Today I was running a seminar at the MIT Center for Civic Media on the journal article as form: its affordances and limitations. We talked about the shifts in how academics reach audiences, as well as the economic, political and institutional forces that surround journal publishing. Out of curiosity, I asked on Twitter about people’s favourite journal articles – what were the ones that changed your thinking? It became such a great list that I wanted to share it with everyone, in case you also find some gems you haven’t read before. As for me, I’d have to say a very influential one is Paolo Virno’s “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus.” It’s in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (1996): 189-210; or you can read it online here.
https://twitter.com/CJAMcMahon/status/402818749814034432
https://twitter.com/kslininger/status/402821218421571584
Social Media Collective 
One of my favorites is: Howard Becker’s (1953) “Becoming a Marihuana User” http://bit.ly/1ffv6Nq
This is great! I started something similar but haven’t had the time to take it very far: http://freerangeresearch.com/2013/11/18/great-readings-that-might-shake-you-to-your-academic-core-im-compiling-a-list/
I have never recovered from reading Helene Cixous’ “Laugh of the Medusa.”
Click to access week12-Cixous-Laugh_of_the_Medusa.pdf
It was my first academic exposure to feminist theory, and until reading it, I really didn’t know that women could sound like this.
Within my own field, I remember the profound sense of relief in coming across Elfreda Chatman’s work, particularly “Life in the Round.”
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.83.4478&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Elfreda Chatman is my patron saint of human information behavior because she takes on issues of social justice and information inequality in a way that is so direct and earnest, but somehow also humble.
Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Generative Internet” (2006) really brought together many disparate threads and ideas for me, into a clear, coherent, compelling and analytical whole: Internet regulation and architecture, innovation, creativity, platform design, and the history of technology, etc, etc, etc. I still return to it regularly: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2295953
Realized I posted the wrong SSRN link (above). Here’s the proper link to Zittrain’s great article: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=847124 (too many tabs open…)