EXTRA! Anti-Blogging Polemic Stimulates Academic Blogging

Irritation is a stimulant.

A small sampling of responses:

Tim Burke
Professor B
Chuck Tryon
GZombie
Little Professor
Matt Kirschenbaum
Acephalous
Profgrrrl
Daniel Drezner
Planned Obsolescence
One Man's Opinion
Collin

Me? Nothing too exciting to add. As many other people have pointed out (see especially Tim Burke and Dan Drezner), some of the dangers of blogging that Ivan Tribble refers to are real ones, especially for graduate students or junior people (like me) who don't have much of a formal publication record.

But the potential advantages are real too. Without the platform of this blog, I don't think I would have been part of an NPR interview, or getting calls from Boston Globe Reporters -- both happened in the past month. I even recently got a call from the BBC Asian Network, though I had to turn them down; they wanted to do the interview in Punjabi. (I wish my Punjabi were good enough for radio. Sadly, not the case.)

I agree with many of the people linked above who have argued, contra Tribble, that academics really need to stop being afraid of expressing or hearing unorthodox and unpolished opinions. Intellectual exchange works better if it's warm. Limiting our written expression to journal publications is equivalent to a kind of intellectual cryo-freeze. Tribble is telling us to keep our brains under wraps until we're ready to show them to the world in the best possible light.

But does anyone believe in cryogenics? When you finally thaw that brain, it's highly doubtful you'll get all the components working properly. That's why so much of academic life -- as the anecdotes in Tribble's article suggest -- is dominated by the crude sensibilities of the medulla, not the spirit of rigor and reasoning that might be more characteristic of the cerebral cortex.