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Tuesday, August 15, 2006
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Academic Blogoscopy With a London Times Educational Supplement article in the works about academic blogging (UD was interviewed for it), and with quite a bit of chatter generally about the pros and cons of this increasingly popular and high-profile activity, it might be a good idea, as a new academic year begins, to think more deeply about where we are. A recent post, in a blog called Urban Planning Research, sets the issues out nicely. The author notes, and quotes from, the very positive Economist magazine appraisal of blogs and blogging by economics professors (scroll down a bit for my take on this article). Academic blogs permit quick expression of ideas and quick response to them; they can earn a good blogger a large academic and non-academic audience and raise her posture as a public intellectual. They can benefit her university by drawing valuable attention to it. They add an undeniable dynamism and social engagement to intellectual activity. But academic blogs, as Alan Jacobs and others have complained, can also be disappointing. The UCLA blogger quotes Jacobs: As a member of the professoriate, I had long since gotten frustrated with the game-playing and slavishly imitative scholarship of the official academic world—all choreographed in advance by the ruthless demands of the tenure system—and I thought that the blogs could provide an alternative venue where more risky ideas could be offered and debated, where real intellectual progress might take place outside the System. ...[But the speed of the internet makes it] woefully deficient...for the development of ideas, [converting] really good scholars into really lousy journalists. With few exceptions, posts at the 'academic' or 'intellectual' blogs I used to frequent have become the brief and cursory announcement of opinions, not the free explorations of new and dynamic thinking. The UCLA professor comments: That is, by shifting their focus from scholarly content to just plain content, scholars regress to the internet equivalent of gabby radio talk show hosts. He calls this "an architectural deficiency" in the internet infrastructure. I think he's right that it's up to individual bloggers to respond to Jacobs's legitimate gripe about superficiality. Timothy Burke's blog is a good model of what Jacobs is looking for -- Burke typically writes short essays every couple of days on political and academic subjects, interspersing them with personal anecdotes and with brief opinions in response to linked articles, and so forth. But academic blogs are about more than what Jacobs describes. Robert KC Johnson's blogging about a ridiculous recent abridgement of academic freedom at Fredonia College no doubt helped (along with other bloggers and the organization FIRE) to turn that situation around. Academics blog for many reasons, not merely to express ideas in essay form. Sometimes they are blogging, as in this case, in defense of other academics.  And sometimes a blog regularly returns to a subject (corruption in university sports, for instance), offering occasional longer takes on it, but mainly building a certain critical mass of articles and brief commentary in order to give substance, texture, and topicality to an already argued position. Each particular posting can look superficial if you haven't followed the blog's established interest in the subject. I think, too, that academic blogs are somewhat seasonal, offering less developed writing during summers and breaks, and more fully worked essays during the school year, when their readership is highest and most focused. But, yes, Jacobs is right that there's a temptation to drift into facile commentary on academic blogs. |