia: the smug conviction that ten academics sitting together in a conference room can figure things out better than the rest of the world put together, because they are the experts and they speak in a secret language no one else understands. I was tired of dealing with that attitude—subjectively, I much prefer the democratic circus in which I now live online. But we’re out here without a net, and there are a lot of big mistakes that don’t get caught.

– Jay Gabler