PZ Myers. 2004 Aug 10. Academic blogging babble. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/academic_blogging_babble/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 01.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Academic blogging babble
Meta gunk. Ignore at will.We academics really haven't figured out this blogging thing. It's a welter of confusing, conflicting drives, and everyone has a different (sometimes radically different) take on it. Last night, I was threading my way through a twisty maze of links that really made that clear.
I started here. Steven Krause is on one end of the academic blogger spectrum: he's written several articles on the theme of the "happy academic." I'm also fortunate enough to have a position I like at a university I respect with a good class of students, so I sympathize. I'm also a mostly "happy academic" (although the situation with my wife having to work 165 miles away is straining that appellation a bit). He raises several interesting points about anonymity and academic freedom and just what the heck we're doing with blogs that I'll return to, andhe also links to another academic site that led me elsewhere.
There's a whole world of weblogs by academics out there that might be better called the "stressed academic", to varying degrees. There's Playing School, Irreverently, Just Tenured, Barely Tenured, and Bitch. Ph.D., to list just a few. I suspect that they more accurately reflect the reality of academia than us rarer, more contented types. This is a difficult business. The hours are long, the expectations are high, and you are expected to be your position. I think happiness is a function of how thoroughly you identify yourself with your work, and how closely that value meets the expectations of the university. Universities, like any other institution or business, regard their employees as vehicles to further their ends. Unfortunately, universities also regard the professoriate as being "on" 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 12 months a year (even if they only pay us for 10), and that generates conflict with all those other activities we normal humans regard as important, like a social life and parenting and sitting on the deck watching the clouds roll by. There is an awkward lack of boundaries here.
Making Contact nails it:
Professor B. writes that, “I think this whole blog is one long project in talking myself out of letting academia scare me.” The pressure in academia is indeed to let one’s life be defined by the job. Read any of the newer blogs by academics which have sprung up lately and you’ll hear about fears of colleagues discovering their blogs and their identities and judging them not serious enough, not hardworking enough, not dedicated enough. What is this about? Why is it that those of us who choose JOBS in higher education aren’t entitled to lives of our own off campus, away from the library, out of scholarly journals? I look at friends and family who earn their livings in a wide range of professions other than academia, both blue and white collar, and I don’t see any of them thinking their jobs define them or that when they are not at work they should feel guilty about the free time or how they spend it.
To return to Krause's article, his writing was prompted by this worrisome story about an academic employee who was chastised for political blogging on company time. He muses a bit on the discomfort of keeping the public and private distinct, and mentions that he maintains an "'official and academic' blog and an 'unofficial and rant 'n rave' blog" and briefly touches on the issue of anonymity in weblogs. Although I can see validity in his points, I disagree with him on both.
I refuse to partition myself. I don't want to be just a biology blogger. I've got a family, I have a cat, I find some things funny, I have strongly held political opinions—that's me just as much as the fact that I'm interested in developmental biology and evolution. Weblogs are not reference works. They are social interaction tools made manifest on the internet. I'm not a fan of the idea of transplanting the narrow artificial compartments we build for ourselves in our work into a new medium that has the opportunity to widen the scope of communication. It does mean that this site is something of a hodge-podge (which has incited some criticism), but that's what I am, and that's what we all are: a mess of different ideas that change all the time.
The lack of boundaries in my weblog may not fit well with my complaint that academia has an awkward lack of boundaries, but the advantage here is that I get to assert those other aspects of my life. I can't go to class or to a faculty seminar and announce that today, I'm going to talk about my kids…but I can here. Maybe it bores readers, but one of my self-appointed missions is to let everyone know that professors are people, too. Boring, weird people, maybe, but at least that's better than being known as the robot who gives dry lectures on gene interactions.
As for anonymity, I've obviously rejected that here in my personal case, but I actually think that it would have some strong virtues in many situations. One reason I'm not anonymous is that I thought it would be futile. I like tinkering with computers, I'm doing all of this on my own personal server in my physical space, with an IP address assigned by my university, with a domain name registered to me—I'd be trivial to trace. Another is more significant: I write about biology and current research here, and one of the things I dun into my students is that they can't use web sources that have anonymous authorship in matters of science. I just couldn't bring myself to make the effort to write up a summary of Hox genes, for instance, that I'd have to tell my own students wasn't credible because it was unsigned. It was simply selfishness and arrogance.
Otherwise, though, I have a lot of respect for anonymity on the web. Anonymous bloggers are doing something very pure, building a reputation on the strength of their words alone, and not trading on the false authority of their employing institution or their degree. What I read I read because I like the sense of the words, not because I know the author has a Ph.D. from Ivy League U, so I have no objection to anonymous authors, other than that it takes a lot of time and effort to build credibility from scratch.
Academics • Weblogs • Others • 7 Trackbacks • Other weblogs • Permalink
-
There might be one small advantage to having an obscurantist, jargon-laden, bio-only blog: no more dealing with the Susans of the world, who blithely state, "I don't know much about mathermaticism, but I'm darn certain that evolutiohooeybalooey is the devil's own theory."
#: Posted by Jim Anderson on 08/10 at 10:13 AM
- As a happy-academic myself, I have mixed feelings about my stressed-academic colleagues. On the one hand, it can be an extremely stressful lifestyle, and one of the worst features of the system is how everyone is constantly being evaluated in an implicit competition with everyone else. Those pressures are very real. On the other hand, there are far more people who want these positions than there are jobs for them, so the competition is kind of inevitable. Anyone with an academic job has every right to spend time thinking about other things; and if, as a result, they don't do as well as somebody else, they may be out of a job. But that, to me, is exactly the beauty of the tenure system; once you reach a certain point, you have more freedom to do what you want. Sadly, by the time that point is reached, you're left with a lot of very stressed folks, who maybe don't enjoy their freedom (or use it productively) as much as they should.
-
Jim: that's fine and dandy, but if Susan (and other creationist and ID cranks) are the byproduct of promoting science to the public - a job which needs to be done (and Dr. Myers does it pretty damn well through the weblog) - so be it. That's one of the best things about academic blogs; the ability to hear what professors have to say.
Which is why I think we should push hard to get two or three really well known academics from different disciplines to run weblogs that talk both generally and specifically about different subjects.#: Posted by Tom Morris on 08/10 at 10:59 AM -
Tom, don't worry. I'm not calling for Dr. Myers to turn into a jargon-spewing academic; my comment was meant purely in jest. I love, love, love his blog, and I laugh, laugh, laugh every time Susan crashes in with her bizarre spiels. "A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring."
#: Posted by Jim Anderson on 08/10 at 02:31 PM
-
I just wanted to comment, since my blog is mentioned here in the context of stressed (implied unhappy? although admittedly that would be Krause's term) academics, that I don't necessarily think I'm really stressed or unhappy.
I like my job. A lot. I like the people I work with. (Can't think of a single gripe about that on my blog. Only gripe I recall is about a grad student who seems underprepared, and it is in the context of wondering what should be done about this)
Although it isn't perfect, I like the other parts of my life, too. In addition to my job, I have friends (near and far; admittedly more far), I date, I have hobbies, I get regular exercise. I don't work a ridiculous number of hours most weeks.
On occasion I feel stressed (days when I have too much to do and have procrastinated for too long), and I will express that. Other times I delight in what I'm thinking about or getting done. I'd consider each post representative of a moment in time unless other indicators are given.
The thing is, although I do feel happy and I do like my job and generally like my personal life (if nothing else, I like the person who I am), I find it useful to sometimes blog and communicate with others about the places where job and regular life collide, the things I worry about from time to time, the choices that I make and the reasons for them, etc. The reason for the pseud isn't related to being happy or unhappy -- I'm actually quite honest with folks who ask me IRL about this stuff -- but more that I don't want complete strangers who see my name to google me and read this stuff rather than my papers/professional thoughts and I don't want to risk students and colleagues with whom I don't want to share personal details potentially lurking in my blog. One big reason is the "moment in time" thing. I've noticed in the past that if I say "I'm unhappy" and mean that I'm unhappy right now, some folks will think I mean that I'm consistently unhappy. And that's not true.
Anyway, enough of my rant. It was a pleasure to read your thoughtful entry on personal/private blogging and the anon/pseudo/real issue.#: Posted by profgrrrrl on 08/10 at 02:39 PM -
Oh, you can comment here even if I don't mention you!
I think my comment was more in the context of Krause's idea that all those anonymous blogs are full of gripes and complaints. I didn't see it that way, myself—it's more that the stuff we tend to talk about are the conflicts and interesting stuff that happens, and it's easy to snark that someone wouldn't be so free to discuss difficulties if they weren't anonymous.
One other good reason to be anonymous: I've been getting more and more comments in the real world about this blog. I have no idea how to reply when I meet someone who says they read this thing regularly, and I try not to even think about it when I'm writing. This is what I say when I'm doing a kind of public monolog, and it isn't stuff that is easily communicated in a conversation. -
What a refreshing attitude you have re: anonymous or pseudonymous blogging. If there's one constant online (I mean, aside from Godwin's Law), it's that in any debate between someone posting under their real name and a person posting under a pseudonym, eventually the real-name poster will play the "At least I have the guts to post under my real name" card, which is sheer nonsense.
I started out blogging strictly pseudonymously, and now I've pretty much conclusively "come out of the closet" since I basically reached a point where I was hedging too much on when I went into personal stuff. It's kind of hard to get the "community" feeling of Blogistan when you're using a pseudonym -- but that's just me.
Anyway, I have yet to find anyone in "real life" -- what I like to call "physical space" -- who knows about the blog, even though my name is out there and a simple Google search of my name will turn up the blog very quickly. It makes me wonder, for instance, if I'm the only person I know who regularly Googles the names of coworkers and acquaintances. -
Hey, we all know that the real reason you use a pseudonym is that you're on the lam from John Law.
Although that cute little kid I saw on your page the other day does run counter to type... -
"Weblogs are not reference works. They are social interaction tools made manifest on the internet. I'm not a fan of the idea of transplanting the narrow artificial compartments we build for ourselves in our work into a new medium that has the opportunity to widen the scope of communication."
I LOVE this. Thanks. I also think you are right about the "stressed" academic thing.