Visions of Blogging

September 27, 2007

It turns out that Andrew Sullivan will be coming to Lawrence University later this year. In today's convocation I found the way in which Sullivan was introduced to be quite interesting. He was called a senior editor for the Atlantic Monthly and a frequent columnist for the Times of London. Then we were told that he is often a commentator on television. Oh, and he wrote a book about lost conservative values.. which is connected to what he will talk about when he comes. But there was no mention of the format in which Andrew Sullivan is surely the most influential.. the blog!

Oddly, the blog is also the format in which students would have the easiest time accessing Sullivan. Considering that the convocation speech was on the topic of student engagement with political issues, this failure to mention Sullivan's blog seemed a missed opportunity. The blog is an avenue of political and social expression that is open to everyone.. including students.

This is post is not a complaint, just an observation as to the way the blog has not gained broad acceptance. It sometimes leaves me scratching my head how an article published in some God-forsaken journal has a high academic prestige while a blog.. even a widely read blog.. is somehow a lesser creation. The justification for this will always come down to peer review.. and attempts to re-think the blog as a more academic enterprise inevitably make some effort to introduce peer review.

The blog requires a fair amount of imagination with respect to futurity. A few guesses:

1) Work in the humanities will be threatened by the Internet in the same way that print journalism is now being threatened. It will take a few years, but the profit basis of academic publishing (journals and university presses) will erode. Research in the humanities will be done, but it will be contained within formats that are are virtually free to publish (websites or online PDF files).

2) The Internet opens up new methods for editing and commenting on texts. That's well known. But this may push academics toward a "Criterion-ization" of their work. The popular DVD publisher Criterion puts out classic or forgotten films that are buttressed by a host of contextual aids. Original radio programs, trailers, interviews, and alternative versions are included in their videos.. and this provides a different model of scholarship. Instead of writing about connections and crossovers, the scholar can make these available to a viewer/reader.. and the interpretation is open.

[Broadview Press does something like this with their editions of literary texts, but what happens when the literary work and all the minor works become available online? The contents of a book could be contained in one page of links. These kinds of smart scholarly mash-ups of information will proliferate—a reasonable response to the mass of texts now available.]

3) The aims of scholarship in the humanities could be clarified by forms of Internet scholarship. In the sciences knowledge builds upon itself. A scientist today can safely ignore works from 75 years ago. That knowledge has already been accommodated and assumed by successive generations. It is this stepping-stone structure of knowledge that makes academic journals necessary in the sciences: articles give a claim of priority to individual researchers. The humanities do not build anywhere. It may yet be important to read Henry James on fiction or on Hawthorne.. or Pauline Kael on a film. These are not opinions that are subsumed by those who come later; they are sensitive interpretations. I am not convinced that the academic journal is quite so necessary in this case.. except to provide the illusion of building through the employment of technical words. Individual sensibility counts for a lot in the humanities and blogs/websites could be a natural vehicle for that. Such blogs/websites could then be taken as occasions for modeling critical frameworks for reading.. and therefore gain a pedagogical purpose.

I may be wrong about some things, but I don't know how anyone can read the tea leaves and not see that the intersection of academic work and the Internet is going to take some serious sorting out. At this point the important thing is not to get too hung up on the notion of a "blog".. which tends to be defined as short and ephemeral.. at the expense of imagining the multiple ways Internet publication could look in the future. Here at Old Roads we are interested in hybrid forms..