So it's with the last post in mind that I finally comment on the recent Chronicle piece about the dangers of academic blogging. Written by the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble, the piece has already received a saturating level of coverage by some very intelligent and witty writers. Collin Brooke, Planned Obsolescence's KF, and Jeff Rice, for example. I'll just agree with everything they say, and turn my attention to one little paragraph near the beginning of the piece:
Don't get me wrong: Our initial thoughts about blogs were, if anything, positive. It was easy to imagine creative academics carrying their scholarly activity outside the classroom and the narrow audience of print publications into a new venue, one more widely available to the public and a tech-savvy student audience.
My complaint here has to do with the idea of the creative academic. Let's ask some questions of it. First, why is it that the academic becomes "creative" by carrying their scholarly activity outside the classroom? Isn't there a way that an academic can be creative without translating their scholarly output into easier consumption for the general public? I'm sure Ivan doesn't mean to make this the only condition for creativity, but as it's written, it's a somewhat facile attempt at straw support. Second, how is it that Ivan and his colleagues seem unaware of Google Scholar, whereby the limited and narrow audience of print communications no longer seems so narrow or so limited? I know it's obvious that Ivan isn't the most tech-savvy of professors - the pseudonym hints at tech skills earned during or shortly after Star Trek: TOS, and I'm doubting much happening at even the TNG level - but come on, with library databases increasingly robust and often storing searchable full text files, Ivan has to have been really ignoring the reference section of his/her school library. Third, and most importantly, what qualities can we ascribe to the ambiguous and supposedly positive thoughts that first characterized Ivan and his colleagues' understanding of blogs? Whatever these thoughts were, they must have been what defined the thinking of the "creative" academic. To me, this signifies the paucity of Ivan's thinking more so than any of the subsequent anecdotes by which the search committee dismissed blogging applicants. Blogging is not in and of itself a source of creativity; it is a means of dissemination and archiving that necessarily implicates the means by which one communicates, writes, or argues. To think that maintaining or publishing a blog necessarily connotes creativity is to basically infer value from the novelty of a technological device, rather than to infer creativity from its application. It shows no knowledge or even willingness to learn about blogging as a particular medium, and little indication that Ivan would even understand that the medium has a specificity worthy of attention.
The negatives that follow the above excerpt, the random reasons by which Ivan and the search committee use their blogs dismiss certain applicants from the pool, can be read in the same vein, only now they have knowledge of specific bloggers by which to contest their naive assumptions about the generic nature of blogging. The conclusion isn't nearly as disappointing as the starting ground, and we shouldn't really be surprised by the results. Start with the flaw, end with the flaw.
That Ivan published in a manner seeking anonymity shouldn't be surprising - after abdicating the responsibility of thinking, he might as well abdicate the responsibility of claiming authorship.