coffee grounds

Should you blog?

The topic du jour on some academic blogs is a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article by "Ivan Tribble" (Who decides on Chronicle pseudonyms? They always sound so unreal, as if they generate the first and last names randomly and separately without regard for their euphony when paired) that argues blogging is a net negative for people on the job market.

Tribble's article has been thoroughly deconstructed in the links above, so there may not be much new to say.

I do like the irony of a pseudonymous piece in the Chronicle asking "What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses."

The same goes double for many of the Chronicle's pseudonymous complainers. I'm unashamed to say that the pseudonymous articles in the Chronicle have many of the same demerits as blogs, because I have the inkling of a view that they are all written by the same person.

Perhaps the Chronicle just has a very firm copy editor for the pseudonymous contributions to the "First Person," but a lot of them read with the same tropes and tone. It's like the questions advice columnists get -- they just sound a little too similar to be genuine.

Many of the articles in the Chronicle's First Person section are written as a tragedy. There is no room for romance, comedy, and certainly not satire. Not intentional satire or comedy, that is.

The common theme of a Chronicle First Person tragedy, like Ivan Tribble's piece is the dashed expectation. About one third of the way through these pieces the writer details the moment of their realization that s/he was suffering from an illusion, an idealization of the world. That illusion was cruelly shattered by the way the academic job market works. The point of their pieces is to save others from such cruel realizations, by letting them in on a secret.

The revealed secret is another common element in these Chronicle pieces. They convey a tone of "I have seen inside the guild, and I can tell you just this much. You can't even imagine what else I know now."

This is, to say the least, a little problematic. Since these Chronicle pieces are pseudonymous the author's authority rests entirely on the logic of their argument and evidence. To be fair, the Chronicle authors seem to be constrained to about 1500 words. Still, they often move a little too rapidly from "I was a naive, idealistic young thing," to "I can dispense pithy wisdom on this topic." It really does strain the reader's credulity.

It doesn't help that this amazing transformation from naïveté to sage adviser to the world often occurs in the course of a single job search (whether as candidate or committee). Of course, once you're tenured you can probably safely publish in the Chronicle under your own name and damn most of the consequences.

Nor does it help the pseudonymous authors that their pieces are largely anecdotal. A sense of the scale of the problem they faced, and whether their experience was representative, often goes missing in the Chronicle.

These elements are all present in "Ivan Tribble's" essay on the applicant bloggers.

Initial naïveté about the subject? Yes. Tribble and his colleagues were clearly unaware of the diversity of blogs and the purposes to which they were put.

Tragedy and dashed expectations? Yes, in spades. See, here it is, the high initial expectations: "Don't get me wrong: Our initial thoughts about blogs were, if anything, positive." followed a couple of paragraphs later by "Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger's tormented soul."

Letting readers in on the secret the author has just learned? Yes. "You may think your blog is a harmless outlet," Tribble writes. (emphasis added)

A missing sense of scale and representativeness? Yes. How convenient for Tribble that the shortlist contained both Professor Shrill and Professor Bagged Cat, whose blogs were opinionated and emotional. How convenient, too, that Professor Turbo Geek's blog illustrates that job candidates might have significant outside interests.

Blogging is young and it's entirely possible that a genuine job search might turn up only bloggers who write about other interests, personal observations, and personal torments. But there are so many examples of non-anonymous blogs by graduate students and un-tenured faculty that are used for serious writing about research, that you have to wonder how deeply Tribble and colleagues delved into the range and realm of academic blogs.

I've said before that the new word, "blog," obscures the continuity with other forms of communication. Tribble's cautionary tale to bloggers is really not about blogging, it's about Google.

Blogging software does allow people to easily post things to the world, and, sure, the ease of that process may let some people put out half-formed opinions and rants. But to call these "unfiltered" as Tribble does is misleading exaggeration. Inadequately filtered, sure. But not unfiltered. A blog is always a partial, selective, and constructed online persona.

As "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast" says, there's an easy solution for that problem. Think before you post. Imagine whether you'd say that at a party with people you'd never met. Or, imagine saying what you're writing in the apparently more casual atmosphere of a dinner or coffee with a job search committee, where many a candidate has slipped up.

But, really, it's Google, not blogging that is the issue here. This blog ranges from topic to topic, a mixture over time of serious academic musings and drafts of arguments, commentary on contemporary politics, observations on cultural differences, and running.

Even without the blog, anyone with a search engine would have been able to find that I had put drafts of work on the internet, that I had authored several little essays interpreting New Zealand and the United States to each other, that I had been involved in New Zealand's republican movement, and that my other passion was long distance running. I also occasionally wrote letters to the editor on current politics, though these predate any New Zealand newspaper's move onto the internet.

I suspect that I'm not alone in having a somewhat copious internet oeuvre without really trying. People that go onto graduate school and then apply for academic jobs have a large overlap with the kind of people who are interested in contemporary events and affairs, sign online petitions, get involved in politics and community organizations, write for the student newspaper, and have a hobby or sport on the side.

Anyone interested in googling job candidates can find out all about their candidates other interests, even if the candidate does not have a blog. Indeed, I wonder if having a blog might in time be an advantage, precisely because it focuses your internet presence. That intemperate 1998 column in the "Small College Small Campus Paper" that Clinton should share a cell with Ken Starr, and Hillary should be appointed President? Lost on page 17 of the Google search results. Your more recent musings on how the draft of your dissertation might look? An intelligent observation about the next Presidential election? Easy to find on your blog. Which would you rather they read?

To me it seems that the gist of Tribble's article is that the search committee was shocked (shocked) to learn that their candidates had outside interests and emotions that might prevent candidates from spending 14 hours a day on research or teaching.

There's nothing new about this attitude on academic search committees -- it has after all been reported in many First Person columns in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

A friend of mine--blogless--writes and publishes poetry as a hobby. You might think that in the humanities this kind of other interest would be seen as a useful complement to scholarship, making them a truly cultured person. Not so much. Some faculty have advised my friend that the poetry might be seen negatively by a search committee. After all, if they can find the time to write poetry and a dissertation, they can't have been serious about their studies. What if this scholar-poet were offered a faculty job, and then decided that really they wanted to be a poet instead of a professor?

A concern about blogging is just the re-expression of age-old concerns that job candidates might not be slaves to the academic galley, and might have personality "quirks" that don't quite fit into the department as it currently exists.

Daniel Drezner advises graduate students to "think very, very, very carefully about the costs and benefits of blogging under one's own name (emphasis original)." I'm not sure that I thought very, very, very carefully about blogging under my own name; perhaps very carefully. It was a while ago that I started this.

It will also be quite a while (four years, at least) before I'm on the academic job market. I think it's likely that in that time the multi-purpose, multi-topic academic blog will be better understood by search committees. And if they still have anxieties about blogs, they'll probably still have anxieties about other indications of outside interests and well-formed personalities.

Posted by robe0419 at July 11, 2005 12:56 PM | TrackBack