My take on a topic addressed in many places. I cannot speak for the sciences, or the social sciences, but in the humanities, intellectual work is facing an incredible opportunity for growth and improvement. It is, in a sense, ironic that technology should provide this opportunity to humanities rather than other areas as humanities has been the most resistant to technolgy. Nevertheless, as I see it, blogging, and similar technologies, represent a tremendous opportunity to expand participation in the development of humanistic knowledge, to overturn the hierarchical mechanisms that restrict the production of knowledge, and usher in a new age of intellectual practice.

Before I go any further, I must state that I do not believe that the Internet is a panacea for social inequity. However the marketplace logic that currently dominates intellectual growth in the humanities serves no intellectual purpose either. I am confident that the evaluatory mechanisms of hiring, tenure, and promotion will find some means to adapt to the changing environment of scholarly practice.

I suspect that our relectance to participate in these technologies reflects our continuing antiquated belief in individual genius. I don’t want to share my ideas before they are fully formed (i.e. “publishable”) in case someone else “steals” them. We can only escape this idiocy by altering the nature of the intellectual marketplace, by sharing our ideas to the extent that no one can claim such “genius,” as if anyone could now.