Blogging

For the next week “Ingrid Robeyns”:http://www.ingridrobeyns.nl/ will be guest-blogging here at Crooked Timber. When Ingrid is not busy trying to convince her 8-month old son to eat his vegetables, she works on topics such as Amartya Sen’s capability approach. Ingrid has just been given a big grant from Dutch National Science Foundation to do research on social justice and the new welfare state, with a special focus on parenthood, gender and the elderly. She’s Belgian by nationality, but studied and worked all over the place, including in Germany, the UK and the US, and is currently based in the Netherlands. Ingrid reports that she was once introduced to the Crown Prince of Belgium as “A great Belgian feminist”. Apparently this produced a reaction of incredulity and fear and the question “Are you _really_ a feminist?” She’s trained as an economist, but has worked in political science, philosophy and social policy. I’m sure she’ll have lots to say to us over the next week.

I’ve just finished reading Brian Cowan’s _The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the English Coffee House_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Brian%20Cowan%20social%20life%20of%20coffee&PID=29956, Amazon) which I really enjoyed a lot (thanks to Rick Perlstein for the recommendation). Its structure is a little unwieldy – the first part is an essay in the history of consumption, the second a semi-related exercise in intellectual and social history – but it really lays out a very strong historical case for something that I’ve suspected and presumed was true, but haven’t seen treated systematically. The typical academic view of the coffeehouse has claimed it as the herald and avatar of a far reaching civil society of intelligent discourse. London coffeehouses have been depicted as the empirical manifestation of Jurgen Habermas’s “public sphere,” a space in which individuals could come together to discuss art and politics, free from both economic pressures and the oversight of the state. They’ve been portrayed as sites of rational and civilized argument. Cowan provides compelling evidence that this view is, to be blunt, romanticized bosh.
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One of the big questions for academics engaged in blogging is whether and how blogs should count towards measures of academic output, like traditional journal articles and book chapters. The obvious answer is to write journal articles and book chapters about blogging. Uses of Blogs edited by Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs is the first edited collection of scholarly articles on blogging (at least so the blurb says, and I don’t know of any others), and includes a chapter from me on economics blogs. With the book coming out of QUT, there’s a strong Brisbane flavour including chapters from Mark Bahnisch (who’s already posted on this and Jean Burgess ditto.

I’ve only had time to dip into a few chapters so far, but it looks very interesting and the opening chapter by Axel and Joanne is available free

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Under the rubric “Can Blogging Derail Your Career?”, the Chronicle of Higher Education has seven bloggers discussing Yale’s decision to not hire Juan Cole as a professor of history, and the role, if any, played by his blog in that decision: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Dan Drezner, Brad DeLong, Michael Bérubé (all: yay!), Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse (both: hiss), and Erin O’Connor (null result), with a “response” by Cole, which doesn’t actually address the others’ posts specifically, and reads like a separate essay on the same subject as the others. (Via DeLong.)

(Some of the things which were written about Cole as part of the controversy (e.g.,) give the impression of a professor who attains incomprehensibility not through obscurity but through foaming at the mouth. As it happens, though, I sat in on his seminar on millenarian movements when I was a post-doc at Michigan, and nothing could be further from the truth. I suppose I could have missed all the sessions which degenerated into hours-long rants about Zionist Entities… Of course, I don’t know why Yale didn’t give him the job, but if it was because they thought he was too spittle-flecked to be presentable to parents and alumni, they were misinformed.)

The fact that this post is not filed under “Middle East Politics” isn’t going to stop anyone in the comments, is it?

I thought I’d give this post a title which combines the obsession of the blogosphere with the obsession of the entire internet, because Max Sawicky has been complaining that some of our post titles have been a little bit off-putting of late, in particular, “Was Foucault a closet Habermasian?”. Max has a point; Foucault is all right but Habermas is ratings death. I actually own a book called “Hegel, Habermas and Hermeneutics” which I bought secondhand out of sheer admiration for the publisher’s gall at such a commercially suicidal title. It was standing next to a row of ten other copies, mint and unopened.

It got me to thinking though; what would be the most off-putting title in the world? So far, my suggestions are “Insurance Accounting in the Communist Countries”, “Comitology in the EU” and “The Role of Telecommunications Standards in the WTO Negotiations”.

The thing is, all three of these issues are actually rather interesting, and so was “Was Foucault a Closet Habermasian?”. It just goes to show you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, I suppose. Furthermore, I am in the mood to get all contrarian and say that off-putting titles can be a virtue. Henry’s title of the Foucault post might have scared off readers who didn’t care about Foucault and Habermas, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, given that it was about Foucault and Habermas. Certainly, the posts with popular and whizzy titles often seem to attract the most ferocious morons to their comments sections.

So what would be the most genuinely off-putting title for a potentially interesting post? Suggestions are welcome in comments with one proviso: I am not looking for fictitious posts. Anyone suggesting a post title had better be able and prepared to write 250 words on the subject without being boring (or even better – link to a real-world example on their own blog). I will be making a few quasi-randomly selected calls of “bullshit” to keep you honest.

William Browning Spencer, in the introduction to his new collection of short stories, _The Ocean and All Its Devices_, contemplates the one form of life that the unsuccessful writer can look down on.

bq. How does the ignored writer dodge envy and bitterness? How does he keep clear of the thought that he is writing in a vacuum, making no real sound as he topples over in the forest? Is he as deluded as some drug-addled blogger alone in a room with his computer and the cast-off shells of ordered-out pizzas, ranting to a potential audience of millions (because they are irrefutably out there; those millions of readers are out there on the Web)?

(The implication in the above that we get forests in vacuums might suggest to the unwary that Spencer is a bad writer, which is wildly untrue. The collection is very good, although so far I haven’t found anything that’s quite at the level of his utterly wonderful short, “The Entomologists at Obala,” in which two increasingly lunatic biologists conduct war-by-proxy in the wilderness via wasps and spiders)

I am here in Palo Alto at the “Center for Advanced Study”:http://www.casbs.org/, for a Summer Camp Institute, and am drowning in readings on global convergence, divergence and trajectories of global capitalism, while trying to punch above my weight with a bunch of smart people. (World Cup mixed metaphors have infected my writing: not “Not waving but drowning” but “Drowning and Punching”. Hmm.) Palo Alto is like Princeton West, only somewhat larger. Meeting my co-campers has added significantly to the list of books and articles I need to read, let alone write. For instance, there’s Len Seabrooke’s “The Social Sources of Financial Power”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0801443806/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20, Josh Whitford’s “The New Old Economy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199286019/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20, and Monica Prasad’s “The Politics of Free Markets”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226679020/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20. Fortunately I have no internet access where I’m staying to distract me.

Meanwhile, “Omar Lizardo”:http://www.nd.edu/~olizardo/index.html is “blogging”:http://wordpress.com/tag/guest-bloggers/ at “OrgTheory”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/. Go read him. I’m on Omar’s dissertation committee so I take full credit for all the good stuff he says, including the title of this post.

“Scott McLemee”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/07/12/mclemee makes a modest proposal.

bq. With such difficulties in mind, then, I want to propose a kind of public-works project. The time has come to create a map. In fact, it is hard to imagine things can continue much longer without one. At very least, we need a Web site giving users some idea what landmarks already exist in the digital space of academe. … AggAcad 1.0 would resemble the phonebook for a very small town — with one column of business numbers and another of personal. It would provide a rather bare-bones set of links, in two broad categories. There would be an online directory of academic publishers, similar to the one now provided by the Association of American University Presses. But it would also have links to the Web sites of other scholarly imprints, whether from commercial publishers or professional organizations. The other component of the start-up site would be an academic blogroll – perhaps an updated version of the one now available at Crooked Timber, divided broadly by disciplines. …

bq. AggAcad 2.0 would provide not just directories but content from and about scholarly publishing. As academic presses make more material available online — sample chapters, interviews with authors, etc. — the site would point readers to it. (This aspect of the site might be run by RSS or similar feeds.) Likewise, visitors to the site would learn of the more substantial reviews in online publications, including symposia on new books held by academic bloggers.

bq. AggAcad 3.0 would incorporate elements of Digg — the Web site that allows readers in the site’s community to recommend links and vote on how interesting or useful they prove. … By this stage, AggAcad would provide something like a hub to the far-flung academic blogosphere (or whatever we are calling it within a few years). Individuals would still be able to generate and publish content as they see fit. The advantages of decentralization would continue. But the site might foster more connections than now seem possible. Information about new scholarly books could circulate in new ways. It would begin to have some influence on how the media covered academic issues. And — who knows? — the quality of public discussion might even rise a little bit.

This all seems to me to be great. First, it would create some sort of credentialling process, which might make it easier, say, to get tenure committees to take blogging seriously as a form of disciplinary or public service (and some of the more thoughtful blog symposia etc as a form of publishing). Secondly, on a more personal level, it would allow me to get out from under the academic blogroll. As a new-ish father, I’m finding it more nearly impossible than ever to keep up with the expansion of the academic blogosphere, and have gotten woefully bad at updating it (I will be updating it with various requests next week, _promise_). It’s just too big for one person to keep track of any more. As a first step towards Scott’s proposal, I may change the blogroll to a wiki format, and ask a few people to act as discipline specific editors (or alternatively just throw it out to the public as an open resource). Or, if anyone has any technically elegant alternative suggestions, feel free to throw them out in comments.

Just before lunch, I had the following conversation on the phone:

[Phone rings]
KH: Kieran Healy.
Woman: Oh, so you are a man.
KH: Uh, yes, I am.
Woman: This is [someone] at the editorial desk of the _New York Times_. We referred to you as a woman yesterday in a post on our _Opinionator_ blog. We’ll change it now.
KH: Oh, OK.
Woman: Thank you. Goodbye.
KH: Goodbye.

The Opinionator is behind the Times Select Paywall, so I haven’t seen the original reference or the corrected one. Someone else told me yesterday is was a quote from the “Brights post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/25/dim-bulbs/.

No thanks to Jim Gibbon for siphoning off a few hours of my time today with that Gapminder pointer. Nonetheless, I wanted to send him a shoutout and welcome him to blogging seeing that he comes from a bit of Crooked Timber lineage. Kieran and I shared an office for a couple of years while in graduate school at Princeton. And it is in this same office that Jim now spends a good chunk of his graduate student days (granted, right now he’s doing summer research in Germany). Welcome to blogging, Jim!

To try to decipher what it is about 129 Wallace Hall that leads to all this blogging, you can check out a light switch, a chair component, a scooter, part of the wall, parts of the building and its door for clues on this collage – all the product of an afternoon when I didn’t feel like working on my dissertation. Those were the days… You think you have no time in grad school, but then you become faculty and all that blogging, taking pictures and surfing the Net… oh, never mind.

!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/octopus.jpg!

All I can say is wow. “David Brooks”:http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/opinion/25brooks.html?hp channels “Jeff Minter”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Mutant_Camels in the _New York Times_ today.

bq. The Keyboard Kingpin, aka Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way.

Squadrons of rabid, venom-spitting command-lambs. As I said. Wow.

(thanks to bad jim for alerting me to this in “comments”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/24/blogofascism/#comment-160958).

Eve Garrard, has written a comment on this John Gray‘s latest piece in the New Statesman. Since Gray got his new post-JG Ballard prose style it is often quite difficult to work out precisely what he is on about, but in this case, he is making the point that “Enlightenment Values” have historically been associated with a hell of a lot of death and destruction (things like the French revolutionary Terror). Garrard’s point is that when she and the Euston Manifesto crowd use the phrase, they use it only to refer to ” universal human rights, equality (in some sense), religious tolerance, scepticism about received dogmas, freedom of speech, a commitment to the use of reason to improve our condition” rather than blood and the guillotine, and that Gray knows this and is just being silly.
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The domain name under which I keep my philosophy blog and personal webpage seems to have been taken over by a domain name hijacker. (You might wonder how this could happen; there are a few details below the fold.) So I’ve had to move everything around. For anyone who links to those sites, or read them, the domain name is now weatherson.org rather than weatherson.net. Similarly the domain name of my email address has changed so it now ends .org rather than .net.
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