How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
An Arcadian who shall remain nameless asked me a few weeks ago, "Wait, how come you don't blog on Arcade?" My first thought was, "Because I'm the Transactions editor, dummy,"* but because I'm socially well adjusted and have an appropriateness filter, what I said was, "Dude, I have my own blog."
Upon reflection, that statement warrants some unpacking. I've given a fair amount of thought to why I blog as an academic. Many of the reasons are outlined in Dan Cohen's now-classic post "Professors, Start Your Blogs," published in 2006, which is a million internet-years ago. (I would Instapaper it--those margins are brutal. Style sheet is now fixed, per Dan.) In blogging, I've come around to the idea that academics need to do a lot more thinking in public if we want said public to have a clue as to what it is that we actually do. It really only seems fair.
Thinking in public is a difficult habit to get into, though, because public is the place where we're supposed to not screw up, and thinking on the fly inevitably involves screwing up. Blogging with any regularity in essence means committing oneself to making one's intellectual fallibility visible to the world and to the unforgiving memory of the Google cache. This is particularly a problem for academics, who are, after all, professional thinkers; we have a culture of making it look easy, and of concealing as much as possible "the raw material of poetry in all its rawness."
Two things cause me to recur to the difference between blogging on my own blog and blogging on Arcade. First, there's been a posting lull on the Arcade blogs recently, a natural effect, I suspect, of the spring semester hurtling toward its crisis of grade-submission deadlines. (Stanfordians, Davisians, and others on the quarter system, I don't know what the hell your excuse is.) And second, there's our Conversations editor Meredith's reflection back in February on the gender dynamics of Arcade and of other online collaborative spaces.
In response to Meredith's post, Cécile Alduy quoted Virginia Woolf's expression of unwillingness to expose the messiness of thinking: "When will come the day when I will be able to read my own writing printed on the page without blushing with shame?" This is a fear that afflicts all writers, but is nonetheless gendered as well; those of us trained in literary studies are familiar with the trope of the publication substituting for the author's body, making the circulation of the text into a highly immodest act for a woman in particular.
So when I say, "Dude, I have my own blog," I am in part acknowledging that having A Blog of One's Own (as it were) is a more comfortable proposition than thinking in public on Arcade, a sort of private room in contrast with Arcade's more public, well, arcade, where traffic is orders of magnitude higher and passers-by peer into your glass windows.
One Arcade feature that has incited debate in the past is our username policy--real, full names only.
This policy puts into practice the theory that academics should be able to think in public and stand behind their ideas, even the ones they formulate on the fly. Here's how Dan Cohen puts it in the above-mentioned post:
Another factor that has distanced professors from blogs was anonymity. Most early blogs, and especially the ones the media liked to cover, were anonymous or pseudonymous. But I would say that the vast majority of new blogs are clearly attributed (even if they have odd monikers, unlike the boring dancohen.org). Attribution and its associated goods, such as responsibility and credit, should make academics feel better about the genre.
Responsibility and credit sound great, and reassuringly academic. I've certainly come out in favor of responsibility and credit in the past. Yet as Marilee Lindemann points out in the Journal of Women's History, eschewing anonymity is gendered (among other things), not neutral. Moreover, Lindemann observes, less authoritative genres like blogging are often the scene of anonymity precisely because they are the places where the disempowered--those who need to be anonymous, for one reason or another--have access to authorship. For these reasons, she celebrates the construction of pseudonymous online identities:
There is a lot of Emily Dickinson in this postmodern Madwoman, playing fast and loose with identity, reveling in the space opened up by declaring oneself a delighted "Nobody" rather than a dreary "Somebody." Dickinson offers the Madwoman more than lessons in the ironies of non-identity, however. With her homemade books and the hundreds of poems circulated to an audience of intimates, she also provides an enabling example of self-publication. Dickinson's careful insistence to Thomas Higginson on the distinction between "print" and "publish" ("I had told you I did not print," she writes, when she wants to explain to him that "A narrow fellow in the grass" appeared in a Boston newspaper without her knowledge or consent) has new resonance in the postprint era that brought today's academic feminist bloggers into being. (210-2)
Indeed, the post-Web 2.0 tendency toward real names has serious privacy implications, and what seemed like an innocuous enough comment from Cohen in 2006 looks a little more troubling juxtaposed with later pronouncements against anonymity by Mark Zuckerberg and others, which my colleague Aaron Bady has ably demonstrated very frequently amounts to good old-fashioned privilege. Certainly a graduate student is less free to post under her or his real name than is a professor with tenure; ignoring power differentials does not make them go away. In requiring real names, Arcade enforces a particular kind of publicness that is in some ways riskier than print publishing.
How dreary to be somebody!
And yet, it's often as somebodies that we reveal ourselves as scholars and teachers. One of the bees recently in my proverbial bonnet is the notion that students have been misguided into thinking that academic thought is neither applicable to nor motivated by "the real world." It's in blogging that I've found this notion most profoundly refuted, as trivial posts on the minutiae of everyday life eventually link up with larger theoretical concerns, casually strung together by the idiosyncratic tagging taxonomy in my head. The humanities in particular are aimed at developing theoretically supple ways to answer questions that we seriously want answered. I'm not going to lie: when I heard I was going to be an aunt, I went and read Eve Sedgwick's essay "Tales of the Avunculate." (Recommended, by the way.) To me, revealing those connections is part of the point of thinking in public.
Sometimes a glass arcade is more of an "admiring bog"--but that's okay, I think.
*Just kidding, Nameless Arcadian, I don't think you're a dummy! Totally the reverse.
[Many thanks to Andrew Sullivan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sarah Clark, and BookForum for linking to this post. Thanks especially to Sarah Clark for her thoughtful response.]
... how blog entries on Arcade can be intimidating because they're so well-written and researched that they don't feel like "posts" but "essays"? Remember that conversation?
In retrospect, I realize that the above comment can be interpreted in a number of ways. I intended for it to ask questions about the tensions between casual and formal, but I can see how it also reads as chummy and insider-y in a way that may make feel people feel excluded. So I think I'm going to try to redo and ask my questions in a clearer way:
Do you think it's better to make our offline relationships in blog-like mediums explicit or should we try to enforce separations between how we know people online compared to how we know people offline? Does acknowledging that some of us know and are friends with each other outside of Arcade make it harder for other people to enter our conversations?
What are some of the models of formality and informality that govern this medium? I can see that your post has certain informal elements, but it's definitely super thought-out in both its scope and the cultural questions it raises. Is there room for more off-the-cuff posting here and elsewhere? Does a certain implied standard for a blog entry make it hard for some bloggers to have the time to post?
Well, that's the thing. On my own blog I feel totally free to blurt whatever random garbage I happen to be thinking. But when blogging in my capacity as an Arcade editor I feel as though I ought to rise to a bit more of a standard, and full disclosure (and I'm fully aware of the irony), I may have run this post by one or two Ph.D.-holding readers before posting it.*
What I want to do--what this post hopes to do--is turn some scrutiny on that feeling. My hope is that acknowledging the difficulty of being public (as well as the varying degrees of publicness that can exist even across the "same" medium, i.e. blogs) can allow us to think of ways to, as it were, "get over it."
I don't think we have to succumb to the expectation that blogging will always be whatever random garbage comes to our heads. To me the great virtue of blogging is that one starts to see the patterns emerge, so that, for instance, I've written several throwaway posts in the past (they may have involved photos of sad-looking dogs in Halloween costumes and the tag "wtf") that have turned into a substantial research interest with deeper connections to my current book project than I at first realized.**
The gradation from the raw to the cooked visualized on Arcade's front page (Conversations --> Transactions --> Publications) also happens in the work-life of the blogging academic. It's really only that freedom to make a record of one's passing thoughts/conversations/idle chitchat as well as the places where they start to coalesce that makes blogging work as a space for thinking in public. So how can we help create that freedom on Arcade? Obviously we can tell our bloggers, "get over it," but that seems like a limited strategy at best!
As for being chummy: I can't see it surprising anyone that Arcade editors talk amongst themselves (it's, like, our job), or that we talk to the regular Arcade bloggers and the frequent commenters. Thus is community formed.
It's true, though, that the formation of community usually comes with some formation of real or apparent boundaries. Less-regular commenters, want to weigh in on that question? That is to say, less-regular commenters, please weigh in on that question.
*But then I ignored the feedback, stating, "it's just a blog post." So there you go.
**WTF: A Bunch of Pictures of Dogs in Halloween Costumes sounds like a natural fit for Harvard UP, am I right?
I have a couple of other blogs (one of which, anyhow, Meredith knows about); part of the culture of blogging is seeing your blog entry appear immediately.
I am wondering whether one reason for the drop off here, which I lament, is the lag between submitting and posting. It seemed (to me) like a good idea at the time, but it certainly formalizes Arcade, for good and for ill, in ways that it didn't seem so formal before.
I'm much less likely to just post something I think about intensely but briefly here. It's much more of an effort, a discipline, to blog every week, which I am doing as a discipline, then it is just to blog in the more or less normal way. I'm much less likely to post atomized individual observations, and yet that's something I think is very valuable as a blogger.
And people who used to comment on my blogs here now tend to comment on them elsewhere (ie when I mention elsewhere that I've posted here, they respond to my posts there, not here).
As to the gender dynamics. I think it's well established that the vast majority of blogs in the US anyhow, and I think in the first world are written by women. My impression is that academic women have more demands on their time than academic men - which I am glad about, pretty much though of course in my own case I would love to be in more demand - so maybe men have more time to hang out on Arcade, especially if we boys aren't producing quasi-finished products anywhere else.
Well, anyhow, I'm sure my posts would be different, for good or for ill, if Arcade were more casual, the most significant and obvious aspect of that casualness being the immediate appearance of our posts - more of a free for all marketplace than the orderly process it is now.
I am totally glad that Meredith is posting now. And I must say I wish you would too.
Bill, I concur with your read on the queue--not that it makes things more formal precisely, but that it dilutes the immediate gratification that's part of the point of blogging. If it's just being posted in the moment, then a piece can look like it's of the moment; if it may not appear for a week, it warrants a little more durability--a piece for this week, if not for all time. (Of course, you may be feeling these effects more keenly than other bloggers--the other bloggers rarely come out with four-part series, for instance.)
That doesn't necessarily mean we shouldn't have the queue, just that the Drupal upgrade that will, among other things, make the queue function more transparently is all the more necessary.
I can't say I understand your comment about gender. Most romance novels are understood to be written by women too; that doesn't make female authorship a settled or even well defined concept, however. It's unclear to me what the large number of woman-authored blogs is meant to demonstrate, especially given the wide variety within the medium (which I've attempted to describe a little above).
I think (as a long time blogger and blog reader) I was trying to register some things only about my own experience of the blogosphere, as a blogger and as a reader, things which seem to differ from your experience and the experience of those you quote: 1) I would much prefer to blog anonymously or pseudonymously, and in fact I sometimes publish pseudonymously; I had a lot of misgivings about blogging here because I'd prefer what I say to stand on its own, not to be associated with any other part of my life. 2) I certainly don't want to blog as an academic. I want to blog as an intellectual. Blogging as an academic is the last thing I want to do. If I seem to do it here that's because I think of blogging as a way for even academics to become truer to their intellectual instincts and passions, instead of to professional demands and the intellectual repression they frequently require. That's why I got into blogging in the first place, and why I think it can be so valuable. This may also be why it turns out that 3) Most of the blogs I read and care about are or at least were pseudonymous, and I vastly prefer that mode of interaction, for many reasons. 4) And it's also true, probably for the demographic reasons I mentioned, that most of the blogs I read (including most of the intellectual blogs) are by women. 5) Nevertheless, most of the academic women I know personally (by which I mean faculty: I do read a lot of grad student blogs) don't blog at all (that I know of, and I think I would know about the ones I am close to), which for me is a pity but perhaps explainable by the fact that 6) Most of them are really busy with professional demands [see 2 for why I wish my friends would blog more], not in any way hiding their personal views, the provisional character of their newest thoughts, or the riskiness of their ideas, all of which they express elsewhere, but which I would love to read them blog about. So anyhow, that's my personal experience of the blogosphere. My suggestion was only that one possible reason women may play less on Arcade is that Arcade tends to be for academics and academic women blog less than other intellectual women do because of the demands on their time, or on the kind of time that would go into blogging. You explicitly blog elsewhere, so you're a counterexample, and I could be wrong. But I guess I'm saying that I agree with you that FB style real-name demands are intellectually stultifying and repressive. I'm just not sure how much that stultification is gendered. Truly not sure.
Natalia, I think this analysis of the dilemmas of academic blogging is spot-on, and I think your description of the value of the Blog of One's Own is inspiring (not to say, like your blog itself, envy-inducing). I hope that other readers will recognize your call to blog and be spurred to post themselves.
I don't agree with Meredith and William's implication that Arcade is too formal, or too thoughtful, for its own good. That misses the point of the enterprise in the first place, which was, I believe, at least in part to create a space for various kinds of internet publication that could have professional credibility. The presence of the Transactions and Journals, the real names, the high quality of the design and the technical operations of the site as run by the editors, by Zach, and by Roland: all of that is what makes Arcade important as an academic venture. The same goes for the practice of queueing posts, which I wholeheartedly support.
So if one important aspect of Arcade is to help make digital publication, from blogging to peer-reviewed e-journal, have professional legitimacy, a certain formality is integral to the enterprise. The idea that someone could be criticized or teased for posting something that is too well-thought or too dense with references as a blog post just runs completely counter to the, again, professional academic ethos Arcade helps to uphold for us. It also offends the values of intellectual life: smarter is better. The point is to stretch and twist formality and professionalism so that they include, somewhere on the spectrum, some of the more improvisational short forms and fragmentary genres that fit in a blog post. We already do similar things orally and on paper at conferences (position papers, roundtables, seminars), and blogging here ought to be another step in a similar direction. If that means we must indeed bear the risks and anxieties of publicity, so be it. For the same reason I have no problem at all with drawing boundaries, implicitly or explicitly, about what constitutes appropriate commenting or appropriate levels of discourse in blog posts.
Arcade could I think do with more people: we bloggers should think about colleagues at other institutions who we might try to entice into trying a blog post? And then we should make a serious effort to respond to new posters with welcoming comments (do not underestimate the power of displays of collegiality) and with posts that continue the conversation.
I regret I didn't have time to make this comment shorter. And on that last note, let me blog something now.
In the spirit of not underestimating the power of displays of collegiality, thanks for your kind words about the above post, Andrew. I think this gets right at the sorts of connections we're trying to make at Arcade, and under the Transactions rubric in particular:
While I've already copped to precirculating this post (and then mostly ignoring the feedback), though, I do want to defend it against the charge of formality, either as a problem to be overcome or as a mark of High Standards, just a bit. Meredith is quite right that there's a slight (apparent) discrepancy between what I say (bloggers should feel free to post about stupid things like pets in Halloween costumes) and what I do (cite a leading digital humanist historian and a roundtable featured in the Journal of Women's History).
But I want to argue that that discrepancy is only apparent, insofar as those thinkers (among others) are regularly on my radar and necessarily inform my thinking about academic blogging. It's not so much that the post is "well-researched" as that I'm too lazy to bother paraphrasing Marilee Lindemann, and have so opted to quote instead.
The thing about academic blogging is that academics do it. It's going to look a little academicky sometimes--even when pets in Halloween costumes are involved. Kind of the point, right?
It obviously depends on the field and the venue. Take a look at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ for a range of examples of high-quality blog posts that never could be journal articles, as well as some that very likely could be. Everyone understands that Geoff Pullum's savage dismissals of Strunk and White are partly for fun and partly undertaken with deadly serious intent. Publishing an article with that tone in a formal journal would be a quite different thing from putting it on a blog.
... of Language Log, and the way it's both academically rigorous but also non-intimidating and welcoming.
Just to clarify, I was responding to a conversation that Natalia and I were having off-line in which she expressed (and please correct me if I'm misrepresenting you) that part of the recent scarcity of posts might be that people's perfectionism is getting in the way. So I thought there was a certain discrepancy between the idea that people should feel free to be more casual about the medium, and the relatively formal and deeply-researched post I see above. So if there was any teasing, it was for that discrepancy rather than the idea of formal, well-thought out posts in general.
Andrew, I think our ideas are not that far apart at least in terms of the range of discourses that we can envision occupying Arcade, though I think your ideas are somewhat different from mine in terms of thinking of Arcade as platform for professional legitimacy. Because Arcade exists in a medium that can much more easily reach people beyond the academy, for me it has the potential to bring humanists' ideas outside of the typical boundaries of the profession, something that is much more difficult to accomplish with a conference talk, for instance. Also, one of my hopes is that just as Arcade can potentially affect people outside of the academy, it may also be possible that it can help the academy be more open to worthwhile discourses that it hasn't been able to incorporate. That's the reason why I'm not necessarily against having relatively formal posts, but I'm definitely for doing more experimentation with the medium and the idea that the raw of Arcade blog posts don't necessarily have to be so beautifully sliced all the time for them to be worth reading.
As for queuing, I do take Bill's point, and can see us putting the posting back in the hands of bloggers, at least until we're able to implement a clearer and more transparent process, as Natalia alluded to. It may be better at this point to try just asking bloggers to be mindful of recent posting rates when they put something up, and to try not to put up too many posts on the same day. Definitely something for all of us to talk about.
Thanks for adding this excellent and thoughtful post, Natalia!
I am of two minds about queuing. On the one hand, I do miss the instant feedback that comes with releasing one's own posts into the wild whenever one wants. On the other, before queuing, there were sometimes big batches of posts released almost simultaneously after lengthy blogging dry spells. This punctuated posting schedule might have had the effect of diluting reader attention. After all, it seems to me that reading a post a day for seven days is easier than reading seven posts over the course of the week, but I might be wrong. I'm not sure what the statistics show.
My experience with Arcade suggests that our readers are not, as Meredith would prefer, general readers -- though this may be changing. Rather, the posts that garner the largest number of hits and the largest response in comments discuss meta-disciplinary matters. What are we doing in English Departments? How are we going to survive the job market? What does it mean to translate research into public work?
These are all worthy topics to discuss -- arguably these are topics perfectly suited to the format of the blog -- but they are a far cry from translating our academic work into publicly consumable form. It is unclear to me what Arcade would have to do to encourage more of this kind of translation, since the site doesn't purport to be "about" any particular discipline or subdiscipline.
Finally, if you want to encourage more newbie comments you might consider adding Facebook Connect commenting system to the existing system.
I'm suppressing a screed about Facebook. Not that you're not right, Lee.
Natalia, I totally, like, loved your post (and will stop right away pretending i can write the way my students speak--not that I don't envy their total lack of awareness that, well, oral presentations might include a drop of eloquence and style). I loved it for the issues it raises and its voice: there is a real person here (ok, a persona) with guts and real life issues bogging her mind and she writes to sort them out, open them up for genuine discussion, and shake things up a little.
I, for one, would love a little more breathing room in terms of tone and style (Please introduce a list of admitted colloquialisms. Please, people, rant once in a while). When we teach (not to mention when we have a life) we adapt to our audience, engage with passion, try to find metaphors and cultural references that speak to students that were born after the 80s (gasp!). Why not when we write?
I find it odd that American Professors are the least formal of all in their interactions with fellow academics (you can walk up to Chomsky and say " Hi Noam, I'm a big fan of yours") and cling to this self-image of The Professor online, who always talks and writes es qualitas of Professor, as if we don't also have cats that shit on the floor at 4am (and wake you up to tell you so), terrible parenting anxieties over potty-training, hang-overs, laundry, bad hairdays, hormonal rushes (I'm speaking to the hot mamas out there), and, oh yeah, self-doubt, blind-spots, tempers, lapses of memory, stumbling blocks, and a hopeless backlog of books unread. I tend to think that there is a gender line here: maybe women feel they won't be taken seriously the minute they bring in "life" in the conversation ("women are the body; men the intellect" is an old cultural cliché as Nancy Huston unpacks) and men have internalized how to compartmentalize eons ago? Let's have a mama-cademics blog where we can talk about dogs and literature without apologizing for being PMS.
(Actually, maybe the gender line is not that strong after all: Montaigne was doing exactly that--write about cats and literature and his BM and lack of libido. Disembodied, polite and polished academism is only a byproduct of Descartes' dualism).
As much as i love Arcade and check it out everyday, as a blogger i have found that it talkes me at least a week to polish and publish a post (and that's when i am on vacation with no toddler around), a more likely two. How many unfinished posts because by the time they were kind of cooked, the topic itself was now cold (for me and the public)?
The time issue clearly has to do with the internalized self-censorship that comes with years of enforced academic perfectionism AND with the general self-imposed standards of the venue. When i was first posting blogs on Arcade, the site was not "on" yet, and with fewer posts to look up for cues of the expected tone and style, i felt much less intimidated. The topics I wrote about were much less academic-oriented, much more concerned with real life questions. As it happens, Zach noticed that those posts were highly circulated in the gamers' world (go figure). Which means that the audience does not have to be academics. There is always a reader in the text, and, here, a very high wal guarding the text from the uninveited readers. I wish Arcade were more open (in its content and tone) to readers from every walk of life, not just academics. Do we need to talk among ourselves also online? Is it not what we do already all year long at conferences, workshops, and when we write academic papers?
By the way, i think that even tenured faculty would love some anonymity (i know a couple who would write really fun stuff if they could). Everything published is part of your "profile" now, and the irony is that it might have stifling consequences for those whose profession is to write, for whom every published piece is also a line on their resume.
Re: WTF. I happen to have purchased the perfect tool for you: perfect to annotate book manuscript for peer-review.
...but I fear I would be tempted to use it for grading. And that would not be okay.
Thanks very much for this comment, Cécile. I actually think women are right to be cautious, since experience tells us that they're routinely punished professionally for having personal lives of any sort. In our capacities as teachers in particular, we're held to very rigid codes. It seems as though every month there's a new scandal about a teacher being fired over having revealed somewhere online that she does things besides grade essays, bake low-fat oatmeal cookies for the library bake sale, and greet eroding work conditions and personal insults with patience and understanding. I may be mistaken about this, but it's my impression that it's primarily women who meet with this fate. Derrida's book about his cat is celebrated. Christopher Smart's poem, likewise.
Self-censorship is complicated and in many cases warranted, in other words. So how can we make Arcade a comfortable space in which to think in public, without forgetting the real and very important factors beyond Arcade that affect the construction of online personae?
By the way, Lindemann's essay is part of a thoroughly worthwhile roundtable on academic feminist blogging organized by Claire Potter (Journal of Women's History 22.4 [Winter 2010]); I recommend the roundtable and, apropos of your comment, think you may find May Friedman's essay "On Mommyblogging: Notes to a Future Feminist Historian" [Muse paywall] particularly of interest.
Cecile, I love the WTF stamp. WTF and LOL have been part of my "notes on margins of books" vocabulary since a colleague introduced me to the idea. It augments my much more opaque system of asterisks, question marks, and exclamation points.
And yeah, I'm still navigating the American culture of formality in a lot of respects, more than a decade after I moved to the States from the Philippines. I was corresponding over e-mail with one of the most distinguished literary scholars in the Philippines recently, someone I've never met in person. Actually, I was inviting him to be a blogger here. He replied with something along the lines of, "Please forgive me, I'm too lazy to even check my e-mail. I don't think you can count on me to blog." We were on a first name basis by the third e-mail and eventually, he asked me what my nickname was because he found it strange that I was using my full name (practically everyone in the Philippines has a nickname; mine is Meri). So I don't know, how necessary is it for us to use scholarly formalities in this medium? I'm struggling with that problem now as I compose a new post.
Maybe now that there is a critical mass of woman academics we might have more leverage on how to change the perception of why bringing the car or the kids in the (intellectual) discussion can actually help us think things through (say, cognition, language, time and rhythms...).
But i agree that self-censorship is warranted in some sense: i only wished we would only be self-editing, rather than plain self-censoring.
thanks a lot for the link.
C.A.
Excellent post, Natalia, and excellent discussion all.
I come at this subject from a different angle. I was trained as an academic, held an academic post, then failed to get tenure. Since then I've done this and that, while maintaining an active intellectual life. The advent of the web was a godsend to me, for it opened up new lines communication. Now I could easily find out about things and stuff and contact any scholar with an email address. I was once again in the mix, though a somewhat different mix, to be sure.
It's within that context that I see my blogging. I do most of my blogging at my own blog, New Savanna, which is a mixture of various things. I could easily break it into 3 or 4 more tightly focused blogs, but why do that? (Perhaps readers would be less confused.) I post photos, personal essays (not so many of those), and material on a wide variety of topics at varying levels of sophistication and intellectual development.
I'm particularly fond of the work I've been doing on cartoons, most of which is analytic and descriptive. I regard that as being as important as anything I'm doing, but I don't see how I could do that work in a formal academic venue. As far as I know, there's no place to publish largely analytic descriptive work on cartoons. So I blog it. Most recently, a series of four posts on Porky in Wackland and eight on The Greatest Man in Siam. While some of those posts get just a tad heavy here and there, for the most part they're pretty straightforward and accessible. Anyone who's interested in that material can read those posts. And there's a substantial community of folks interested in animation that isn't being served by academia.
So, I'm a public intellectual without the reputation that seems to be part of the implicit understanding of the term.
And then there's my work on cultural evolution. Sometime in the Fall of 2009 the National Humanities Center invited me to post to their blog. My post was scheduled to appear on July 5, 2010, and it did, a long and fairly formal post, "Cultural Evolution: A Vehicle for Cooperative Interaction Between the Sciences and the Humanities." Prior to that, however, I laid some groundwork at New Savanna. I wrote a series of posts on aspects of cultural evolution that I wanted to have available, but could go into in any detail in my main post. I then referred to them in that main post.
Further, I collected all those background posts into a single document and uploaded that as a PDF to my page at the Social Science Research Network where people can download them. I did the same with my main post, to which I appended the comment I wrote to close the discussion there. None of that was formal academic work, but it came close to it. And the discussion of my post, while not as extensive as I would have liked, was certainly valuable, and visible, and more or less permanently visible, unlike most academic discussions. Taken all together, I've roughed out a book on cultural evolution, and done so in public, more or less. Whether or not I ever actually write that book, that depends on this and that, whether and when I have the time, and whether or not there's any interest in such a book. But the core ideas are out there, and they're accessible, not only to academics, but to anyone.
Bill, while the satisfaction you take in circulating your ideas is no doubt a pleasant thing, this comment thread may not in fact be the appropriate context in which to do that circulating.
I agree with Natalia. I regret having to say this publicly, but: Bill, this kind of extended self-promotion is inappropriate to this forum. You're trying to direct attention away from the topic on hand and towards yourself and your own projects. You may feel you are contributing to the discussion, but you are actually harming the discussion.
Natalia, and for that I apologize.
Still, as you and Andrew have both objected to my posting, allow me an observation or two.
It's hard for me not to feel that your objection to my self-promotion, and Andrew's objection as well, are objections made from a position of institutional privilege of a kind I do not have. Both of you have fellowships at prestigious institutions and have blogging privileges at a site sponsored by Stanford University. That certainly doesn't amount to a tenured faculty position, but it's more institutional support than I have. Those affiliations promote your work without you having to do anything except list the affiliation. I have no affiliation to list; I must, alas, be more aggressive.
Except for a brief comment by Chris Brew, I'm the only non-Arcadian who's posted anything in this conversation. More generally, Arcade in general has an air of insularity. On more than one occasion I've wondered why I comment here. I'm certainly not intimidated by the place, but I clearly don't belong. Whatever the Arcade 'community' is, I'm not in it and, so far as I can tell, never will be.
Beyond that, and speaking as someone who has been blogging for several years, blogging at Arcade is not "thinking in public". Why? Because Arcade is only nominally a public space. Functionally it is not. It IS a space of institutional privilege. This kind of thinking in that kind of institution may be problematic in various ways, but, still, it is thinking within an institutionally privileged space.
Which brings me to one of the themes in this discussion. If one of the objectives of the blog, and of Arcade in general, is to engage with the general public, then you need to change something. The general public isn't commenting here and that, on the face of it, is a sign that something is wrong with respect to that goal. I don't know what you need to change, but you do need to change. As Chris Brew mentioned, Language Log is one good example. Michael Bérubé's blog is another, though that was very much a product of Bérubé's personal sensibility. Alas, he no longer has time to maintain his blog, but it's still on the web and you can browse through it.
Finally, depending on just what you intend to put into the prospective "Interventions" feature, you might want to consider a different name. If the idea is for academics to talk to other academics about public life, then the name is fine. But if the idea is to speak to the public at large, then the name reeks of condescension, as though you will be delivering the word from on high to the masses below.
Bill, I think it's useful to separate the two issues of your commenting behavior and the real or perceived exclusivity of Arcade. In terms of the first, I don't think it's tenable for you to feel like you should be more aggressively self-promoting because you don't have an institutional affiliation, if only because I think it actually does more harm than good. I sympathize with your feelings about lack of institutional support, but I also feel like it's both important to be cognisant of norms in any community, and that the particular norm of not diverting conversations (whether online or IRL) in order to self-promote is a good one. As imperfect as the system is, I do think that one of the advantages of digital media is that the world of ideas is less exclusive now than it used to be, and ideas are much more likely to be heard with little to no institutional support. Speaking personally, I often find it hard to attend to people's ideas when I feel like they're too self-promoting, because I feel like they're less concerned with ideas themselves than how to heighten their profiles. I find it alienating, and my experience is that others do too.
Now in terms of Arcade, I do think that we're a work-in-progress, and will be for a while. The commenting rate for Conversations is misleading because we ask for real names and registration while Language Log allows anonymous comments, so we do get a lot more traffic from the outside world than the commenting would lead people to believe. It's something I definitely want to revisit, as are other questions about how we can be more inclusive and diverse. At the same time, we don't want to lose the academic focus that gives Arcade its distinctive quality, so it's a tension that we're constantly reconsidering.
As the university developed over the last half of the 20th century it became less and less of a privileged old boys club. In many ways that was good. But as the university became larger, more diverse, and more rationalized, it became less social as well, less , well, clubby, if you will. And the casual exchange of ideas has suffered:
And so:
H/t Rohan Maitzen.
What I've gotten is Tim Morton, and that's surprising.
Initially I found his posts odd, perhaps unsettling, but intriguing. So I followed them, making a comment or three. I went to his own blog, Ecology without Nature and read around in it, and from there to other blogs in the object-oriented ontology loop. At some point something clicked and, since then, Tim and I have been exchanging posts, comments, and emails.
I say this is surprising because he and I are VERY DIFFERENT thinkers. He's deeply embedded in an intellectual world I abandoned some time ago. I have no intention of returning to it, even in this current incarnation. Nor do I expect Tim to come over to my world. Still, we have things to talk about and to share.
And that's exciting. Whether we'll be at it 6 months or a year from now, who knows?
So, thanks for the connection.
I also note that Tim's blog is an excellent example of what an academic can do with a blog. He's been blogging up a storm recently with an interesting mix of short notes, longer well-considered posts, links here and there, video clips, and live blogging from conferences. And, as I've mentioned, he's one of a number of academic bloggers who are cooking up objected-oriented ontology and speculative realism in the blogosphere, in real time, day by day by hour by week.
Now, Tim's free to do this because he's got tenure and he's in demand. And the OOO blog-circuit works because it has a specific intellectual focus. Arcade, of course, is different. It has no specific intellectual focus. It has to organize around something else, an institutional mission. That institution is academic and, specifically, Stanford. Yes, the board, advisers, editors, and bloggers may be from here and there, but it takes place under Stanford's imprimatur.
It's not at all clear that the imperatives of that institution are consistent with the capabilities and norms of the blogosphere. Then there's the more general problem that academic publication has been a mess for years, with an imperative to publish material that is, for the most part, unread. So, what's the point of attempting to position an academic group blog as a station on the way to archives that don't get read?
And on that sorry note I leave you with a link to a post about Arcade that Rohan Maitzen published in The Valve over a year ago. How have things changed since then?
Get your "I have tenure and I blog" bumper stickers here.
Of course, you would have to have tenure. Car optional, I guess.
Lord Henry to Basil in the first chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In the Intro. to Lit. class I taught, my comments on this one -- she tried to found a place where people come to share knowledge and ideas, but ended up having one where people only go to have meals -- were often met with "how is that my business?" kind of puzzled look of the students. My heart sagged.
At Arcade, I don't feel myself as either an outsider or an insider, but I was (and am) enthralled by the idea that it's meant to be a "salon." Then, these days, I began to wonder whether a salon should also always be in part a "restaurant" as well. Physical nearness, usually felt by having meals (and drinks) together, seems essential if what we want is to carry conversations forward.
The country is too H-U-G-E for that!
*I'm at a loss what to say next. I'll try come back later if I can!
... of when my students and I were talking about metaphors for what it's like to be in a seminar, and one of them said that she thought of it like a potluck where the professor was the host and everyone brought a dish. I really like her analogy, more than the student's who thought it was like a reality competition show except no one gets voted off at the end of each episode!
There's a great moment in Six Feet Under (I was addicted to the series, watching them over and over again for a long time), when Brenda, touring a house she and Joe might move into if they get married, talks about a dinner party she may throw there, where "everyone sits around and discusses the nature of reality." (Now written down like this it sounds corny, but it can be surprisingly poignant when it happens in the show!)
A potluck party where everyone sits around and discusses the nature of reality would be great too!
I've experienced was the research group run by my mentor, the late David Hays. One reason it was successful was that it had a fairly specific intellectual focus, a set of ideas Hays had been developing with students and colleagues over the course of years. So, we had a common language and accomplished real intellectual work in our weekly meetings.
And then there's the way Hays ran the meetings. At the beginning everyone present was entitled to put one item on the agenda for discussion. The meeting was over when all were more or less satisfied, at least for the moment.
Then, depending on when the meeting was held, morning or afternoon, everyone helped prepare (and clean-up after) the communal meal. That was very important.
... what we were missing was the boeuf en daube.
(And now I'll stop with the modernism jokes. Probably.)
More (and more and more) modernism jokes! please?
I'll have to start looking at things from the perspective of what modernism jokes may come out of them!
This is a fascinating thread which, unfortunately, I was only able to skim because, though I do spend a lot of my time reading & writing, I am unable to do so in a more...speculative fashion. Which, it strikes me, is the the lovely & privileged way academics -- at least tenured academics! -- get to spend their time.)
There are many many good points brought up in this thread. A single person couldn't possibly comment on them all. But two points I'd like to gloss on two of them:
-- INFORMALITY // It shocks me that there is any debate about the possibility of writing formally on the web. It's simply impossible to do for any extended length of time if you hope to maintain an audience. Web content must & should & does tropism toward informality. Look no further than the obviously very intelligent line of thought in this thread from Natalia Cecire. What begins as a line of well-reasoned argument ends with a joke about French cooking.
Plain and simple, the nature of hyperlinks and computerized information glut makes the internet a hyper-competitive place for prose of any sort. There is an inherent demand in the medium that that prose be "catchy," that this prose demands people's attention, that this prose attack ideas with knives both lethal and editorial. It is not a medium for leisurely thought or ideas that develop slowly or at length.
-- THE GENERAL PUBLIC // Again, that there is any debate that the general public would have any interest in this blog in its current form is shocking to me.
Skimming the headlines of the posts currently on the home page there are lots of posts on abstractions -- "Race, Ethnicity, Brains"; "Religious Moderation"; "French Political Culture." Abstractions are not going to grab the world's attention when even extended commentary on highly specific works of art are having a hard time.
Note that traditional arts criticism has seen a relatively quick decline in the internet era. By which I mean, arts criticism in the Pauline Kael mold; hell even in the Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel mode. To put this point more bluntly: In the internet era, no critic has emerged to have the authority to take on a movie like Terrence Malick's Tree of Life at length; why do you expect you might develop an audience for rambling commentary on life itself?
Do you want to see what criticism looks like on the internet? Bang here you go: http://twitter.com/#!/discographies
This is not to say people are not interested in discovering new art; in experiencing new art. I'd argue that there is more interest in experiencing actual art than ever. But I think commentary on art, conceptual writing in general, is at a low ebb culturally. (I'm sure this is a glass half-empty view. I'd love someone to contradict me!)
To turn away from my glossing into the meat of this thread, Natalia presented the most clear-headed notion on what this blog should aspire. I want to re-state it here so everyone might savor it for a second. (Savoring other people's ideas being something that the internet is actually quite good at.)
"To me the great virtue of blogging is that one starts to see the patterns emerge, so that, for instance, I've written several throwaway posts in the past (they may have involved photos of sad-looking dogs in Halloween costumes and the tag "wtf") that have turned into a substantial research interest with deeper connections to my current book project than I at first realized."
If Arcade has any hope as a useful forum, it demands that the posters here not worry about their reputations; not worry about consequences; that they do not overthink their posting. Which, I'd argue, they currently do.
Fact is, this site is currently prissy, specialized and hermetic -- and I say this as someone who happily finds a lot intelligent writing on the web, albeit mostly about technology & business issues. I'm not computer programmer and only a self-taught businessperson yet I find reams of welcoming, smart & engaging (erm) content on those topics, content that is completely coherent to the non-specialist. Arcade is, by contrast, generally impenetrable. And I'm someone who has at least a four year tenure spent in the most ivy-laden halls of academia.
I think if posters here want to prove themselves an evolutionary step above most intellectual discourse they must embrace a different life on the web (or, apologies for the double-entendre, a second life); they must become humanists using the methodology of scientists; they must act as investigators looking for patterns in a jumble of ideas & data; they must not self-edit and fret about sharpening those ideas into well-reasoned points.
Online conversation is a debating contest timed with a stopwatch; it is not a place for academic review and second-guessing yourself.
Rant over. The internet is an excellent forum for rants. :)
Alec, thanks for taking the time to comment. You and I seem to agree about what can be productive about blogging, and I particularly agree that airing one's thoughts in public can be not only a form of engagement but also a writerly discipline.
That said, I'd like to re-emphasize what I thought was a central point of the post: there are good reasons for academics to approach blogging with trepidation and some care. When nuanced thought is your profession, you don't just want to be putting any old thing in writing--not because you're "prissy" or concerned about your image, but because ideas and the ways they're represented matter to you. Revision and peer review are in fact meaningful processes, not merely archaisms. You seem to be arguing that blogging can only function by putting any old thing in writing. I disagree.
Academics are continually accused of "overthinking." This is also known as thinking. I for one am still clinging to the rosy view that nuanced ideas--and reading things in full--aren't just the "privileged" domain of academics.
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Natalia, I just discovered your shout-out on this post when glancing at my WP stats today. I'm very flattered, and thanks for the linkback!
Thank you, Sarah, for your thoughtful response to my post. You bring up dimensions of the blogging-in-public problem (like its relation to academic rank and "impostor syndrome") that I didn't feel I had space to explore. (Here's Sarah's post again, for those who missed it.)
Grad students in particular are in an odd double bind with respect to blogging. On one hand, their status in the academy is so ambiguous, On the other hand, many of them are, if not young, academia-young, let's say, and there's a widespread myth that younger people have some kind of special cyborg existence that allows them to intuitively understand all technology and social media. (A ridiculous idea—just watch the average first-year composition student Google—but pervasive all the same.) So they're often perceived to be masters of new media but novices in their fields. So where does that leave their blogs?
Hi -- I noticed "Currer Bell" is an Arcade blogger now. It's a great handle....
Ha. It's a fake account I use for testing things like the ask-an-editor feature. I need to know what things look like to a user who has exactly the same site permissions as our real bloggers have.
That's hilarious!
Yours,
Ellis
Over at the Arcade Editors' Blog, I've just posted some more of my usual ramblings about academic blogging. I may enlarge on the issues raised in the final paragraph at a later date, since they relate to teaching and some particular problems I want to solve.
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