I know what you mean about the instinctive contrarianism or contentiousness of some bloggers. With academic bloggers, I think it has a lot of sources. Some of it is the general culture of blog-commentary: so many thoughtful blogs have nevertheless attracted lots of trolls in their comment sections, particularly the political ones. Once a blog-comments section gets a particular culture or feel, it tends to visit that on all new respondents. But peculiar to academics is also a sort of adversarial style that I think we’re trained to as graduate students–you know, where people sit around and rubbish a book. Maybe that’s faded some since I was in grad school, I dunno. Plus as you say there’s a certain amount of sniffing around people’s credentials, not just in blogging but in all sorts of academic contexts. You get a completely different reaction when you say the same something as an associate professor than you did as a graduate student, though that’s also discipline specific–you have to earn your chops all over again when you go off and work in a new disciplinary context, which I find unbearably tedious.

What else makes me sad? I’ve wanted to post more in a spirit of inquiry than one of conviction – in part because I don’t always know what I think, and want to hash it out by tentatively posing an idea and looking for useful replies. Apparently that’s not the way you do it, though; there seems to be much more of an “argument as challenge”, riposte, and counter-riposte, type of blog posting behavior that is preferred.

Do you find this structure to exist, and if so, does it work well, do you think?

Maybe it’s not just the nature of academic work that’s involved here, but equally the nature of academic argument that creates a kind of avenue for some of us, but a roadblock for others. For instance, I always have preferred the inquiry mode; while in law school (eons ago) I found the challenge/argument mode much more rewarded. The world of a blog (and its comments) is pretty much determined by the preferences of its initiator/moderator, I would suppose. But in the subset of academic blogs, wouldn’t it make sense that the favored model would be the one preferenced by the discipline?

For me, the problem is partly that this doesn’t (solely, at least) constitute “intelligent conversation”. Not if I’m treated dismissively, or even being accused of being a “troll”, when I try respectfully to listen, talk, but yes, sometimes disagree. That’s about as counterproductive as some of the slanging matches that occurred in first year con law. (And heaven knows, I wouldn’t want to go through that again!)

I wanted to write something about how difficult all this is when there often aren’t the usual ways of establishing mutual trust and confidence in each others’ motives online. Blogging, even in academia, seems to entail a certain suspiciousness among some; and occasionally some openness (sadly, also sometimes ill-rewarded) among others. What gives rise to the difference? Why are even some of the most sympathetic writers – whose thoughts I can appreciate, and therefore whose scorn is so very hard to take – uncompromisingly closed-off with respect to people they don’t “know”?

I’d welcome the chance to hear about your ideas for the Academic Reformation, if and when you ever feel up to it.

Look, one of the beefs I have with graduate school and academic training is that it fosters both by design and by accident a pervasive, panoptic sense of being observed. It’s a paranoid culture, and I think many (including me) enter it with no sense of that at all.

One might protest that all workplaces have this paranoia. But academia has it both because of an aggressive use of confidentiality strictures but more because the stakes are so final in relation to the time investment. You sink six to eight years into training for a career which is all or nothing at all (usually). You get the great (or not so great) job and you can keep it if you get tenure, but if you don’t, unless you’re in a select number of fields, it’s back to Go and you don’t collect $200.00. If you lose your job in an ordinary office space (allusion deliberate), well, what the hell, there’s more where that came from and your skills are relatively mobile.

So we’re already watching each other obsessively. Now comes blogging. Blogging looks like what a lot of people drawn to academia were dreaming of: intelligent conversation with passionate people who care about ideas, a chance to produce knowledge collectively while also preserving your individual insight, and so on. That it should be yanked back inside the stifling tent of paranoia by the Ivan Tribbles of the field feels cruel. All the more so when you realize, as you have, that this potentially includes email-identified comments on blogs, and so on.

Academia is just itching for a Reformation. If some of us hesitate to tack our theses up on the door, it’s partly because we know that the Horowitzes of the world are just waiting to seize on reasonable statements about strong reform and twist them to seriously negative ends. But this is work that if you don’t do it on your own terms, it’s going to be done to you by others.

I posted fairly frequently on the comment boards of a few blogs in my area of interest. I did use a “tag”, but did not realize that on some of the blogs my name was retrievable as a link behind the tag. I had used my own email address, which gives my full name. Stupid of me, I (now) know. I’m sure this will come back to haunt me when I go on the market in a few years’ time. Indeed, I have already received quite a bit of nasty email in my inbox. I am sure I should have expected it.

There are probably many such cautionary tales. And it’s easy in these cases to say “but you should have known – it was obvious”. As we (some of us, anyway) become more familiar with blogging, I think it’ll be fair game to say that. And admonishments to young scholars to manage one’s identity and online presence may also, perhaps, be less patient and kind and thoughtful than yours. Perhaps rightly so.

For the moment, though, I only want to add to your thoughts by pointing out that there are more places online than just in blogs themselves that can be searched, judged, and found wanting. Even when you are trying to learn, to think, and to converse, others may be appraising you and your words. That’s kind of a sad thought, to me: I’d believed that I could have instructive interactions without having to worry about such things.

I guess I feel a bit burned, and maybe that has tainted my perspective, though.

Well, OK, but it seems to me that the same thing could be said about *publishing*–which is not to say that it isn’t true about publishing or at least widely felt to be true–hence all that writing which manages to not quite take a stand on issues of scholarly importance. But our whole enterprise is in a lot of trouble if we become afraid to be opininated (which is not the same as closed-minded) about scholarly issues.

In this sense, blogging is just a subset of the way you manage all of your research and intellectual interests as a junior scholar. I’m quite certain that the research topic of my first book hurt me in two searches I was in–and helped me a lot at Swarthmore, because there were two people here who for different reasons understood why it was an interesting and important topic.

The only bad thing about blogging in this calculus is that it’s likely that the individuals who will be most impressed by the fact that you blog are either junior people or weirdos like me who have a hard time convincing their colleagues about such matters. But that may be changing.

I think this is spot-on. If you’re interested in making a name for yourself as an academic, and consider how you blog accordingly, then you need not fear the Tribbles of the word. If, however, you’re interested in building a reputation as a person, then you run into problems. Granted, there’s no way to disentangle these two aspects of a public persona, but this is a case in which approach counts because it’s manifest in the results. Another thing to consider: keep the blog up and running, but when you hit the market or are looking to hit the market, delete or “unpublish” the posts that don’t help your market-value but leave up the ones that do. There’s no reason to present a carefully groomed image of yourself as a candidate and not extend it to all those facets of your life the hiring committee could possibly investigate.