{"id":2427,"date":"2017-05-24T19:44:54","date_gmt":"2017-05-25T03:44:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/?p=2427"},"modified":"2017-11-08T11:34:38","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T19:34:38","slug":"misguided-exclusivity-on-the-anthropology-news-commenting-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/2017\/05\/24\/misguided-exclusivity-on-the-anthropology-news-commenting-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Misguided exclusivity: On the Anthropology News commenting policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been exceptionally dismayed this year by the retrograde, anti-open-access, profit-oriented publication philosophy at the American Anthropological Association. Earlier this\u00a0year they announced that they were renewing\u00a0their publishing contract with the corporate behemoth Wiley Blackwell<\/a>. Now I notice that they also have a horribly\u00a0misguided commenting policy for their online news site, Anthropology\u00a0News<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Here’s what the policy says<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Want to comment? Please be aware that only comments from current AAA members will be approved. AN is supported by member dues, so discussions on anthropology-news.org are moderated to ensure that current members are commenting. As with all AN content, comments reflect the views of the person who submitted the comment only. The approval of a comment to go live does not signify endorsement by AN or the AAA.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the one hand, this only means that anthropologists who can’t afford the Association’s exorbitant\u00a0annual dues are going to be further excluded from the Association’s public forums. (There are rumors<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0many anthropologists only pay the annual dues in years when they are attending the Annual Meetings, because otherwise membership confers few\u00a0useful\u00a0benefits.)\u00a0I\u00a0am certain that no one is going to be incentivized to join the AAA merely to write a comment on this site, which implies that policy constitutes a harmful form of\u00a0economic exclusion within the profession\u00a0without any identifiable upside<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But on the other hand \u2014 and even more importantly \u2014 this commenting policy just further emphasizes the Association’s paleolithic relationship to technology (cf.\u00a0their\u00a0latest tech fail<\/a>), and in particular their weak grasp on the culture of web publicity.\u00a0Websites like\u00a0AN<\/em> are public spaces. There are cultural norms about how online discussions work in such spaces. It flagrantly<\/em> disrespects\u00a0these norms to\u00a0provide\u00a0public commenting facilities \u2014 as\u00a0on any blog-like site \u2014 and then to deliberately reject all comments by non-dues-paying members.<\/p>\n

To be clear: you don’t charge people cash to comment on your articles, because they are already\u00a0giving you something for free by writing their comments<\/em>. To comment is to contribute. To comment is to create a space of exchange where otherwise you just have a\u00a0one-way transmission into the digital void.\u00a0It’s fair\u00a0to ask people to create accounts before commenting, to\u00a0cut down on abuse, but\u00a0there’s little precedent for making it into a cash transaction.<\/p>\n

If you want to have members-only web forums,\u00a0the generic convention is\u00a0to hide\u00a0them behind a login screen for members,\u00a0instead of coupling a\u00a0public comment box to\u00a0an anti-public\u00a0message. Thus the current\u00a0policy is both\u00a0hostile to the digital public and<\/em> out of\u00a0touch with web culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been exceptionally dismayed this year by the retrograde, anti-open-access, profit-oriented publication philosophy at the American Anthropological Association. Earlier this\u00a0year they announced that they were renewing\u00a0their publishing contract with the corporate behemoth Wiley Blackwell. Now I notice that they also have a horribly\u00a0misguided commenting policy for their online news site, Anthropology\u00a0News.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[502,485,729],"tags":[735,523,551,779],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2427"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2493,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427\/revisions\/2493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}