Modern Academia

Tiny Cat Pants pointed out an intriguing (though as yet somewhat sparsely populated) social networking site: Academia.edu. 

To be fair, both Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day and Science Roll saw it earlier, but I must have been ignoring them. I was probably distracted by zombies or something. 

Aside from having a great URL, Academia.edu aims to list academics from all over the world, displayed in a tree format, with links to other people working in the same research area, other people from the same university, etc. It also offers said academics a handy way to have a professional webpage, and although it's not totally clear to me how this works (the FAQ is a little spare), it appears you can upload your papers, presumably to share.

You can browse departments or research areas, search for universities and people, and invite others to join, just as you'd expect from a social network. I imagine you can also send internal emails and such.

Signing up looks pretty easy, although I didn't try it since I figured I'm not an academic. There's no written guideline that I could find on who's allowed to sign up and who isn't (although the process involves placing yourself at a university), so it's kind of a self-defined community, but I'm not a researcher or anything, so I'm self-excluding.

Anyway, it really is pretty cool to look at. Try typing a university name and watch how neatly it scrolls!

I do kind of wince at the automatic news updates' use of the plural pronoun, as in "Muttonchops Wilkins (University of Whiskers) added themselves to the department Mathematics." 

I know, I know, 'they' and 'them' for an individual is commonplace now because it avoids the whole 'he or she' question. I recognize the issue and I can deal with the solution, which is at least easier than getting everyone to adopt some entirely new pronoun that we just made up.*

But 'themselves'? As if there are literally multiples of this person? Can't we at least say 'themself,' which, though a grammatical monstrosity, at least sounds singular---and, in a way, by its very weirdness calls attention to the fact that it's being intentionally used in order to address an accuracy issue with the language, and is not just sloppiness?

So that's my language whine of the day. Come on, Academia.edu, take a stand for decisive singular-plural pronouns! The people (by which I mean the various 'themselves' of me) demand it! We can make this good English, by gum!

Mmm...gum.

*Although honestly, I'd cast a vote for calling everyone 'it.' I like the utilitarian functionality. "Muttonchops Wilkins added itself to the department Mathematics:" what's so wrong with that? 

Of course, I have always secretly admired robots. But I digress.