I certainly don’t deny that there are hierarchies and power relations in the blogosphere as elsewhere. But (a) I think that the academic blogosphere is likely to be less vulnerable to these hierarchies than elsewhere, and (b) I’m quite certain that blogs and similar forms of publication can have a substantial upsetting effect on hierarchies that already exist in the academy. In order – I think that academic specialists have an advantage over average bloggers – their specialist knowledge is less substitutable. After a certain point, one person’s political opinion (unless they have something really interesting to say) is substitutable for someone else’s – that isn’t true for academics who are talking to their specialty. There isn’t, as best as I can tell, a currently existing power structure in the academic blogosphere that resembles that of, say, the political blogosphere. Clearly some blogs are more influential than others – and CT is more influential than many. But it’s not as close to the center as it was a year ago, as best as I can tell, because there isn’t really an academic blogosphere in the same way that there was a year ago either. Instead of a center, it seems to me that there’s a lot more horizontal discussion going on. Now this may decay over time into traditional hierarchical relationships – but that doesn’t seem to me to be inevitable. This also has implications for the public intellectual role, I think. It is possible, say for scientists to complain about the way that the media treats evolution – and have attention paid to them – in a way that wasn’t true before. Do I think that everyone is going to end up having as much clout as, say, Susan Sontag did? Nope – of course not. But if you want to influence the public debate on evolution, and you’re an academic biologist, blogging is a great way to do this.

Also – and this is what I wanted to stress in the essay – I think that blogging is shortcircuiting the traditional academic hierarchy in some important ways. Prominent academic bloggers that I read and enjoy come from a wide variety of institutions – and from no academic institution at all. That’s something new and important. It may be that in the long run this is just the replacement of one set of gatekeepers with another, which is what I take you to be arguing – but I don’t think that this is going to happen for the reasons outlined above.

Finally, I agree with the guy you are pointing to that conversations are a lousy metaphor for markets. But they are a pretty good analogy for blogging, no? After all, we’re engaged in a conversation at the moment. That doesn’t mean that power relations, self-interest etc can’t enter in – but they can enter into our everyday conversations too.

“Blogging democratizes the function of public intellectual. It’s no longer necessary for an academic to lobby the editors of The Washington Post’s op-ed page or The New York Review of Books in order to make his or her voice heard.”

What you miss is that it’s generally necessary to lobby the editors of big Net sites to make one’s voice heard to a significant public audience (as opposed to interested specialists).

“Both group blogs and the many hundreds of individual academic blogs that have been created in the last three years are pioneering something new and exciting. They’re the seeds of a collective conversation, which draws together different disciplines (sometimes through vigorous argument, sometimes through friendly interaction), which doesn’t reproduce traditional academic distinctions of privilege and rank, and which connects academic debates to a broader arena of public discussion.”

Here’s some extensive commentary I think is worthy about “collective conversation”, from the standpoint of critiquing another angle of blog commentary, but still relevant:

http://homepage.mac.com/dave_rogers/GHD09-05.html#note_2383

“A metaphor, especially if it’s a new one, can help to place a familiar subject in a new light, illuminating aspects of it that were previously hidden or unclear, and giving us a new way of relating to that subject. In this regard, “conversation” fails miserably. It illuminates nothing, and what it purports to show is actually a misrepresentation of what the subject really is.

http://homepage.mac.com/dave_rogers/GHD09-05.html#note_2384

“Here’s the thing, “markets are conversations,” makes them something approachable. It’s a typical marketing metaphor, it evokes a feeling of false intimacy, a personal connection that doesn’t really exist. Thinking that “markets are conversations” actually facilitates people devoting more attention and surrendering more authority to them, not less.”

Wait…are you talking about blogging or academic jobs?

;-)

Seth – the academic blogosphere is rather different to the blogosphere as a whole in the relevant aspects. Less of a star system in the long run, I think, because of the pressures towards fragmentation into a variety of different academic blogospheres around more particular issues/disciplines. My sense is that CT has a less central place in the academic blogosphere than it did a year or so again, and that’s a very good thing (reflects the greater diversity of academics who blog today). Your last paragraph doesn’t seem very relevant or useful, without a specific argument as to why the comparison is wrongheaded or unhelpful. To say that x is like y if we want to understand it is a “stock form article” seems misconceived – it’s a standard form of reasoning, argument by analogy. If the analogy doesn’t work, and you have good arguments as to why it doesn’t work, good for you. Let’s hear them. But criticizing me for simply using an analogy without addressing the relevance of that analogy seems kinda weird to me.

From my perspective, blogging hype and PR is a veritable fount of marketing, which reaches the scammishness of a pyramid scheme. That is, a few people who get in early, and market the system to extremes, make out like bandits, and everyone else gets told to have a positive attitude and keep the faith.

So, just as a general comment, no personal implication, I suppose where you stand depends on where you sit.

On the particulars, any article about any activity can have a stock form: “Some people don’t like X, But X is like the old hallowed Y. X’ers are great people, who form a wonderful community – though, ha ha, it’s not always sweetness and light. However, X can be good for A and B …”. That’s not particularly wrong. But it’s not particularly helpful either.

That’s new. It might also be old—it’s rather like a salon, but fortunately I don’t have to live in Paris or some other major academic center to participate.

It’s helpful to have a counterpoint to Ivan Tribble, and at least make the case for what academic blogging could be.

Only really stupid people would argue against the case that the blogosphere is a carnival of ideas, out of which some nice things emerge.

Blogs in this way are just a modern addition to op-ed articles, current affairs magazine piece and so on, which all have been considered (and still are) as somehow un-academic by many traditional academic gatekeepers.

So what’s new?

The Chronicle of Higher Ed often seems to be a reactionary sort of place, with a fondness for curmudgeonly luddites and fake controversies (see Tribble, Ivan), so it's good to see a positive article on this strange enterprised called "bloggin…