blogology

One of my New Year's Resolutions for this blog was that I wouldn't blog about blogging. But I suppose those things are usually violated by late February, and so here I go. I don't want to rehearse all the exchanges that Rice's IHE piece has produced, but I do want to second Jenny's and Spencer's points in response to some of the kicked up discourse that blogs--nay, even one 'single' blog--need not exist for some monolithic purpose. In the end really no one said they should or do, but given how the discussions have gone, there have been strong intimations, and so it's worth pointing out any old way.

I also want to pick up on Jenny's point about blogging to write: this has been one of the most surprising things to me since I started posting on this site a few months ago. Gale Walden, a writer who works in my department, contacted me recently about a piece she's working on which takes up the question of why academics blog. After posing the question to me on email, she wrote parenthetically "(Given the amount of writing the profession requires anyway.)"

Walden's is a fair and common assumption, one I totally shared when I started blogos, and the reason that another of my resolutions was that I couldn't make any promises for how much I can blog when my normal teaching load resumes in the fall. But I discovered that varying the kinds of writing I do--going beyond article, book, letter, and email writing--actually simply expands the amount of writing rather than squeezing out the others. In other words, as I put it to Gale, writing is not necessarily zero-sum. I talked about how blogging has become a 'warmup' or 'cool down' from academic, 'worky' writing. How it offers a way to quickly respond to or ruminate on what's going on in the world, no matter how broadly or narrowly defined that 'world' might be. And how, for those who still don't believe, it can take surprisingly little time to craft an entry anyway. None of this is news to the blogging community, but I did want to post it, since a lot of people who zip across this site don't necessarily have blogs themselves. (In fact, an ever increasing number of hits at blogos seems to be from those looking for news about Vivi--the whippet that escaped at JFK--but that's an entry for another time.)

Comments

[collin]

Speaking of Spencer's entry, I would pay someone to write the rest of Chronic-what?-le of Higher Ed rap:

Lazy Sunday wake up in the late afternoon
Go to Bloglines just to see what blogs're doing

Hello?
What up Brooke?
Yo Bloglines what's cracking?
You thinking what I'm thinking? (Higher Ed!) Then it's happening.

That's the easy part. It's all about the Horowitz baby...

cgb

[dhawhee]

Click on First Person: "Yo I can't get tenure"
"Stuck at this Farm School, man it smells like manure."

[katka]

True dat...s--t making everybody wheeze.
People falling down like Bode Miller on skis.

[spencer]

It's the Chronic-what!-cle of Higher Ed.
It's the Chronic-what!-cle of Higher Ed.

Goin' to the library, books on reserve,
My damn repuTAtion tryin' to preserve.

[jeff]

Hello?
What up Brooke?
Yo Bloglines what's cracking?
You thinking what I'm thinking? (Higher Ed!) Then it's happening.

"Yo what up that Rice piece got folks dissin'"
"Sorry. I was crusing ESPN.
I must have missed it."
"It's like Chuck D.
Took a million to hold them bloggers back"
"Yo who cares? I got better rants to get to
Slashdot + Microsoft = CRAZY CHAT!"

[b]

It's the Chronic-what? cles of Higher Ed
It's the Chronic-what? cles of Higher Ed.

I rate the chili peppers cause the kids like my boo-tay,
But I'm gonna' get tenure cause I blog like Mike Bérubé

[jenny]

damn. i was gonna write something "clever" (pronounced CLE-VAH) on here. then i saw these posts.

i'm always late.