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Showing posts from August, 2011

Mediocrity and privilege

Mediocrity, you know it when you see it (or is it really so easy to detect?), couched in privilege and in the desire to not have this privilege ever be questioned by alternative values and viewpoints from elsewhere. Mediocrity is about keeping on doing what you have been doing for years, to keep repeating the already invented cycle, sitting amidst the comforts that come with privilege. Mediocrity is the mantra of the mainstream power structures in society that want to invent a wide variety of languages to justify their medicority, for not having to work for the things that one "should" naturally be entitled to. Knowledge structures and the games within these structures are essential to the logic of mediocrity; if you are mediocre, you don't raise any alarm bells and so you are "safe." Within my own discipline of Communication and within the social sciences, I see this mediocrity in the everyday practices of academics and in what they consider to be their entit...