I asked Alex a fellow grad student at the U of C anthropology department what he thinks about how much an academic should blog of her own work. His blogged answer (I am still waiting for my more personal answer) is an insightful musing about the general form of the blog genre, examining its strengths and weaknesses as a medium of communication and writing. He notes:

They create informal networks and conversations, but are more structured not informal conversation. You can blog a conference, but all the Navy Seal shit (intellectually speaking of course)goes down at the bar, where alcohol (martinis, preferably) and camaraderie galvanize your brains and get the intellectual juices flowing. Blogs allow the initial presentation of thoughts and ideas long and structured enough to put in a book, but they are not books, nor is their formal structure of the sort in which one develops into a book without a lot of work. Blogs stand in between, like the custard before it sets: too thick to truly be appropriate to the ebb and flow of conversation, too thin to take on the hard solidity of a book.

So where does this in-betweenness give us academics that let’s say a book or essay doesn’t? His answer is that they act as a fertile productive breeding ground for what then will possibly become more fleshed out future work:

“Blogs are all topic sentences and no supporting evidence, god bless ‘em. This flare-up-and-fade-away aspect of them is what makes them so great and inspires such thought. This, in fact, is my answer to the question: How best to blog my academic career? The blog is a place to put all your unsubstantiated hunches, since it’s too compact a format to allow for substantialization anyway. A blog is a place for thoughts that are one blog long [clever indeed].

But what else has this sort of state of in-betweenness allowed or caused in a more general sense? I have thought a lot about the “the blog” as a genre and although I loathe the name, I love blogging and feel a need to explain this new found passion, which so many share. I tend to obsess over two particular aspects of the blog: 1) How has the blog shifted the terrain of epistemology? 2) How does the blog shift the boundary between public and private persona?

It seems like blogs have transformed the ways in which knowledge is presented and possibly generated. Montainge is often credited with inventing the genre of the essay, which has evolved over the course of centuries to become a standard and valued means by which to argue a point and present information. Although Montainge’s essays do often begin with personal type anecdotes, for the most part the academic essay has evolved so that the personal and the subjective is well, not really “kosher” or readily integrated. It is sloppy to do so. One makes an argument with the hard facts and with the use of some slick style and good old-fashioned rhetoric to craft “such strong” arguments so that they smoothly cross over from text to reader, the constructive process of the argument being pretty much hidden. What the blog brings back into the mixture is a type of personal perspective of the “where and how the knowledge is generated.” And this is precisely what it is that I like and value about the blog. It is a genre that does not entirely hide the material and contextual means (place, location, event, emotional stance) by which your point, argument or whatever emerges and takes shape. It is ok for me to add some biographical information by which to make a point or that was relevant in how I arrived at some position or just to be indulgent. It does not have to be so tight, a looseness that is productive of other things. It usually makes for interesting reading and points to the complex intermingling of fact and value which really allows for the side by side existence of different epistemologies one of which is more experience based and the other objective oriented. Or perhaps it integrates the two in which the process of knowledge generation becomes part of the very fabric of knowledge? And though we know by now that a reader constructs a text through the act of reading, the looseness of the blog, I think adds a visibility to this co-construction possibly even facilitating it.

In addition to being breeding grounds or a test bed for what then becomes a more analytical, non-subjective work, it textually acknowledges that frankly, the person, the I, the me, making that custard does play into the creation of knowledge as uncomfortable as that might make some more positivist-oriented chefs. It also at some level reveals not just the custard but also the very recipe (or the creation of the recipe?), which took time to refine, was garnered from many different ingredients, and had a very material sort of existence as the researcher threw together everything in the pot, mixed, and then baked to come up with something that hopefully is appealing to eat. So while it brings the “me” into the mix, it is not necessarily a hyper overvaluation of the sole creative author as the linking and the personal contextualization reveals the collectivity of sources that goes into creation. The blog can demystify the whole process of writing and thinking integrating the subjective or the processual, which reveals the process by which the end product is made.

How about my second question about how and whether the blog reconfigures that strict division between the private and the public which is so supposed to characterize bougie society? Well, at first glance I thought, “oh yeah, total shift in which the private is brought out into the public” but you know, I am not so sure about this anymore. In some ways, at least ahemmm, brining in my own personal experience, I do feel like I craft a more public persona than ever before carefully choosing and picking information about me. I censor myself all the time although I tend to reveal more than many other of my fellow bloggers that I link to. “Fellow” Yes, which made me think that indeed there might be a gender component too although i have not really tracked in any consistent way the “personal revelatory” nature of female vs male blogs but I think that would indeed be a really interesting sort of endeavor.

Whatever the case, tackling the question of private vs public as an clear cut oppositions is not necessarily the question to ask as stark oppositions usually bankrupt us from the delicacies that are the contradictory textures of social life. But the blog has brought forth some of the private into the public while shifting the crafting of a public persona. And here is a bit of a private tidbit to end: it is late and I am going to bed as a rare SF storm wails outside my window.