Unit Structures: Blogging: Academia's Digital Divide?

Blogging: Academia's Digital Divide?
Posted 8/15/2006 10:58:00 AM |

Lately, I've found myself reflecting on the role of this blog in my academic career. Granted, my academic career is somewhat nonexistent, but perhaps one day that will change. To that extent, I must think about how my present-day creation will affect my future possibilities. Remembering the Chronicle piece "Bloggers Need Not Apply", it is hard not to second-guess the value of my blog, or academic blogging in general. I figured that it might be useful to enumerate some of the valuable effects of academic blogging, and imagine how these might one day be integrated into mainstream academia. So, as a list - some of the benefits of academic blogging:

Blogs help researchers find one another. Traditionally, researchers "found" each other through academic publications. They would then meet up at a conference, pat each other on the back, talk about collaborating, etc. As a graduate student, I don't have a very strong publication record, nor do I have money to travel to conferences. I am essentially locked out of the traditional academic model. However, Google drives a ton of traffic to my blog; in that traffic are researchers who are conducting background and primary research. I can't tell you how many interesting researchers have contacted me, left comments, or tracked back to my blog; I've made many valuable contacts this way. I've also many many valuable international contacts this way - people I probably wouldn't have met otherwise.
Blogs can be a place to share research. Indeed, this is a controversial point, so let me share my back story. When I started researching the Facebook, I didn't know what I was going to do with my findings. Largely, I was conducting the research as background - using it to formulate a more formal research agenda. However, in doing the Facebook research, I came across interesting findings, and there was a public need to understand the Facebook. I shared my research, and it was widely read. Indeed, this was the same research I would have sent to a conference or journal, but it was dressed down a little, and thrown online so people could access the research immediately.

I'll be the first to admit that blogging research findings is somewhat of a gray area. However, if you look at Pew or other think tanks, you'll see they consistently promote summary research findings. They put key findings into the public via a blog post or press release, hoping to generate buzz. In a sense, I've done the same thing, though my intentions were really to get something out there that would be useful to people as they attempted to understand the Facebook.

In the right context, the blog can be a very valuable place to showcase research. The research goes into Google, people can repost it, and there can be a public conversation about the research. I can't tell you how much of a bummer it is to know that the best academic work is tied up in controlled-access journal that are prohibitively expensive; perhaps the personal academic blog can be somewhat of an antidote. To sum, I do believe blogs can be a valuable place to share research - the ethics haven't been completely worked out, but as more and more academics use blogs as venues to promote their research and distribute early findings, the more we'll understand the accepted ways to blog research.
Blogs make academics better writers. Writing is difficult. For every beautifully written paper I read, I come across two or three that are almost unreadable. It is an axiom of the writing community (creative, academic, journalism) that the way to be a better writer is to write more often. Every post I write gets sent to a few hundred people - knowing this, I'm forced to write better - in terms of content and grammar. As academics, we are communicators - and blogging/writing consistently only improves our communication skills.
Blogs leverage the community's wisdom. A lot of what I put on my blog is stuff I come up with in the shower or the car. Blogs are great venues for these big, crazy ideas, because you've got a community of readers who will check, interact, argue, disprove or validate you. Maybe one day you'll decide to test one of those big ideas, and you'll already have the benefit of a community that has vetted your ideas.
Blogs are great places to share accomplishments. Blogs are an excellent way to let your community know about things like papers, talks, conference attendance. Think about it - as your audience is opt-in, they actually care about the stuff you do, and they might actually read your papers! Also, it is becoming quite common to "subscribe to a person", in the sense someone follows your blog to keep up with you. Who knows - maybe someone who is subscribed to your RSS feed will hire you someday - you want to keep them aware of the cool stuff you're up to. At a more basic level, however, we subscribe to each others feeds because we are fans. I want to know what people are up to, their accomplishments, changes in their lives.
Thinking aloud is valuable. My blog wanders through my various interests. Social networks, identity, virtual communities, academia - and through this public thinking, I've been able to reflect upon these interests. As I begin to think about my dissertation, I can look back on my blog and know that I've thought through a number of things, refactored and moved on.

In my opinion, all of this is extremely valuable. Connecting with researchers, formulating an agenda, bouncing ideas off a community, thinking aloud. Its extremely difficult to think about myself without a blog. That said, how is it that blogging could have such a bad name in academia - is blogging academia's digital divide? Let's explore this a little.

Academic blogging is misunderstood. As evidenced by the Chronicle piece, the underlying assumption is that blogging is only the sharing of public grievances. Unfortunately, blogging has its stereotypes, but I believe they are being broken down methodically. People can blog professionally. People can divorce their political views from their blogs. There's no requirement that a blog be a non-filtered braindump of everything in one's life. That's not how I blog, and I respect bloggers that are topical and try hard to create posts of value.
Academic blogging is generational. At SILS (an information science school), a minority of professors maintain blogs. However, as I look around at my cohort in the program, I see lots of students with blogs. As long as these students get value from their blogs, there's no reason to assume that they won't carry blogging forward with them as they advance in their careers. Our generation will begin to break down some of the barriers to blogging in academia.

Considering the value my blog has added to my academic experience, I tend to believe that academic blogs will eventually mainstream. Their acceptance will take some time, but the value provided by blogging - in terms of connecting with others, the public debate, the real dialogue that emerges - will be self-evident. Of course, some things will never change - being a good blogger will always take effort, and not all of us need to blog. However, as we see models develop for academic blogging, it stands that more and more of us will want to take advantage of the benefits.

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9 Comments: (Post a Comment)

At August 15, 2006 3:58 PM, jkd said...: I think you're right on about all of this, and that the real key point here is "...the underlying assumption is that blogging is only the sharing of public grievances." It's been my experience that in a lot of press coverage of "the blogs," journalists seem to have a strong buy-in to the narrative of either,
-"blogs are frustrated fringe figures in their underwear ranting about politics," or
-"blogs are people sharing WAY TOO MUCH PERSONAL INFORMATION oh goodness don't they know that this stuff is out there forever"

A few points on this. Part of journalists' misunderstanding of blogs - academic and otherwise - is, I think, an intentional one, and also reflected in their frequent refutation of the question nobody asked, "Will blogs replace newspapers?" What I'd argue is going on is that some journalists are very uncomfortable with the fact that widely- and cheaply-accessible written content is no longer a closed shop. Until very recently, it was, and their experiences and credentials allowed them access to enormous audiences without very much competition. Now, pretty much anyone can reach a mass audience with their writing - the point is not so much that "the blogs" are replacing newspapers qua newspapers (of course, many are entirely dependent on newspapers for their content, and acknowledge this fact) but that they're providing competition in terms of the written word, period, and on the merits of the writing alone. Which I think some journalists wish weren't true, and so work to put "the blogs" into the box of the first two mass-recognized utilizations of blogging: politics and personal journals.

In this context, it's totally unsurprisng that media coverage doesn't "get" academic blogging, because they're not even trying to do so.

Which leads to the second point, the "putting stuff out there" element of blogging. No doubt, there are some people who are now making public information that they will later regret, but I think you're right to frame it in terms of a generation gap. For our cohort - and especially for those who are five, six, 10, 15 years younger (i.e., incoming freshman [high school and college] Facebook users), the fact that all this "stuff" is "out there" mostly falls into the category of, "Feature, not a bug."

Misunderstanding this is probably the result both of general inter-generational condescension - "those kids just don't know what they're doing" - and also of value-substitution. From their perspective - We sure wouldn't put all that stuff out there, so why would they do it?

Well done for raising and so clearly analysing this issue.
At August 16, 2006 12:09 PM, raymond said...: Fred,

You post is interesting and thought provoking about blogs continuing into the academic setting. However, I think you left out an important issue. Most things (if not all) are academic on some level. I'm not sure you'll agree with the connection, but I'll try to make it. As you know, not everyone reading your blog responds or interacts with you. Just as true, most readers can not offer you an academic stepping stone. But with all your readers, you do offer a stepping stone leading to thinking and learning. When someone reads a blog, they usually get ideas they might never of had. They might expand on that idea leading to you reading their blog, article, book, etc one day. With this in mind, I don't think it is possible to measure or comprehend the academic value of blogs. I read many blogs, most of which I don't respond. But, it is rare I don't learn. This helps me academically. Does this make all blogs academic? Or, does a blog need to come from a structured classroom to be academic? I believe the former. I believe blogs are already in academic settings and will continue if the blogger moves into structured academia.

I would also like to respond to JKD (above comment). I continue to have difficulties understanding the importance of worrying about putting yourself out there. Rather is takes all kinds or not, we have all kinds of people. Most people understand this and understand life is a changing journey. I've never had an employer wanting to know what I've done 10 years ago. They know it has little to no bearing (okay, all history has bearing) on who I am today. If an employer uses the Internet for more than verifying the information I give them, we won't develop a healthy relationship to begin with. I'm not implying employers shouldn't do background checks and confront the applicant with problem areas, but a "witch hunt" on the Internet says much more about the employer than the prospective employee. Sometimes opportunities lost, are better lost.

To put it another way, as a nurse, patients tell me they can't stop alcohol or drug consumption because they don't have what it takes to rid themselves of their friends doing and encouraging these things. I tell them to stop the self abusive behavior and they won't have to worry about trying to stay away from their friends. I help them understand their friends will go away on their own. Some of these patients seeing me again tell me I am right.

To try and make sense of the connection, what I'm trying to say is people have a natural way of weeding themselves out. I say, put yourself out their and let others do the weeding for you.

Back to you Fred,

Just some rambling thoughts from someone who enjoys your blog,

Raymond
At August 16, 2006 12:25 PM, raymond said...: Fred,

I just read "Bloggers Need Not Apply" and found:

"Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know "the real them" -- better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn't want to know more."

My question is "are they better off only wanting the applicants they didn't know"?

Raymond
At August 16, 2006 1:07 PM, jkd said...: "I'm not implying employers shouldn't do background checks and confront the applicant with problem areas, but a "witch hunt" on the Internet says much more about the employer than the prospective employee. Sometimes opportunities lost, are better lost."

I think this might be true now - but maybe what's been left unsaid in a lot of this discussion is what might or will happen in the future, with changing practices in both employer interest in employee online identity and history, and changing levels of comfortability and control that individuals have over their online identity. Fred, of course, is helping address the latter with OpenID - whatever scheme arises, in five years' time I expect that in much of the tech and white-collar world, giving an employer a self-verified unitary online ID will be just another part of the resume: e-mail, phone number, work history, online identity.

This does, of course, raise difficult issues regarding discrimination - how many of these potential employees now are being passed over for the "too much information" being, say, political?
At August 16, 2006 8:48 PM, nathan said...: I've often talked about how useful blogging can be in academia, especially in the humanities. While I don't necessarily consider myself an academic blogger, people often ask why academics would want to put their writing/ideas at risk (of theft) by publishing on the web. Honestly though, obscurity is a hell of a lot worse for an academic than plagiarism.

I say the sooner academia starts participating and putting their ideas out there to create connections, the better.
At August 18, 2006 5:37 PM, Joy said...: Absolutely. It's serendipidous that I read this post immediately after I make my first post to my "academic" blog (i have another personal one, with a completely different audience and purpose). One reason I am forcing myself to do this instead of writing my notes and thoughts in a non-public place is that by formulating a post, I am forced to think through and articulate my ideas more effectively (we'll see how that goes!) and think in terms of a broader academic audience. Instead of scribbling in margins and making lists of partially formed ideas in a text doc, I am forced to string things together into larger and more coherent wholes. For me it's an act of self-discipline, and an extra motivational force. Things are still not fully formulated by any means, but it's closer at least.
At August 21, 2006 11:08 AM, Jason Griffey said...: Thoughtful post, Fred...I'm one of the people who definitely consider blogging to be academic work, whether it is the publishing of formal results or simply off hand wondering about issues. My blog is definitely not only academic. I don't focus my thoughts on it every day to an academic area, and often range into just what I find interesting on a given day. I do often write about issues relating to libraries, politics, copyright, open access, and other things that I think fall squarely in the purvue of the academic librarian, just not exclusively on that.

So it's a bit of a mix with me. But given my strong feelings on the matter, I did just add my blog to my CV, and I included it in my annual report to my dean. I plan on including it in my tenure file. Whether it is taken seriously isn't really up to me, but I plan on presenting it seriously and being able to justify it being there.
At September 27, 2006 6:09 PM, sozlog said...: Thanks for your article on academic blogging!!

Beside all your arguments, I would wish to share a few more:

- Academic Blogging can be an excellent means to share knowledge beyond the scientific community in the more narrow sense and invite a wider audience to think about a specific subject. I have encountered quite a few weblogs whose authors are very successful because of their profound knowledge, research and experience with a given subject. My blog is relatively new; it is about sociology, a subject very often associated with the academic ivory tower. Why not open the floor for discussion? Why not invite a wider public to think about and discuss economic, social and cultural life from a sociological perspective?

- Why not offer a weblog parallel to an ongoing research project? The worst thing that can happen is that I meet people in other places with similar interests or projects. If I consider lectures or seminars on sociology, e.g. sociology of communication, sociology of technology, organizational sociology, economic sociology or sociology the "classics" - why should I not offer a blog? Unfortunately, many universities do the opposite: they actually discuss relevant knowledge behind closed doors using keywords and other obstacles to let nobody in who does belong there/attend a lecture or seminar. Doing the opposite might be good PR for an academic discipline, a university or institute, a researcher/research group.

- a sociology-spefic argument: since the internet is a vital part of social life, sociologists are not well-advised to ignore it but rather use the internet to learn about society, social thought, the actors, the systems the institutions who produce content day in day out; blogging is one means beside others to participate and learn. I whish colleages who tell me or show more subtely that they consider blogging being " trivial" or even "a waste of time" would get to read your post.
At October 07, 2006 11:26 AM, Poyel said...: Very interesting contribution. While on a worldwide level there are hard facts to the digital divide, in academia it is much more a question of online user behavior and attitude. Thank you.