I’m quite interested in paths of academic interest that have lead nowhere. Not so much scientific threads, but social threads. The best example I can think of is semiotics. This was all the rage a few years back and now, as far as I know, is utterly dead. What are some other examples of “academic fads” that were very popular but have now completely died out?
(This may be better suited to another forum, feel free to move it).
PS. What about post-modernism? Is this still an accepted branch of study?
I’m not sure if that is what you want though, an other example is the Y2K thing, it was all the rage, and then nothing, it just disappeared, almost as if nothing happened.
Entirely true, Pentax, but speaking from my experiences as both a former mental patient and a former graduate student, I feel safe in saying that neither lobotomy nor psych drugs has tended to hold sway in academia.
(I mean, yeah, being a grad student is a lot like other forms of being institutionalized, but they aren’t quite that interchangeable!)
The Y2K bug was a real technical problem that was averted at the last minute by fixing a hell of a lot of old code. It did do some damage, but none of the worst scenarios panned out.
The Y2K fad was, well, a stupid fad. It wasn’t any more academic than the foxtrot.
The Millennial Scare was a religious hysteria that was based on a literal reading of Revelation (among other texts of dubious origin) and the utter conviction that this was The Real Deal.
So, what exactly are you blithering about?
Trigonal Planar: If post-modernism has died, what has replaced it?
Semiotics is alive and well - what claim is there that it isn’t? Sure, it’s no longer being toted as a magic system that will solved just about any problem thrown at it, but that doesn’t mean it was just a fad.
The reason that “nothing happened” is that tens of thousands of programmers, database administrators, and other IT people worked long hard hours in the months leading up to Y2K to make sure that nothing happened.
There were a few minor glitches that made the news. I remember one state that started issuing “horseless carriage” license plates to brand new 2000 cars, and a couple of other things. But if nobody had taken any precautions and made a lot of changes to existing programs, there would have been many more disasters of the magnitude that alarmists were predicting.
Would deconstructionism be an example of the type of thing you’re talking about? I think it started as a method of literary criticism, but for a while the term seemed to be applied to everything from philosophy to linguistics to fashion. I remember buying a jumper (sweater) that was kind of cool because the seams were wrong side out. The salesperson said it was part of their “deconstruction” line. I haven’t heard the term much in a while, so I don’t know the current status of the trend.
I suppose eugenics is more a “social application” of general genetics, but it’s certainly fallen out of favor. That might more closely fit the bill of the OP.
While, as PaulFitzroy said, phrenology is the discredited art of deducing personality traits through the shape of the skull, physiognomy is the discredited art of deducing personality traits through facial features.
For 99% of the users out there, the Y2K ‘thing’ was a non-thing. Yet they still bought that anti-end-of-the-world-bug-fix-software in lemming-like droves. Oh no, my commputer has the wrong date…unless you are a bank or a few other businesses, this means little.
I was in the guard, and we had to pull extra 12 hour shifts just in case something happened, even though the more rational beings among us knew nothing would.
We now had to write the date in the format YYYY/MM/DD in the paper forms because of this insanity…this is real important because aircraft records are only kept for 7 years and someone in 2001 might get confused into thinking it was 1901 with the old YY/MM/DD format…right.
Post-modernism has been replaced with the ridicule of post-modernism.
Deconstruction is still being taught as a literary theory…at least, I had to learn it last semester…But, my professers seem to think that it and post-modernism will be gone from the discourse in ten or fifteen years.
That line in Adaptation about the serial killer who is an English Prof and calls himself the Deconstructionist cracks my shit up.
