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November 28, 2005
post-turkey reflections
Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Still pondering how we might want to proceed here.
We just wanted to check in on how people's thinking has progressed over the past few weeks. Various threads have been picked up elsewhere in promising ways. Daniel Anderson, an english professor at UNC who we've talked with a bit, linked to our discussions here on the Techrhet listserv:
There is a good deal of momentum and conversation related to the role of public intellectuals taking place around the Institute for the Future of the Book. See their Sidebar blog. A lot of that energy seems to be directed toward thinking through models for peer review and cooperative archiving/legitimizing of these new forms but concepts such as the reputation economy associated with these efforts seem to overlap with notions of ethos.
We're curious to know what else is brewing, and in hearing from everyone about other related conversations you may be having elsewhere. There is no reason to confine this to the original meeting participants. Anyone who hasn't yet taken a look at John Holbo's proposal on The Valve for a Thinkr-esque initiative should do so (and a similar project is getting underway here). We're definitely interested in something like this happening, but are unsure whether it is the right sort of thing for us to sponsor directly. In some ways, we feel that a project of this kind will have the best chances of success if it arises organically among academics, with us just providing sympathetic support and consultation. Then again, we recognize the problem of funding. We're interested to hear reactions to John's proposal and any other ideas you might be toying with.
Two concerns have come up repeatedly in our discussions. One is how to raise the status of blogging as a scholarly activity within the academy. The second is how to use blogging, or something like it, to connect academics to the public sphere. As a sort of in-between institution, we think the second area is probably where we have the most to offer. As much as we would like to see blogging taken more seriously by tenure review committees, we feel the importance of scholarly blogging is in large part a function of its slightly oppositional stance. So independence and connection with a general readership are to us the paramount objectives: "marshaling and re-deploying intellectual capital." We're still thinking about this "Magnum" collective idea, as well as possible ways that academics might tie their blogs to specific research or book projects.
These are just some thoughts. What else is cooking?
Posted by ben vershbow at 1:32 PM | Comments (2)
November 22, 2005
The Dean Reads a Blog
I am going to take our new dean on a tour of the educational blogging world tomorrow. Of the teacher blogsThe teachers and focused educational researchers. Oh, and the policywonks and teachers' unions with blogs.
The point of this tour is to show her the extent of the conversation--some of which is political, some of which talks about pedagogy, some about research and student outcomes. Unlike some other disciplines in the university, we in education have the funny marriage with politics and practice. So any solution has to be negotiated in terms of research, outcomes, practice, policy, and public support.
I'm trying to explain why practice and research and outcomes need to be viewed more tightly, and as a triangle that suggests practice can help drive research, that can help identify practice--all of which can lead to better student outcomes.
Anyway, this is a kind of rambling way to say I'm thinking about ways to draw some faculty and other intellectuals into a more direct dialogue with the public, practitioners, and policymakers. I hope it goes well. I think it will. I'll probably write about it on my weblog...
PS. My dean interested in digital, interactive textbooks.
Posted by jenny demonte at 6:15 PM | Comments (0)
November 19, 2005
"will work for whuffie"
On The Valve, John Holbo just posted a long proposal for a Thinkresque collective with a P2P review system. Synthesizes a lot of what was discussed at the meeting and in our "next steps" post.
Also see John's response to Boynton's academic blogging article in Slate.
And here's ours from if:book.
Posted by ben vershbow at 1:53 PM | Comments (0)
November 16, 2005
next steps
this is a long post.
the first part is me thinking out loud; trying to understand how to contextualize the institute's effort in this area.
the second part is an exchange between ben and me. ben laid out several different scenarios (black); i commented (blue) and ben replied (red).
this is meant to spur discussion, not cut it off. all options are open.
please chime in. and for those of you with a login, feel free to go into the post itself and enter comments at specific points in the text - just make sure you identify yourself (other colors welcome too).
(should we be using a wiki for this?)
b.
Academic Blogging - a crucial new form of intellectual discourse
when people ask us what the institute for the future of the book is "about" we start by explaining that we use the word "book" metaphorically - that books are the vehicle humans use to move big ideas around society, the mechanism of intellectual discourse which is relentlessly shifting from print to screen. our mission is to try to understand this evolution well enough that we might even be able to influence it in ways beneficial to present and future society.
we are in a very interesting and crucial time of transition. at the very moment when we face gigantic problems -social and economic inequality on a national and global scale, dramatic long-term threats to the environment, technological shifts of unimagined proportions and consequences, we find ourselves STUCK - unable to carry on a meaningful debate about whither humanity.
the dominant media forms have largely been colonized by corporate interests. we need new media forms wielded in new ways by actors fresh on the stage to re-invigorate discussion.
much attention is focused on the internet which itself is poised to go in one of two diametrically opposed directions - either a mechanism for fostering non-hierarchical communication from many to many or a new top-down broadcast medium dominated by the same mainstream media which is part of the problem and shows no signs of being part of the solution any time soon.
blogging is a very interesting new form - giving power to individual voices which has not been seen since the beginning of the modern press where each "news outlet" was often the output of a single writer with access to a printing press.
one of the most significant developments within the burgeoning blogosphere is the emergence of experts from the academy who are using blogs to talk to a much wider audience outside the university. commenting on this at a recent meeting john mohr, a sociologist at UC, Santa Barbara, suggested that this phenomena of professors moving beyond the walls of the academy to share their knowledge on key issues, blogs should be seen as a crucial attempt to marshall and deploy intellectual capital in new ways for the longterm benefit of society.
academic bloggers face two powerful opposing forces - on the one hand the conservatism of the academy resists accepting this vital new form of sharing knowledge and on the other, mainstream media is trying to coopt these powerful individual voices so they are rendered relatively safe and harmless.
Scenarios
A distribution point for all academic bloggers
What would this be? Well first, as Manan has suggested, we could simply establish a central index of academic blogs - an aggregate of the blogrolls of Crooked Timber, Cliopatria and Pharyngula, plus many others that people submit. Spread the word and provide a simple moderated submission form where other academics can add their blog. This is useful first step at carving out a more defined space for academics in the blogosphere.
while i think this is a wonderful idea and that someone should do it, i'm doubtful of its relationship to our primary goal of encouraging capable academics to become public intellectuals via blogging and the related goals of raising the academic status of blogging and protecting the independence of academic bloggers.Agreed. We can just encourage folks to do this themselves. Manan and/or John Holbo might be able to pull it together.
Then there is the possibility of Thinkr -- a Flickr, or Revver, for blog posts. A collective archive with a tagging system where people can showcase exemplary blog writing. My instinct is that for this to work, it should consciously establish a sub-genre -- the "note" perhaps -- the kind of blog post that stands outside the 24-48-hour news cycle and deserves a longer shelf life.
my sense is that social software sites such as flickr/revver depend on large numbers of submissions -- would Thinkr as described above get enough to reach critical mass.i suppose my biggest problem with Thinkr as conceived in this way is that while it may make academic (blog) output available to a wider audience, i'm again not sure how it either raises the academic status of blogging or protects the independent voice of academic bloggers.
[btw, although not blog-related it might be interesting to conceive of Thinkr as a repository of all academic papers, presumably both peer reviewed and not.]
It's hard to predict how it would evolve, but it seems to me that this model would leverage academic blogging more with the general public than with the academy itself. It could become known as the place where academic bloggers archive their best posts. An attractive destination for an intellectually curious web surfer.
This would raise the bar for submission and add a curious twist that would get people intrigued. Any blogger that thinks back on his/her self-publishing career will recall numerous posts that stand on their own as essays, or "notes." Perhaps an entire thread -- a book roundtable a la The Valve, a debate, a series of interviews, a satirical exchange. These too could be tagged and submitted to Thinkr, by the authors or by their peers in the academic blogosphere. In some ways, this system would perform the function of blog carnivals, and certainly, groups and communities could form within the system just as they do in Flickr.
what about the (ongoing) comment stream on the original post; seems like you'd want to make that available some how -- in addition to comments added to the Thinkr listIdeally, an entry on Thinkr would incorporate (perhaps using RSS) comments from the original blog and possibly interweave them with comments left directly on Thinkr. Or perhaps you'd have two columns of comments in order to leverage Thinkr comments as a peer review mechanism.
Thinkr users would need to be authenticated in some way and to satisfy the basic criteria of being an academic blogger set out above in the manifesto/statement of principles. To what extent Thinkr would involve something approaching a kind of peer review is up for debate. It seems to me the aim is not to offer an equivalent to peer review, but simply to provide a more defined commons for academic bloggers. It could be used, as Clifford described in the case of the physics community, to test run rough work that perhaps contains the seeds of formal papers and journal articles. But I suspect it would also inspire, as people realize the power of the venue, an outpouring of pithy, short essays written for their own sake -- something nicely in between the off-the-cuff blog post and the polished article. Writing, as they would be, just as much for a general readership as for a group of scholarly peers, this new short form might re-invigorate academic writing, casting off much of the jargon and stuffy abstraction that are the trademarks of academic journals.
it seems to me that if Thinkr enabled and encouraged extensive commenting it becomes a new more powerful mechanism for peer reviews. as i understand it, current peer review involves sending a paper to a small number of readers, who effectively become the gatekeepers. suppose on the other hand you made it relatively easy to publish into an environment with extensive commenting -- wouldn't you in the long run end up with a stronger sense of a paper or a note's value?I think you're right that the comments will be of great value. This might be a reason to separate, as I mention above, Thinkr comments from regular comments.
Blogging is light years from becoming a recognized form of scholarly activity that might count toward tenure. In part, this is due to the not-unjustified stigma attached to blogs that they are sloppy, undisciplined, and too much of the present moment. Carving out a middle space between "publish or perish" and "push-button publishing" -- between "of the moment" and of the archive -- might leverage blogging as a lively yet serious avenue of discourse for academics. Perhaps a strategy for dealing with academics' concerns about tenure and the blogging time-suck, is to emphasize the outreach component in blogging -- to use this as the window through which the whole practice can enter into legitimacy. A Thinkr-type platform would provide a frame that might distinguish academic blogging as a particularly valuable sort of outreach.
i see this approach as too accepting of blogging's poor-cousin status. while i don't think it's realistic to expect people to ignore issues of tenure etc., it would be far better to try to build structures which make blogging (and related forms) acceptable as appropriate "academic" forms than to try to make blogging acceptable by reinforcing it's image as not quite up to academic standards. i.e. let's either bring blogging up to those standards or change the standards. i think that is at the heart of what john mohr means by marshalling and re-deploying intellectual capital.I think it should be both. Again, the goal is not to make something that is the same as peer review journals or scholarly monographs. The difference is what makes blogging exciting and valuable. But I'm with you in terms of improving blogging's image as more of an an appropriate academic form, either as a more relaxed peer feedback testing ground, or as its own kind of short-form scholarly production (like the "note"). But outreach (perhaps there's a better word) is incredibly important in terms of the general audience. Yes, we want blogging to be taken seriously as part of a scholar's work, but we don't want to academicize it too much. Part of the joy of academic blogging is that they write in regular, human english.
A more modest approach
A less sprawling approach could also be taken. Something based more on the Arts & Letters Daily model of a few carefully selected articles each day. The dearth of choices is one of the things that makes AL Daily so refreshing. Every day, it slices through the imposing mass of possible readings on the web. Perhaps such a model could work for academic blogging. A rotating seat of editors, a daily carnival. Five columns, for example, each representing a discipline or subject area. Each day, a single post appears in each column. History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, and a wild card. Comments on these posts could be seen as a mechanism for peer review.
this isn't uninteresting, but seems to be something that AL daily or another web-based publication could/should do.It would definitely be a huge job. Would still like to float it out there, but with your comment that it maybe isn't the project WE should be doing.
A "Magnum" for academic bloggers
for me this one has the best chance of both raising the status of blogging and building a sustainable modelI like it too, but I'm still not satisfied in terms of grassroots concerns. Of course, we have to choose our battles. At least for now, I think it's productive to keep wrangling with both the elite and the grassroots ideas.
This is related to and might significantly resemble the previous scenarios. The difference is that we are dealing here with a more strictly defined and selectively chosen membership. Sort of what Magnum is to professional photographers, this league would be for serious blogging academics. Its stamp assures quality and leverages participating writers in the public eye. The Magnum model also establishes opportunities for collective bargaining, which could in turn be used for advantageous advertising schemes to make the whole thing sustainable, and the selling of syndication rights. It could also provide some basic services for its members such as fact-checking and comment moderation.
More to the heart of the matter, a Magnum-type league would help to safeguard gifted academic bloggers from co-option by mainstream media. Providing a framework that increases visibility and helps make blogging more sustainable would diminish the temptation to secure a more comfortable arrangement at the expense of one's independence.
As Bob has roughly outlined, this would begin with a small core of bloggers formed into a cooperative. The bloggers themselves would be responsible for selecting and inviting new members (and for hiring support staff -- though perhaps the institute would provide assistance with this). When appropriate, blogs within a discipline would be more closely linked, and perhaps conversations would occur across these blogs.
When the times and spirit move them, the cooperative could issue highly visible responses to major events in society. "Ten Notes On the Paris Riots," "13 Ways of Looking at Katrina," etc.
Justice League, Fantastic Four: a small portal for A-list academic bloggers
i'm not keen on using the hollywood/society term "A-list" as it injects a certain sense of arrogance and hierarchy. how about just saying "excellent"?Sure. No attachment whatsoever to A-list.
One take on this is the global hot spot portal that Juan has envisioned: four or five historians with deep expertise on a crisis region giving daily or near-daily news digests and analysis of the sort you won't find in any mainstream paper. The front page could be organized by geographic area with headlines or threads advertised in each section. The hot spot portal could also be part of a slightly bigger portal. Three nodes -- e.g. history, science and philosophy -- each with a group of academics elucidating and demystifying the major stories of our times. Each of these sections would start with a single blogger who would then select a partner. The two of them would, in turn, select a third peer and so on.
not clear to me why the magnum model and fantastic four models aren't one and the same as there is no reason why under the magnum model there aren't smaller subsets such as Juan's regional experts or 4 physicists or 3 economists.That's true. What we need to figure out is when Magnum is simply an affiliation where you are linked to by the mothership site, and when Magnum's site actually contains the blogs, as in the case of the hot spot portal (or maybe not). It could be as simple as a badge that you display prominently on your site. But if we're talking about this more complicated apparatus with fact-checking, comment moderation, advertising and syndication, then it becomes a little more involved. Thoughts?
Posted by bob stein at 11:01 AM | Comments (10)
November 15, 2005
A tool in our quiver?
Link: BusinessWeek: Analyzing Google's Analytics Strategy.
It's almost as if Google saw us coming. I'm not sure exactly how this would work, but the exact same sorts of markers/tags and automatically generated lists for credibility, expertise, and quality that we were discussing last Friday could be facilitated with the free use of this Google/Urchin analytics tool. It would involve writing a bit of code, perhaps a custom Movable Type Plugin, but given Google's penchant for allowing access to search results and APIs for code applications, I'd say it looks very do-able.
Here's some bits from the article above that I found that may pertain to our goals:
NOVEMBER 15, 2005News Analysis
By Sarah LacyAnalyzing Google's Analytics Strategy
The online giant's decision to make its Urchin Web Analytics software free could spell disaster for search-engine optimization companies
[...]
Pretty soon, they may be blaming Google for taking it away. Google became a competitor when it bought a small analytics company, called Urchin Web Analytics, back in March. It upped the ante when it slashed the price of Urchin's software to about $200 from about $400. But the final nail may have come when Google announced on Nov. 14 that the software is now free.
RAPID-FIRE LAUNCHES. "When they first announced Urchin, I speculated about a couple of possible outcomes," says Eric Peterson of Jupiter Research. "The most frightening for Web analytics companies was that they would do tag-based analytics, freely available and supported by the global Google brand, and that's exactly what they've done."
[...]
"BETTER WEB EXPERIENCE." Google says the free-software move is not about going after former partners or competitors: It's about making the Web the best it can be. Google is betting the technology will be used not only by its advertisers but by all Web publishers, who can use the software to determine what parts of their Web sites resonate most with viewers.
"Our objective is to take what are extremely powerful tools and make sure all advertisers have access to them to make a better Web experience," says Richard Holden, director of product management at Google.
[...]
The BusinessWeek article focuses on the impact the move could have on existing business, businesses that exist around Google like the little bird around the hippopotamus (did I get my species right PZ?), like I really care about their fate. That's for stock watchers. What I'm trying to figure out is what it will do for people who use Google APIs, like Technorati et al.
And further, for our purposes, it could be a way to use the analytic data to go beyond the more "traditional" blogosphere ecosystem measures of link authority, link counts, even most popular or most emailed. I think this could take tags to another level, but for us, it would allow us to create alternative measures of credibility and authority, based on expertise or whatever, and incorporate it into custom tables of contents or even self-organizing site structures.
Am I full of blather, or what? I'm punting the Urchin code up on my sites now, just to see what it does. It still could be a trojan horse for big brother, as if Google isn't that already.
Chris
Posted by christine boese at 2:17 PM | Comments (1)
Stanford Professor Inadvertently Supports Blogging
I'm in an informal meeting with Tony Bryk, a professor at Stanford with a joint appointment in the Ed School and the Business School there. One of his major points is that we in the Ed School have the responsibility--in fact, the obligation--to make our work transparent and understandable to the public. It's our job, he says, to raise the level of public discourse about education.
I think I'll send him a link to my weblog. Neat.
Posted by jenny demonte at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)
November 14, 2005
no more theory without practice, no more practice without theory!
First off, here's that photo I promised:
Bob and I (and others here at the institute) are still sifting through notes and thoughts from Friday -- should have something substantial up here in the next couple of days. In the meantime, here are some provocative nuggets from a presentation I saw last spring at a new media education conference at CUNY called "Share, Share Widely." This is from McKenzie Wark, who teaches at The New School and last year published A Hacker Manifesto. I was mulling this over leading up to the meeting and it seems even more dead-on now:
"This tension between dialogue and discourse might not be unrelated to that between education and knowledge. Certainly what the new media technologies offer is a way of constructing new possibilities for the dialogic, ones which escape the boundaries of discipline, even of the university itself. New media is not interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. It is antidisciplinary -- although one might be careful where and to whom we break this news. Its acid with which to eat away at the ossified structure of discourse -- with the aim of constructing a new structure of discourse. One that might bring closer together the university with its outside. Not to erase the precious interiority of the university, but to make it porous. To actually apply all that 'theory' we learned to our own institutions.""We need to do a 'history of the present' as Foucault would say, and recover the institutional aspect of knowledge as an object of critique. But of more than critique as well. Let's not just talk about the 'public sphere'. Let's build some! We have the tools. We know wiki and blogging and podcasting. Let's build new relations between theory and practice. No more theory without practice -- but no more practice without theory either. Let's work at slight angle of difference from the institution. Not against it -- that won't get you tenure -- but not capitulating to it either. That won't make any difference or be interesting to anybody."
We've talked with McKenzie about some of these ideas. I expect we'll be talking more.
Posted by ben vershbow at 5:52 PM | Comments (0)
CHE: Do Not Fear the Blog!
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has published a positive article on academic blogging. It's a pleasant change!
Posted by pz myers at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
Thinkr
One concrete step that I think we should have a quick vote on, and proceed with, is building a universal blogroll of all academic blogs/sites etc. We can combine the blogrolls of our various blogs [CT has a long list of academic blogs -tho, I don't know how out of date it is].
We can put a simple submission form wherein academics can submit the name/brief description of their blogs or update the entries.
What say ye?
Posted by manan ahmed at 10:27 AM | Comments (5)
November 13, 2005
so...
Thanks to all for a terrifically stimulating meeting on Friday. Pity in a way that we couldn't have a Saturday morning follow-up to see how things had turned and shifted in our minds after a night of revels in Little Tokyo. But that's what this blog is for, as well as the many conversations we will surely, in various combinations, have.
We are taking a little time to process everything and will report back later in the week with some thoughts on possible next steps. In the meantime, a number of you have already posted about the meeting on your blogs, some with photos. I'll soon post some myself, including one of a high stack of empty beer glasses that could perhaps serve as an emblem of the meeting: draining yet highly satisfying.
Here's the link to Clifford's post on Cosmic Variance, where he kindly links to some of the others.
You'll hear from us soon.
Posted by ben vershbow at 11:15 AM | Comments (1)
November 10, 2005
highlights from cole and myers reader surveys
i found the answers to the substantive questions in the questionnaires to be very interesting. so...
on the plane this morning i highlighted choice phrases in the answers to the Pharnygula and Informed Comment reader questionnaires. i only got to the question of Why You Became a Regular Reader (question 2 in both) and What leads you to trust . . . (question 4 on pharnygula, question 3 in the informed comment questionnaire).
you can download the docs below. when you open them, scroll down until you start seeing red text.
Posted by bob stein at 7:28 PM | Comments (0)
November 9, 2005
11th hour addition to meeting roster!
I'm pleased to announce that Clifford Johnson, USC professor and blogger at Cosmic Variance, a group blog on physics, will be attending the Friday meeting.
Clifford V. Johnson is a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Southern California. His research is mainly on (super)string theory, gravity, gauge theory and M-theory, the goal being to understand how the universe works. His avowals that he would never blog are legendary.
Links:
Posted by ben vershbow at 11:50 PM | Comments (2)
reader survey data for Informed Comment and Pharyngula
At the beginning of the week we threw together some simple reader surveys for Juan and PZ's blogs. Since then, hundreds of responses have come in. Take a look:
Posted by ben vershbow at 3:42 PM | Comments (0)
November 8, 2005
WOW! Readers respond to Informed Comment Questionnaire
Juan Cole referred his readers late yesterday afternoon to a questionnaire we designed. as of this morning we've gotten 201 responses. we're trying to figure out a useful way to collate the responses for friday's meeting.
Posted by bob stein at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
November 7, 2005
On the basic un-truth of The Media and the postmodernism of it all...
I am going to try to choke down some of the very good readings everyone has been sharing--I'm afraid I currently have a dumb stare going in terms of what I'd like you to read, but it will come to me. Or rather I'll plumb the depths of my readers. But in a class last week, I had what was to me a telling anecdote. We were discussing Joan Didion's "Insider Baseball," which is about the 1988 Presidential campaign. A 22-year-old student (a quite astute young woman) described it as a "historical" essay that in its day revealed great truths--but now, she said, we all know that media is staged, and that people go to blogs for real information.
Aside from the sting of learning that an essay published in 1988 (when I was well into my first career) is "historical," I was fascinated to re-read that essay through my fellow student's eyes. It seems to relate to what we're talking about in ways I can't yet fully articulate. However, I could bring it back full circle and say that if to Didion all narrative is ultimately sentimental and the real truth lies outside those lines, perhaps with the vast array of reportage and writing and emerging genres new technologies enable, we'll learn how to live in a world with a plurality of narratives, the sum of which becomes the anti-narrative truth. But that's awfully deep for late Monday afternoon.
Posted by kgschneider at 7:47 PM | Comments (2)
November 6, 2005
first draft of meeting agenda
1. purpose and goal
to understand how academics with expertise, integrity, and "a voice" can be encouraged to speak to a wider public audience through blogs and other internet-based forms, and how that effort might be supported and strengthened over time.
we intend for the day's discussion to be instrumental in generating specific and concrete ideas which can be fashioned into a fundable proposal.
2. agenda
in the morning we would like to talk about the experience of blogging
* your motivation for starting to blog
* key moments and issues in terms of creating and establishing a relationship with an audience; why do they trust you?
* character of your interaction with readers
* reaction from colleagues, both local and in your field generally
* how blogging differs from other writing -- academic and/or journalistic, depending on your experience; e.g. one out of many questions, what is the essential difference between blogging which allows your voice to be heard without editing or mediation of any significance and writing for publications which run everything through editors and sometimes publishers.
* and a more general question about the "social role" of blogging - what is it's current and potential contribution to the mediasphere and society generally.
in the first part of the afternoon we want to explore hopes and dreams about where blogging might go over the next five to ten years. since this question divides in at least three big ways and then in endless more ways, i'll leave these open-ended so each of us can focus on the part of each question we're most interested in.
* how would you like to see the shape/form of blogs change.
* how might the social role of blogging shift over time.
* is there clear value in aggregating individual voices; if so how do you safeguard the individual voice
please add more and/or subdivide these at will
in the second half of the afternoon we'd like to discuss concrete ideas and suggestions
assuming that aggregation of some sort makes sense,
* what kind of support do you ideally want/need to make your blogs better, to get a wider audience, to interact differently with your readers. etc.
* along what lines does aggregation make the most sense; what level of aggregation might yield the most
* who decides who joins an aggregation?
* amateur vs. professional; does the distinction make any important sense here.
please add more
Posted by bob stein at 10:11 PM | Comments (3)
November 5, 2005
an if:book reader and contributor comments
i received the note below from Sol Gaitan, a friend who came to the states from Colombia, got a phd at NYU in comparative literature, and now teaches at a private school in NY, where she uses computers in innovative ways (look here).
b.
hi. have had some time to take a look at your guests. an interesting group. my opinion based on a superficial reading of their links. take it as the outsider's view.
i disagree with christine boese when she talks about "the inadequacy of critical and postmodern theorists to be persuasive in a larger public sphere," and how they inspire academic conservatism. i don't think the problem is with theorists, or their conservatism, but with the conservatism of academia from the top down. that's, as she admits, linked to the tenure thing. so, jenny demonte's piece on academics and weblog ties in well here. demonte has the great romantic aspirations of someone who's about to start writing a dissertation. she must believe in academia, while boese doesn't. it could be interesting to team these two up.
the problem with blogs in general is that they lack rigor, are heavily subjective, and many times the writers don't know the codes. intellectual debate requires knowing the codes, and many times, this leads to insularity. i don't believe that "dumbing things down", making them user friendly, is going to advance intellectual inquiry. blogs are pop, if you wish, academia is neo-classic. however, why divorce, why not confront them? if, as boese says, the enlightenment was about public discourse as opposed to the "hermetically sealed epistemologies" that fed the inquisition, we cannot forget that, thanks to those closeted scholars -- monks who had all the time to translate, illuminate, and preserve, and philosophers who, in the isolation of their libraries pondered the big problems of being -- laid the ground that made the enlightenment possible. why not allow both to exist? why not feed from each other?
what is exciting about blogs, is the possibility of dissemination and aggregation, and the fact that blogs transcend the local. however, notwithstanding the tons of blogs out there, the tons of people expressing their opinions and the proliferation of search tools to access them, the blogosphere is still a very, very, circumscribed realm. perhaps our increasingly ADD society is going to have to start sorting rationally among the sheer amount of information, images, and intellectual and artistic productions. Now the visual richness, or business, of the screen promotes distraction and requires an enormous effort to choose what deserves one's attention. do we need to train and be trained for these new times, or will the fittest adapt?
academicians, and teachers are also people who have to feed their families, and have to move in the free market. and they happen to inhabit a glass sphere, where everything is, to a great extent, public. as journalists have to give in to the economy-driven forces behind media, academicians are also, and increasingly, subject to that. the more public funds are taken away from public universities, the more they have to rely on private money, all strings attached. tenure or not, academic freedom is a factor of economics. how many academicians can afford to express freely inside or outside the intimacy of the classroom?
the concept of blogs as gathering places where information is exchanged rather than consumed, takes us back to the process of selection. one has to choose where to go. the interesting advance here is that the chosen "place" offers cross-links, track back, and so on, into other places that one wasn't intending to visit. however, to which extent does the absence of a guide, editor, compromise these virtual excursions? we are at the mercy of the blogger, there's not a "board" whose voice(s) acts as a guiding force. the institute's blog seems to be the happy medium between the two.
Posted by bob stein at 1:20 PM | Comments (0)
November 4, 2005
thinking about what else should be on our agenda...
Hey y'all!
This is Chris Boese just sort of rambling around and thinking out loud. Warning, half-baked and long-winded ideas lie ahead! Proceed at your own risk.
Bob asked me to think about what might be added to our agenda, to give us some more stuff to chew on for our meeting.
I have a few article links that I want to share as a springboard point for common discussion, and now they've both been linked in a post called "other readings" here at Sidebar. You're probably already familiar with them, but they do kinda create a common ground to trigger discussion.
They have to do with the idea of a "public intellectual," particularly this "Inside Higher Ed" piece called "Mind the Gap," and another, a Columbia Journalism Review piece by Mitchell Stephens called "We're all Postmodern Now," about spin and postmodernism in journalism (which has always been a bit theory-lite in the pomo sense).
Somehow these two thoughts are related, and I forget sometimes where I've had which conversations, so that is why I was trying to sort them out a bit before posting, but Bob said go ahead and post thoughts in progress, so take this with a grain of salt, since I haven't met y'all yet.
The threads I see between these two articles may not be immediately apparent (although they are part of the reason I launched one of the two blogs I launched last week, the public one-- the design sucks right now, called "Spinning and Being Spun: The Idea of Journalism in a Postmodern World." I rushed the launch because of all the Libby stuff. It's still just a little baby blog trying to figure out what it wants to be, except that I know it is going to be my sort of "public intellectual" venture)
(and because I was half-heartedly scanning Chronicle jobs last night, my blood is feeling chilled over all my blog ventures... I go so far afield from anything in any of those job descriptions, it discourages me from even thinking about returning to academia proper instead of working as an independent researcher).
My MAIN hobby horse, in this respect, is that I'm really critical of the inadequacy of critical and postmodern theorists to be persuasive in a larger public sphere. If these theories are so important and compelling, why do they inspire such academic conservativism? (lack of activism or even engagement in the face of direct threats to their ideas)
I know, it's because of their anti-foundationalist nature, and a bit of pomo paralysis, but I don't think that's a good excuse, I just think it's descriptive of the paralysis (with a good mixture of tenure tyranny for young scholars).
My point would be that IF an argument is good, it should also be persuasive to larger audiences. I'm extremely concerned about the abdication of the public sphere by intellectuals and academics. If they're so smart, why aren't they in the thick of things? Why are they only speaking in their insular disciplines?
Blasphemy Alert: maybe they're not so smart. Maybe insularity has left them intellectually lazy. Maybe their ideas wouldn't stand up to interdisciplinary and public analysis.
[Anti-intellectualism such as the blasphemy I voice above is also a sign of lazy scholarship, as seen from the opposite POV, a lack of engagement in difficult ideas or a lack of intellectual abilities to engage difficult ideas. By uttering the blasphemy above, I risk aligning myself with anti-theory forces in skill-focused journalism schools, and with management at television news networks who promote people who make a case that they most resemble the network's audiences by not having read very many books. Reading too much can sometimes be a liability for promotion, because it distances a person from understanding the mind of the audience, enforcing something like the mediocrity of Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"]
I have a paper about this that I need to get out and shop around that deals with some of these issues, an rhetorical analysis of a video the religious right made in Arkansas to try to shut down a school where I once taught, and the inadequacy of the academic faculty at the school to defend what they were teaching to gifted high school kids in terms the general public could understand. I need to bring it up to date and send it out to a rhetoric or speech com journal, because so much is going on now that parallels what happened then.
Also I'm thinking about postmodern attacks on the Enlightenment, which, for all its foundationalist tyranny [G], was about knowledge in public, in the light, replicable, as opposed to hermetically-sealed epistemologies of alchemists and such that hunkered down to survive the Inquisition. Which model do scholars and experts want to align with?
And it isn't just insular disciplines that are hermetically-sealed these days. It is also Bell Labs and other non-replicable scientific research sites, "proprietary sponsored research" so potentially lucrative (alchemy, a variant of lead into gold, pharmaceuticals, etc) it must be guarded from the light (Enlightenment) of public scholarly examination and replication.
Think about the Phantom Professor blogger from SMU, doing what creative writers have done for many years, mining her life for material and putting it in stories with the names and situations changed. When fiction writers do it, their relative obscurity gets them academic status and literary awards, but because the Phantom Professor did the same things in the powerfully disseminated blogging medium, people actually found out about her in a way they they don't with ignored fiction writers, and she was fired. She wasn't fired for what she did so much as she was fired because PEOPLE ACTUALLY READ WHAT SHE WROTE. In academia, writers get more status when they are more widely ignored. And they can take bigger risks.
You could say the Colorado professor Ward Churchill with the peculiar but perhaps more academically acceptable ideas about culture and conflict and 9/11 was also a victim of the dissemination of his ideas, where he'd probably retain his academic status without difficulty if he had remained strictly in his disciplinary sphere.
And see, where I'm at right now, here in Missoula, illustrates these ideas in dramatic fashion, so I guess that means I'm supposed to be thinking about these things. This is a traditional journalism school, meaning strongly anti-theory, practical and skill-based in its focus. They are asking for my help in developing a new media track and curriculum, so I'm stewing on a lot of these ideas, thinking about how to present them (and the theories behind them) without sounding offensive. Because they have a good point: you can be smart without being a complete pointy-headed wonk.
I asked one colleague here to respond to Juan Cole's quote about Iraq coverage above his bio the Sidebar site, and I'm looking forward to sharing his well-considered response with the group in L.A.
It's like the simple dichotomy Mark Twain and other writers invoked, playing with the motif of the American West, of the Eastern effete from the intellectual establishment vs the clever wanderer in the American frontier, living by his or her wits, but a bit lite on the "book-learning." A grown-up Huck Finn who "lit out for the territory." (uh, I'm not talking about the president's Texas version of this motif, which is not only anti-intellectual, but is also NOT clever or quick-witted. Mark Twain's clever frontiersman was never stupid.)
Growing up in Alaska, in a blue collar family that was never happy about my attending a New York PhD program, I feel these tensions enacted across my body. My grandpa hopped trains during the Depression, went out and worked on those big dam projects out west, a laborer, but a guy who could teach himself any skill, pick up any technology, fix anything, finally ending up an electrician, as are my father and many uncles and cousins. I have his technical abilities, and my mother's family's dyslexia, so I come at all this stuff from a peculiar angle. I want both, the book learning and the clever and quick-witted skill-based common sense. I don't want to diminish one or the other.
So what am I honing in on or looking for? I'm not just talking about competing with MSM, I'm talking about a much needed and overdue expansion of the discourse of the public square to include intellectuals in the conversations, and thinking about the pros and cons of such a move, the advantages and real professional and career-development risks of doing this. And I'm also thinking about what role the highly professionalized field of US journalism has when the discourse expands.
So to phrase this mind-wandering excursion around our topic in the form of some questions to throw out to the group, to possibly discuss in our meeting, try these on for size:
What does it mean for academics to venture out of their insular disciplines and into the public square?
We seem to accept this as an unqualified good (at least I do), but in doing so, people in tenure-land will be taking some very real risks with very little payoff. The "Mind the Gap" article points out that many of us are choosing those risks, but even in carving out territory as independent scholars with some other day job, speaking out in public can mean very real and economic consequences. People who blog risk losing their jobs. I fly under the radar at CNN, but I'm conscious with every blog post I make that I can get in just as much trouble there as I would in academia.
What can we do to encourage the acceptance of public intellectuals both inside the academy and out?
It won't get anyone tenure. The work has to be done for its own sake, and for one's own sense of relevance and engagement with the world. Would it be feasible to form some kind of professional advocacy organization for respected scholars who want to engage with the world more as public intellectuals? Or should people who don't have tenure simply not even try?
[Chris inserts here that this is a much larger issue than framed out above, because most people's work lives are being carved out without any true "free speech zones," not even the chain-link kind created for G8 summits and national conventions for political parties. The tensions created by bloggers illustrate in graphic terms how fully many of us live under restricted speech conditions dictated by our employers, suspending the first amendment not only in the workplace, but in our extracurricular activities as well. Perhaps this is something public intellectuals should be taking the lead in speaking out on, making visible what is invisible and insidious in our culture.]
Here's a dumber question: What happens to academics who try to speak out on public issues and do so very poorly, with jargon-filled wonk-talk, alienating elitism, and perhaps poor social skills?
I think there's going to be considerable blinking and acclimating to the public sphere for many who could easily hide out in their disciplines.
I'm not really that worried about those folks. I just had to pose the question to get to my next one:
PERSUASION. This is perhaps the crux of what keeps me up at night, what I was circling around above.
How do we negotiate a common ground in the discourse of the public square to be able to make compelling and persuasive arguments without a disciplinary foundation based on commonly understood knowledge, or, for those of us who don't believe in disciplinary or universalist foundations, an agreed-upon, socially-constructed idea of a common good, not to mention a sense of what makes one argument more persuasive than another?
Shouting matches are just not useful, nor is endless relativism. I know my field is rhetoric and I don't need epistemological certainty, but I definitely believe supporting arguments can be verifiable, and that bad arguments NEED to be exposed wherever they appear. And we can't just retreat into the easily obscure epistemologies of our disciplines.
But how can academics and experts learn to communicate in the public square in a way that is compelling and persuasive, that cuts through bullshit, exposes the more inept sophistry that passes itself off as "proof" in some non-reality-based shouting soundbite universe, earning respect, credibility, and influence on larger audiences?
Posted by christine boese at 12:48 AM | Comments (1)