A recent article in Slate once again recounts the woes and dangers of academic blogging. I just want to make a few points on this.

1. If an academic is blogging about daily life or hobbies or politics or popular culture, then these things mostly likely have nothing to do with his/her job. Of course, this doesn’t mean that one’s colleagues or potential colleagues might not read it and come to some negative conclusion. A blogger can try to be careful, but if you say what you think, someone will inevitably disagree with you or come away with some negative opinion of you. That’s not just the nature of blogs; that’s the nature of writing. Blogging just means one of your colleagues is likely to read what you wrote, whereas conventional scholarly publishing is probably a surefire way to ensure that you write something no one in your department will ever read.

   BTW, I don’t think this situation is any different outside academic circles. The lesson here, for all professionals, is that blogs are public (no kidding!). Write about something trivial and risk your audience considering you a lightweight. Write about something substantial and risk angering your audience.

   Rhetoric is risk: ask Socrates.

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2. If you blog about professional-scholarly issues, as I generally do, the danger is in your colleagues wondering why you are blogging instead of doing "real" writing. The Slate article discusses this in a thoughtful way. I think this is primarily an issue in the humanities and perhaps some social sciences. Despite their political tendencies, these are not progressive entities. No one should expect that the academy will ever accept blogging as an activity on par with conference presentations, let alone publication.

   That said, I think the underlying technologies of blogging (e.g. database-driven web publication, comments/trackbacks, folksonomic networks, RSS, etc.)–or what follows on them–will form a basis for the future of academic communication. Based on this premise, I see two key challenges:

   a. Building an academic discourse that takes advantage of the rhetoric and epistemological characteristics of the technologies. Most online journals are simply the electronic delivery of conventional print essays. True, some folks experiment with hypertext, Flash, or video, but what these Web 2.0 technologies represent is a quite different side of new media. While these experimentations are valuable, Web 2.0 applications are more about how information gets distributed, organized, and connected in a more dynamic fashion.

   b. Establishing ways to talk about the value of blogging right now. For example, I give a presentation at a conference. I’ve submitted a proposal and had it accepted, so I suppose that might represent some level of vetting of my work. However, I don’t suppose anyone would think it was substantial in any way. Then I give my paper to 10 or 15 or even 50 people. I probably get some feedback in the form of an observation or question or two. Maybe there’s one or two folks in the audience with the knowledge and interest to actually help me.

   On the other hand, I publish that conference paper on my blog. The same number of people might read it over a six month period. However, I’m far more likely to reach an audience of interested colleagues than I am at a conference. So maybe I do both. Conference and blog.

   In either case, I look at my blog like I might look at a conference paper. It’s something I write on my way to writing something else; it’s part of the process of developing an idea. True, I could just keep my ideas to myself, but writing for this public space forces me to explain myself (to myself) more fully. For example, some recent comments on my previous post about professional writing and cultural studies has me thinking more about how I might better explain my thinking (again, to myself first and then to others). I’ll likely blog about it again some time.

   Bottom line, I would say I blog to develop my ideas for future scholarly work (and to develop ideas for my teaching) but also to participate at the ground floor in shaping how academic discourse might develop online.

If only we had seen the end of these articles about the dangers of academic blogging, but I’m sure that we haven’t. Just as I am sure that we haven’t seen the end of the academic blogging incidents that spawn the articles. Clearly what is needed here is some education about what the various reasons academics blog, and, for those who blog in a scholarly way, some explanation about the role we see blogging playing in scholarship.

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