Notes on “academic blogging”

Hear, hear. (I’m reminded of this recent Will Wilkinson post on the old days.) I still feel a real sense of camaraderie with those who were at it back then, even across ideological and disciplinary divides.

Actually, one of the things I’ve liked about blogs, forums, and the like, has been the possibility of asking for, and getting, sources and references. In the old days, material in the newspapers, magazines, posters pasted on walls, rants in bars, radio, and television, didn’t have this. But I’m coming from a different territory than most of you, I guess.

For me (and for us, I hope) it was always for fun or it was nothing. There is a connection between blogging and academic teaching and research, but it isn’t really about “dissemination”, it is about putting tentative ideas out there, about chatting to people, about learning that someone in some other field is working on a similar problem (but you read different journals, so didn’t know of one another’s existence before).

Yes and yes! Blogging was, from the start, always mostly about getting know what’s happening in your and other disciplines, and learning from those who were similarly curious about others’ happenings. In one form or another, may it long continue.

Jacob T. Levy @1:

I still feel a real sense of camaraderie with those who were at it back then, even across ideological and disciplinary divides.

I feel no camaraderie with those who were at it back then, since I didn’t start blogging until mid-’08. (Btw I don’t have a Facebook account and I don’t tweet, and I have no current plans to change that.) This comment, of course, is fairly pointless, but if J. Levy feels moved to express his nostalgia for the good old days in line with the OP’s nostalgic mood, I feel moved to express my lack of interest in such (not infrequent) expressions of nostalgia.

From the OP:

There is a connection between blogging and academic teaching and research, but it isn’t really about “dissemination”, it is about putting tentative ideas out there, about chatting to people, about learning that someone in some other field is working on a similar problem (but you read different journals, so didn’t know of one another’s existence before). And it is also about hearing about new books and new writings and maybe getting to go places you wouldn’t otherwise have gone to. And then there’s just goofing about and discussing comics and pop music.

And then there’s something that Chris Bertram does a fair amount of, it seems to me, at Crooked Timber, but which he doesn’t mention here: namely, comment on the news of the day (see his most recent post on Ukraine, e.g.). There’s nothing wrong with that, indeed it’s valuable, but it doesn’t really fit squarely into any of the categories mentioned in the above quote.

Straightwood’s “…the ivy covered campuses …” puts me in mind of the Tom Lehrer lyric about “…ivy covered professors in ivy covered halls…” Which is, thankfully, one thing the best blogs are not.

This is a great post, Chris. I had no idea that things had gotten this bad. It confirms something a writer at Jacobin said the other day in a thoughtful critique of my response to Nick Kristof: blogging and other forms of public engagement have now become yet another task that academics, particularly younger academics, have to shoulder.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/02/the-work-of-public-work/

“The future of advanced university education is global faculties serving a global student body. The disciplines will not longer observe geographic and national boundaries, nor will the student bodies.”

Count me skeptic. What was that figure I recently read in Harper’s? (Fetching paper copy, looking up p. 9)

“Percentage pf students enrolled in a MOOC who view no more than one lecture: 49
Percentage who complete the course: 4”

The printed book predates most universities and everything one can learn at a university (or from an online course) can be learned from books. Why did people still think universities were a good idea? In the US, *since the advent of the internet* higher education has been able to raise prices far more than any other economic sector. I expect there’s a bubble waiting to burst but I don’t see evidence of the internet’s much predicted profound influence on higher education.

I used to read The New Yorker cover-to-cover in the days before…now, er, then.
Some time in 2000 the reason why I was reading the NYer so obsessively passed over into the digital, the web.
In 1999, though, still voraciously consuming that “dead tree” mag, there was a little one paragraph filler thing, called something like “web sites we’re watching”.
Robot Wisdom.
Sci-fi me I was on that as soon as I could get to a computer. At a university near-by. Little 15″ screen Macs, and cludgy ratchety Windows98 machines.
He was going around all over this thing called the internet, and keeping a record of where and what he saw, with little descriptions and links.
A log of his activities. He called it a “weblog”. Way before I got there. His coinage. Shortened to… yes.
Others were doing much the same thing, but it’s his word, and his example. For a lot of us. I hit Evan Williams’ blogspot on his recommend, in 2000. I saw the entry of the word “blogosphere” and the mild debate ensuant about its clunky possible efficacy as descriptor.
What happened to Barger the Robot Wisdom guy online is really illustrative of what makes me often seem like a troll here. Indignation at the unfairness of it. And a refusal to take shit from the smug assholes who did that to him.
But the information, the opening and opening out of everything. Link-search-link-search. Wow.
Really quickly it was apparent journalists were moving toward whatever that was, pens and notebooks in hand. It was new, and newsishy, and they were obviously trying to come back with marketable packages from it, reductions that attempted to catch the gist, and it was just so pathetically clear they were incapable. It was way to big to fit their abilities and the constraining demands of their jobs.
So much of what was there, for me, was missing from their take – mostly political, novelty, print-analogous, basically a reiteration of their own familiar turf, only digital.
There was a thing called “honeyguide”. There was wood s lot. UFO Breakfast Recipients.
All kinds of things that never saw the glaring light of consensus mainstream day.
But in the larger older realm it was like the subjective experience of these “explorers” was all there was out there.
Hey I went to the internet, and this is what it is!
As opposed to”This is what I saw”.
Facebook’s like that for a lot folks who came online actively in the late 00’s.
That’s the internet web! We know what that is.
But I was constantly being reminded that it was huger, what that was, and way beyond even my ability to look at it enough to pin it, let alone have the vocabulary for it. And I was, fortunately or not, able to spend a lot of time there. Here.
Elephants, blind men, story.
It’s natural enough, you see the web as what it is to you. Same-same with the world, the real one.
The difference would be arrogance versus humility. Trying to describe the contents of the library versus a bookshelf in someone’s house.
And what happened to Robot Wisdom in the still relatively invisible corner of what this was at that time, man that wasn’t right.
The vitality of free and open communal information sharing is what has nearly passed by these institutions, it’s what threatens them, and it should.
JSTOR. Aaron Schwartz.
Control.

Yeah – the best bloggers have distinct, individual voices, a willingness to be wrong in public, and the capacity for irony and self-mockery — virtues incompatible with how universities present themselves to the public.

I mean, it’s clearly full of smart, earnest stuff, but you go to https://theconversation.com/uk and read its self-description as “A new journalism project featuring content from the sharpest academic minds” and you sort of cringe, no?

TM @18:
People who pay for college don’t pay for the education – which in principle they could get much cheaper from books or the internet – they pay for the degree and the prestige it entails.

So you think one never gets anything from being exposed to teachers’ and fellow students’ perspectives, sense of what’s important, etc., and that someone sitting at home plowing through a syllabus, or taking an internet course, could learn exactly as much?

It’s worth noting, btw, that far from going in Straightwood’s preferred direction, my guess or impression is that those universities that can afford it seem to be doubling down on the model, the ideal, the ideology — whatever you prefer to call it — of residential education. At least some of the institutions, I think, that pour lots of money into renovating student residences do so not mainly for marketing purposes but because they believe that a particular model of student living contributes to education broadly defined. You can, if so inclined, dismiss this as self-serving or false or whatever, but it doesn’t seem to be going away, and the MOOCs etc are not seen as replacements for but rather adjuncts to the core function of the institutions, which remains, for many of them, the residential model.

I happened to notice the other day that the Univ of Virginia is offering a new MOOC on ‘the Age of Jefferson’ overseen by a noted historian. But it’s not mainly for the students in residence, presumably, and UVA is not going to start tearing down those old brick buildings that surround the Lawn or do anything else like that to set Mr. Jefferson twirling in his grave.

Re loren at 20: disillusioned slashdotters have recently started squatting comp.misc, so the corpse of Usenet is stirring.

I would like to extend a thank you to our hosts for putting up with us and for the posts.

I know I’m in a minority on this, but I find the “camaraderie” of the old days to be extremely counter-productive. It means (as an example) people like Tim Worstall get a free pass on writing all sorts of nonsense, because they are “one of the crew.”

TM @22
No that’s not what I said

You didn’t say it in so many words, but “which in principle they could get much cheaper” does imply it on a fair reading, I think.

loren @ 20
Great link, but I wonder whether his research includes questions involving how many of the other producers of his data were eleven year olds pretending to be their dads (which he admits, though it’s within the bounds of possibility that he was signing every post “11 and using dad’s account”).

[LFC: let’s not derail this thread. “In principle” is the necessary qualification.I’m not saying that there’s no educational value in college. However, the educational value is not what justifies the cost (speaking in the US context). It’s the degree and its reputation that justifies the cost.]

While reminiscing about the blogs and blogging of yore, I got a comment from someone who basically misses the days when there simply wasn’t so much of it, because then he could feel caught up on everything, like he wasn’t missing anything. Not my view. I’m glad there’s so much of it happening now.

I wonder whether we’ll see more splitting of academic blogging into the pseudonymous and the official?

The Digital Age? LOL. Wasn’t that like before I was born?

Sounds like it.

I never understood the whole ‘Tim Worstall is evil’ bullshit. Most libertarians are just shills for big business who suddenly become terribly authoritarian when the discussion turns to any freedom other than that of the market. Tim, AFAICS, was a libertarian who put his money where his mouth was: when a number of bloggers were campaigning for asylum rights for Iraqis who had worked for the British, he went the extra mile. Most UKIP types would run a mile rather than stand up and argue for more immigration by Arabs.

And Worstall gave a lot of publicity to new bloggers, based on whether he thought they could write rather than whether they wrote something that chimed with his politics. I disagree with almost everything the man ever said, but you could differ from him and not have him scream abuse at you.

“I got a comment from someone who basically misses the days when there simply wasn’t so much of it because then he could feel caught up on everything, like he wasn’t missing anything. Not my view. I’m glad there’s so much of it happening now.”

Well there is the problem that humans aren’t really equipped to deal with the flooding of information enabled by the internet. I’m a bit surprised this hasn’t come up yet so let me ask: is nobody else worried about how much time we are spending with this? It’s fun yes but most blogging is trivial. It has to be because there just can’t be so much profundity in the world to justify the millions of blogs and forums and web sites and whatnot (not to mention facebook etc.). How did we spend all that time before the internet? And if more academics are getting into blogging, do they really have much to say that isn’t already being said somewhere else?

I suspect that the internet has reduced the overall productivity of office workers, and that includes academics. It’s not just the raw amount of time spent but the frequency of distraction by checking email, facebook, blogs, forums. I wonder whether that came up at all at the “academic blogging” conference?

TM@41
It’s fun yes but most blogging is trivial.

Wait, no, that can’t be. It’s a conversation, except that you can quote without author checks – you get to look more clever than you actually are.

Statistically, J. Quiggin on the traditionality of modernity got some people, somewhere, laid. And D. Davies on beer started a few fights. Anything but trivial.

Ronan(rf) @ 44
C’mon, I’m a gentleman.

Besides, it’s statistics.

It’s fun yes but most blogging is trivial. It has to be because there just can’t be so much profundity in the world to justify the millions of blogs and forums and web sites and…

I suffer. More or less patiently.
With all due respect TM, what you mean there is either “most blogging in my experience of it” or you mean “most blogging, in its entirety, on the internet full stop“.
Two really different scenarios. Assuming you mean your subjective experience – because how could you personally have experienced every blog out there – what does that mean? A bunch of filtered access to a cluster of things you kind of randomly bumped into until your bookmarks folders were bulging at the seams?
Not important until it’s time to make judgment calls about the efficacy and utility of interaction with what that whole thing is.
Probably the percentage of trivial dreck is majority, okay, but the amount of valuable non-dreck is an unknown, outside subjective experience.
Seconding Straightwood’s paleo-analog: a refinement of the ubiquitous arrow that has this little barb thing on it, so it won’t slip back out. From those guys over around Clovis.
Who knows how important that is, at the time, from within the change, and how altering it’s going to be?
The internet is bigger than any single human mind’s ability to comprehend what it is, it was that big already, bigger than the single mind’s reach, in 2001.
Maybe some of our more savantish freaks can do it, but they have to get that comprehension back down to our scale to do us any good.
Or we could just pretend it’s much smaller than it really is.
What happens when things like facebook and other residential actively-filtered platforms intentionally reduce the size of it, allowing for the pretense the internet’s not that big, for palatibility and ease of digestion, and comfort.
Twitter not so much because of its stripped-down nature. You can’t live there, though people do sort of, in the sense of spending massive time. People put their full selves on facebook. Different.
Blogging as a platform isn’t portaled like f’book, its doors open directly onto the net. Facebook has a tightly secured lobby.
Talking comprehensively and concretely about blogging is like talking comprehensively and concretely about the human race.
You can do it, but unless you’ve got some serious philosophical ducks in a row, you end up sounding portentous and silly.
Not you “TM”, but you “one”.

..which won’t matter of course if the info remains unpaywalled

Scholars don’t like protean phenomena because mastery can’t be attained, certified, refereed, etc. As long as the evolution of the Internet keeps wriggling, squirming, and morphing, it will be the domain of intellectual cowboys like J. P. Barlow and Jaron Lanier. Scholars want it to stop moving so that they can dissect it and teach anatomy, but it just won’t hold still.

In a time of plutocratic ascendancy and the failure of conventional democratic institutions, we can at least hope that some engines of reform will emerge from the evolutionary factory of the Internet. There was a long interval between the invention of Gutenberg’s press and the fall of monarchies. We won’t have to wait that long this time.

I agree with the benefit of less commercialised blogs (although research dissemination has its place). Personally, I blog about:
1) Things that I’m interested in but don’t have the time to turn into research
2) Things that are a bit too fanciful to spend any real research time on (this is probably 90%)
3) Things that I only have one interesting thing to contribute and hence wouldn’t have enough material to turn it into a full research project

Some of this will be informed by my research but I think that there’s a benefit in sometimes thinking about things outside your research.

Ronan,
I don’t have a poli sci answer for you. I just have faith in the democratic enterprise in the long term. That is, I want to reach policy makers, but I also want to reach citizens and get more information and better arguments into the public discourse. This will, eventually, I hope, help.

It’s bootless to predicate anything of so large a phenomenon as “blogging” or “the Internet” in general, just as it would be of “technology” or “mass production” or “modernity.” Obviously all those things entail enormous blessings but also grave costs. Few of us would want to live without automobiles or airplanes, but the world is in danger of choking on gasoline exhaust. Mass production has made life a lot easier, but it’s also massively changed the prevailing character structure, and not entirely for the better.

The Internet seems to be an almost unmixed blessing for scientists, who can circulate ideas and information much wider and faster than ever before. It’s a potential blessing for democracy, though so far largely unrealized because people with strong political beliefs tend to affiliate chiefly with the like-minded, while those without strong beliefs largely eschew political sites — just as they rarely read newspapers — and instead use the Internet mainly for shopping, entertainment, and socializing. I’m not sure, though, that it’s even a potential net blessing for culture and education, at least in the humanities. For the most part, cultivation in literature and the arts is necessarily slow, difficult, silent, and solitary — all the things that hyperconnection militates against. And unlike science and politics, where up-to-the-minute information is essential and superseded theories can be ignored, literature and the arts are mostly backward-looking. We’ve surpassed Galileo, Linnaeus, and Lavoisier; there’s no reason to grapple with their work now. But the idea of surpassing Homer, Dante, Leonardo, Milton, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tolstoy, or Joyce is unintelligible — it makes no sense. There will still be great — maybe even greater — new poetry, painting, music, but nothing that will make reading/listening to Homer et al superfluous, the way Darwin and Einstein made reading Galileo et al superfluous.

All the above, as I hope most people will recognize, is just a footnote to the work of Sven Birkerts, especially The Gutenberg Elegies and his forthcoming book On or About … .

“How can a qualitative judgment “trivial” be statistical?”

Fair point, it’s not easy to define and measure intellectual profundity. What I roughly have in mind is a test along the lines of “is this worthwhile to be preserved for posterity?” And this is not meant pejorative. It is just in the nature of things that the vast bulk of human communication is not meant for posterity. I remember Feyerabend having said something along the lines that ‘philosophers always assume that the purpose of language is to express profound philosophical ideas but really, language was invented to communicate everyday gossip’ (this is very roughly from memory and certainly not a quote – maybe somebody can help locate the original, if it was preserved).

What is new about communication on the internet is the fact that all that trivial gossip IS preserved for posterity.