Kieran Healy

Scholar Bloggers

The Chronicle article on academic bloggers has just been published. I’m quoted in it a couple of times, the first time saying “One person’s ‘distributed journalism’ is another person’s echo chamber,” and the second time saying that this blog is not the main focus of my career. (Although I have considered listing my posts as publications on my vita. I mean, the ones with comments are practically peer-reviewed.)

I don’t think I was explicitly disagreeing with Julian Sanchez when I made the comment about echo chambers. I suppose my intuition was that the early excitment about the revolutionary potential of blogging has calmed down a bit as the practice has grown and differentiated. While we have good examples the “death by a thousand cuts” approach to fact checking, of the sort Julian discusses, there’s plenty of ranting as well. It’s a tricky empirical question.

The article is well worth reading, though. Many of the usual suspects have interesting things to say, as you might expect. I hope Jacob Levy takes it the right way when I say that this sequence of quotes from the article made me smile:

Jacob T. Levy … explained his reluctance to commit to blogging: “I’m worried about public-intellectualitis … At least so far, there are no financial returns to blogging. Much bad public-intellectualism seems to come about because of the temptation to (to put it bluntly) sell out.” (Mr. Levy subsequently abandoned his solo blog, and is now one of the authors of the Volokh Conspiracy.) …

For some people, however, blogging itself is a direct form of career development … Mr. Levy and Mr. Drezner have each recently begun to write columns for The New Republic’s Web site because an editor there noticed and admired their blogs.

I am fairly new to this blogging business (only a few months), but clearly some folks get a bit too breathless in their estimations of the “revolutionary” nature of the medium.

Still, I think that the Chronicle piece is correct, blogs provide a nice middle-ground between serious research and chatting with one’s colleagues in the office. They provide an outlet for all of us who have a lot that we want to say, and the luxury of saying it to people who come to read our sites of their own volition.

For me, it has been somewhat like thinking out loud, but with some responsibility to make cogent arguments (or such is the goal, anyway).

The nice thing about blogging, is that there actually is a more tolerant atmosphere online amongst academics of differing ideological points of view than their tends to be at the typical professional meeting (or even around the office, in many cases).

It has also encouraged me to take a stab at column writing—something I had wanted to do for some time, but never got around to it. I haven’t made the New Republic yet, but have had a few column published. :)

Ultimately, the typical professor likes to talk, and this just gives us another outlet!

===(Although I have considered listing my posts as publications on my vita. I mean, the ones with comments are practically peer-reviewed.)

I only wish the last couple papers I’ve gotten to review were as interesting as most of your posts.

[rim shot]

From the Chronicle article:
“The development of the blog lowers the cost of publishing almost to the vanishing point. …It really does help realize the promise of the Internet as a place for wide-ranging public discussion.”

I don’t understand what all the fuss is about.

USENET, which has been around since before the Internet, is the ultimate group blog, and like a weblog it emphasizes content over presentation. It is also a more permanent medium.

Archived mailing lists have been providing a cheap personal soapbox for years.

While weblogs can be useful adjuncts to websites (and a good way to attract traffic), there seems to be nothing revolutionary about them.

Heh.

Ralph –
One advantage of blogging over usenet is that someone owns the page. Discussion is therefore inherently moderated, both as to tone and topicality. Flame wars are fewer and this encourages a rather more tolerant and thoughtful atmosphere than most usenet threads. And bloggers get more feedback on how popular/influential their post is – linkbacks, followups and comments act like a sort of citation index. Combined, all this means that the average standard of posting on logs is simply higher than that on usenet.

There are other advantages too – principally accessibility and ease of cross-linking to other blogs/threads.

Good points Derrida Derider.

Overall, I think that weblogs are a useful innovation and combine the good features of personal websites with those of discussion forums, but I think that their revolutionary nature is over hyped. They are at best evolutionary. Internet hyperbole would have us believing that effective Internet discussion never existed before the weblog craze.

The main problem I weblogs is that they are transient, like the rest of the web. If Kieran Healy allowed the domain registration to lapse, all posts and followup comments would vanish. What are the odds of this comment being here in five or ten years? I would say very small. On the other hand, I can search Google Groups for entire threads dating back to 1981, and there are other comprehensive archives of USENET that are available, and if one is using a newsreader, one can easily keep an offline copy of posts that are useful, without the danger of them being yanked or going stale, like URLs. And feedback is built into discussion forums like USENET, rather than added in as an afterthought through trackbacks.

I think that the usefulness of blogs is of the same general type as the usefulness of e-mail: that they provide a middle ground between two traditional communications media.

The usefulness of e-mail, in my opinion, is that it provides a medium of communication that falls somewhere between the telephone and traditional written correspondence on the ease-of-use scale, AND that also falls somewhere between the two on the thoughtfulness/quality scale. Paper letters could be well thought-out and deep, but were difficult to write and thus not written very often. Telephoning was easy and thus widely used, but also shallow, disorganized and lacking in any archival properties. The way most people use e-mail is that it allows them to be more organized and thoughtful than with phone calls, but that it also allows them to write a lot more e-mails than anyone was ever able to write paper letters.

Similarly, blogs provide a middle ground between high quality, but unresponsive and untimely traditional opinion media (including web opinion media), and the low quality, but very interactive and timely usenet world.

Blogs won’t replace either traditional opinion media or usenet, because those media still have qualities that make them well suited to certain types of content. But blogs will find a comfortable niche in between, and perhaps in so doing steal some content from traditional opinion media and from usenet that never really fit in.

In terms of stealing content from traditional media, I’m thinking about stuff like what a particular opinion writer thinks of a hot current article or idea. This kind of thing doesn’t do well in traditional opinion columns, because its too obscure and small in scope, but on blogs it works well. In terms of stealing content from usenet, I’m thinking about all of the traditionally very thoughtful, well-researched usenet posters, who now have a more visible and calm forum for their work than usenet.

Academic Blogs

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on academic weblogs. My blog neighbor Brian Weatherson is mentioned under “From Nascar to Ugly Robes: Some Academic Blogs to Note”. PS Kieran Healy, who is also featured in the article, has s…

A Scholar-Blogger and his Peers

Kieran Healy redefines (or perhaps refines?) the notion of peer review: “(Although I have considered listing my posts as publications on my vita. I mean, the ones with comments are practically peer-reviewed.)”…

Blogging in Universities

Oliver Wrede noted that there are three major universities with weblog initiatives, as of May 2004: Harvard University: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ Stanford University: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/itss/projects/blog/ University of Minnesota: http:/…

A Scholar-Blogger and his Peers

Kieran Healy redefines (or perhaps refines?) the notion of peer review: (Although I have considered listing my posts as publications on my vita. I mean, the ones with comments are practically peer-reviewed.)…