Friday, April 29, 2005
On not "getting" blogging. You hear lots of "so-and-so just doesn't get it" bouncing around the blogosphere when somebody slams blogging, but that knee-jerk response probably doesn't accomplish anything. It's tempting, for example, for a fan of blogging to rant about a recent column by Blaise Cronin, who is Dean of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University. To give the flavor of the thing, glance at the title: BLOG: see also Bathetically Ludicrous Online Gibberish. Or a few highlights:
The Web has become the universal soapbox. No voice need be unheard; no whine denied oxygen. It�s the fusion of vanity publishing and the bully pulpit . . . .
I'm struck by the narcissism and banality of so many personal blogs, of which, if the statistics are to believed, there are millions. Here, private lives tumble into public view, with no respect for seemliness or established social norms . . . .
Why do they chose to they expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism?
So, rant on against Dean Cronin, if you wish. But you could read the piece very differently by focusing on other passages where, if "getting it" were all that mattered, you'd be happier:
Blogs can keep stories alive, bring them to the surface and propel them into the media mainstream . . . .
Some blogs are akin to pamphlets or broadsheets, others more like diaries or journals, while yet others function as a kind a community alerting or information sharing mechanism. Many genres and sub-genres can be identified. Admittedly, some blogs are highly professional, reliable and informative . . . .
In this column-length piece, though, that's where his investigation of the value of blogging stops. Understandably, Dean Cronin has trouble getting past the excesses of some personal blogging; nevertheless, if he were on duty at the reference desk and you needed help investigating blogging, you'd hope he'd be willing to look a bit further into the subject.
Why doesn't he pursue the virtues of blogging further in his column? There are clues here and there in the piece itself. Most professors live in the world of refereed journals; we are accustomed to presenting our work to gate-keepers who allow it to be published or not, and we give tenure only to those who have been approved, often repeatedly, at the gate. It is not surprising, then, to hear Dean Cronin disparage the fact that:
[In blogs,] every idea, no matter how trite or crazy can see the light of digital day. [sic]
He rejects blogging not just because of the excesses of personal diarists who believe
such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable . . .
but also because the rest of us have streamed past the gate-keeper, acting as though
. . . time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace.
That may be the heart of the matter; we seem to have abandoned the gate-keeper.* In the column's final sentences he spots the hundreds of writers in the Wikipedia community commiting the same error, and he closes by naming the authority we should defer to:
Undoubtedly, these [ . . . ] same individuals [ . . . ] believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better.
We can't have blogging at all, in any fashion, if we can't get past the appeal to authority. And of course it does come back to the problem of "getting it" -- surely Dean Cronin has never had the experience of seeing a community of writers work hard on a very promising idea over a period of days, risking public exposure, taking chances, building trust and a shared enterprise as they go -- the way we do on our good days of blogging. Just look at the flash of work being done in the last week by Tim Porter and Jay Rosen and their readers. There is a very good chance that their recent posts will influence the thinking and writing of their community for months to come -- I would be willing to bet Dean Cronin a fine dinner at the faculty club that this will happen. Ideas are moving at a different speed, through different channels, and winning approval by different means. The best blogs are not merely, as he says, "highly professional, reliable and informative," -- though they are that. The best blogs are workplaces, places of exchange and risk; they are nodes of community life where people think together; they are places where communities and ideas create each other. Bloggers do not aim directly for authority, though they may acquire authority in time. For this reason, visitors who are interested primarily in authority will probably not see what is actually happening.
___________________________________
*More likely we have produced other forms of peer review and other ways to note value, yes? Those ways are appropriate to fast-moving exchanges of ideas and information. Anyone who has written for a peer-reviewed journal knows that it takes many months to get an idea in front of others and many more months for readers to reply. I acknowledge the value and the limitation of the old way.
Others have written about the piece: Free Range Librarian, Tame the Web, Walt at Random, Dave's Blog, Family Man Librarian, Lethal Librarian, Library Dust, Data Obsessed, and Baby Boomer Librarian that I've noticed.
PS. You'd think that Dean Cronin would be interested in the collaborative work of academic bloggers, given this abstract of his article called "Bowling alone together: Academic writing as distributed cognition":
While philosophers are not often co-authors, 94% of their studied papers from 1999 included an acknowledgment of intellectual contribution of others to the work. Cronin argues that all scholarship is the result of cognitive interactions with a socio-technical system of people, texts, and other aids and artifacts, and that bibliographies and acknowledgments prove scholarship is an instance of distributed cognition.
Later note: There is also the post by Gypsy Librarian, who seems to think I was pleased by Cronin's piece. I'm sorry to have given that impression.
More [0 & P]
The Web has become the universal soapbox. No voice need be unheard; no whine denied oxygen. It�s the fusion of vanity publishing and the bully pulpit . . . .
I'm struck by the narcissism and banality of so many personal blogs, of which, if the statistics are to believed, there are millions. Here, private lives tumble into public view, with no respect for seemliness or established social norms . . . .
Why do they chose to they expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism?
So, rant on against Dean Cronin, if you wish. But you could read the piece very differently by focusing on other passages where, if "getting it" were all that mattered, you'd be happier:
Blogs can keep stories alive, bring them to the surface and propel them into the media mainstream . . . .
Some blogs are akin to pamphlets or broadsheets, others more like diaries or journals, while yet others function as a kind a community alerting or information sharing mechanism. Many genres and sub-genres can be identified. Admittedly, some blogs are highly professional, reliable and informative . . . .
In this column-length piece, though, that's where his investigation of the value of blogging stops. Understandably, Dean Cronin has trouble getting past the excesses of some personal blogging; nevertheless, if he were on duty at the reference desk and you needed help investigating blogging, you'd hope he'd be willing to look a bit further into the subject.
Why doesn't he pursue the virtues of blogging further in his column? There are clues here and there in the piece itself. Most professors live in the world of refereed journals; we are accustomed to presenting our work to gate-keepers who allow it to be published or not, and we give tenure only to those who have been approved, often repeatedly, at the gate. It is not surprising, then, to hear Dean Cronin disparage the fact that:
[In blogs,] every idea, no matter how trite or crazy can see the light of digital day. [sic]
He rejects blogging not just because of the excesses of personal diarists who believe
such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable . . .
but also because the rest of us have streamed past the gate-keeper, acting as though
. . . time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace.
That may be the heart of the matter; we seem to have abandoned the gate-keeper.* In the column's final sentences he spots the hundreds of writers in the Wikipedia community commiting the same error, and he closes by naming the authority we should defer to:
Undoubtedly, these [ . . . ] same individuals [ . . . ] believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better.
We can't have blogging at all, in any fashion, if we can't get past the appeal to authority. And of course it does come back to the problem of "getting it" -- surely Dean Cronin has never had the experience of seeing a community of writers work hard on a very promising idea over a period of days, risking public exposure, taking chances, building trust and a shared enterprise as they go -- the way we do on our good days of blogging. Just look at the flash of work being done in the last week by Tim Porter and Jay Rosen and their readers. There is a very good chance that their recent posts will influence the thinking and writing of their community for months to come -- I would be willing to bet Dean Cronin a fine dinner at the faculty club that this will happen. Ideas are moving at a different speed, through different channels, and winning approval by different means. The best blogs are not merely, as he says, "highly professional, reliable and informative," -- though they are that. The best blogs are workplaces, places of exchange and risk; they are nodes of community life where people think together; they are places where communities and ideas create each other. Bloggers do not aim directly for authority, though they may acquire authority in time. For this reason, visitors who are interested primarily in authority will probably not see what is actually happening.
___________________________________
*More likely we have produced other forms of peer review and other ways to note value, yes? Those ways are appropriate to fast-moving exchanges of ideas and information. Anyone who has written for a peer-reviewed journal knows that it takes many months to get an idea in front of others and many more months for readers to reply. I acknowledge the value and the limitation of the old way.
Others have written about the piece: Free Range Librarian, Tame the Web, Walt at Random, Dave's Blog, Family Man Librarian, Lethal Librarian, Library Dust, Data Obsessed, and Baby Boomer Librarian that I've noticed.
PS. You'd think that Dean Cronin would be interested in the collaborative work of academic bloggers, given this abstract of his article called "Bowling alone together: Academic writing as distributed cognition":
While philosophers are not often co-authors, 94% of their studied papers from 1999 included an acknowledgment of intellectual contribution of others to the work. Cronin argues that all scholarship is the result of cognitive interactions with a socio-technical system of people, texts, and other aids and artifacts, and that bibliographies and acknowledgments prove scholarship is an instance of distributed cognition.
Later note: There is also the post by Gypsy Librarian, who seems to think I was pleased by Cronin's piece. I'm sorry to have given that impression.
More [0 & P]