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an if:book reader and contributor comments 
11.05.2005, 1:20 PM
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 November 5, 2005 1:20 PM