Journalists have always had an edge on academic research and publications in terms of speed, especially when the latter is ethnographic or qualitative in nature. And cutting edge culture (popular, sub-, counter-) has long been a step ahead of even the hippest lifestyle columnest. But a constellation of new social and technological dynamics appear to be making the timely contribution of academics on flash-in-the-pan contemporary moments a practical impossibility: New cultural trends are widely seen to be breaking and recycling at breakneck speeds, to the extent that not only is what's hip "always already over" (Lloyd 2006), but that what is over is always already back. At the same time, social networks, twitter, and all manner of frenetically crowd-sourced and constantly updated opinion and reportage make even digital editions of our major newspapers seem hopelessly behind the times, let alone researched and peer-reviewed scholarship. With average times to completion or to publication in social science being what they are, is "cultural studies" more appropriately housed in a history department than an anthro, sociology, or media and communication one?
For the record, I don't mean to suggest that I think the answer has to be 'yes', but I think that engaging this intriguing line of questioning opens up tons of issues for the contemporary social scientist, from connecting technology to academic publishing (here here) to the role of contemporary 'cultural' research in general, while the "postmodern-hyper-reflexivity" of popular culture argument is always a fun one to start.
Food for thought, a quote from N+1's Mark Greif, writing in the preface to an only slightly tongue-in-cheek attempt to parse the “hipster” subculture after declaring it dead: “The study of the hipster, as opposed to the punk, hippie, raver, goth, cyber-utopian, or b-boy, has not yet drawn its scholars – or else they’re in the long and thankless stage of dissertation fieldwork, rather than on faculties where they can easily be located.”
