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Mediocrity and privilege

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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 entitlements to comfort: comfortable arguments, comfortable constructs, comfortable methodologies that all work together to maintain the status quo within comfortable spaces. The ability to be mediocre is incredibly important as it keeps you "safe." So to the extent you keep parrotting the messages and the tools that are palatable to the disciplinary power structures and to the multicultural logics of these structures, you are "safe." To the extent that you don't really question the fundamental values underlying the concepts and the methods of getting at them, you are "safe." You can develop safe designs for testing existing theories within safe boundaries, then go ahead and recruit undergraduate students from the "safety" of your classrooms in exchange for extra credits, and then go on to make "safe" pronouncements that reify the existing structures. Or for that matter, you can sit in front of the TV screen, watch some shows, and write up a "safe" piece that too reifies the power structures, albeit couched in a different set of language games. This is the story of the game of mediocrity in academe; a game that continues to further the knowledge structures that reify exisiting social, cultural, and political equations.
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