boring prattle about blogs and academics

So, this post on Jonathan Sterne’s blog got me thinking today about academics who blog and the issues they may or may not face as a result. The letter he cites (here) written by Juan Cole sums up pretty well one aspect of blogging as free expression amongst academics and in the sidebar you can find a history of Chronicle of Higher Education articles about professors and blogging.

The controversy being discussed deals mostly with the idea of the expression of controversial ideas in blogs and the effect that might have on the careers of the bloggers (in this case in higher education). While being dooced is obviously a big issue in blogging, there are other questions I’ve been thinking about specifcally in relation to blogging among educators and “public intellectuals” (since I might end up in the position of being an educator of some sort sooner or later). Most importantly — and I guess this opens up intellectual property issues as well: when your business is all about thinking and providing knowledge (in the most general sense; let’s not argue pedagogy here), how free do you feel to express what you’re thinking, and to impart knowledge, for free via a tool of mass communication? Is it a good idea?

Some professors and critics (Jonathan is a good example) tend to blog but not so much about their areas of expertise. Someone like Michael Berube or danah boyd might sometimes blog about mundane stuff, at other times about current affairs, and at other times about her/his specific area of research. Blogging can provide an exciting way for scholarly thought and argumentation to work itself out in an informal manner before going to the big leagues (i.e., journals and the such) (here I am cheerleading for . . . WEB 2.0!!). But if you have certain information or insight that is fairly novel, and perhaps important, is your blog a place to express that? How does one decide what’s discussed and what’s kept under wraps until an article/book/dissertation appears, to give it context and, yes, to an extent, commodify it?

Which brings me to my other big question — are more and more academics starting blogs (and/or myspace pages and/or the whole bit) just to plug their “real” (contextualized/commodified) publishing? Case in point: Henry Jenkins, who’s supremely well-respected in the field of media studies and is the head of the MIT Media Lab, and who I will admit is awesome (though he loses me when he goes off about gaming . . . that’s more my fault than his though), started his blog specifically in support of his newest book. Jenkins is an interesting case in that starting a blog for his book about “convergence culture” and the meeting of old and new media makes sense both on a publicity level and on a, er, meta-mediated(?)¹ level (in that he’s carrying out the very tasks he studies and describes in the book) (from what I can gather, since I haven’t read it yet).

And if the answer is yes, people are starting blogs with the specific intent of using them to plug their books, how should I interpret their writing? As thought-provoking communication about important issues, coming from experts in their respective fields, with the interesting potential for feedback via comments, or as an extended and well-thought-out advertisement? And should you be interpreting my blog as silly comments about my life, interspersed with thoughts about stuff like this, or as an extended advertisement for my band (which, by the by, is playing its last show, for a good while at least, in September)?

1. I’m scrambling here for a/the word that can describe a communication the medium of which reflects directly the content of the message, in an intentional way rather than in a McLuhan sort of way. If you tell me what it is, I’ll append that nonsense, because, pretty clearly, that word does not do the job.