Tim Burke’s lastest post is a must read. He discusses the benefits of academic blogging and explains why he is often the intellectual referee of the academic blogosphere. (Long time readers of blogs like Crooked Timber know of Tim’s gravitas.)
His comments about the strangeness of the bonds that we form through blogging I think will appeal to everyone.
…my blog writing does feel surreal to me sometimes. It involves me in a discursive world that sometimes feels like a small town where everyone knows one another. Kieran knows Harry who knows Russell who knows Laura who knows Rana who knows Elizabeth who knows John. They all know me, or at least the highly public, constrained, particular reduction of me who manifests in my online voice.
There’s a circle of people reading and writing about each others blogs and so much of what they have to say influences my waking thoughts. I crave their approval and respect. But at the same time, so little of that conversation comes into explicit ways into my day-to-day professional life or my personal life. I can come home and say, “You’ll never believe what that Belle Waring had to say today!”, but it takes so much set-up to stop the flow of an always-moving discussion and explain it to my wife that it’s not really worth the effort. I can say to a colleague, “I think you’ll really like what Russell Arben Fox had to say recently”, but I always feel vaguely embarrassed when I do, because I don’t know what they’ll think if they do go and look—will it take too much prior experience of ongoing discussions to appreciate it? will they wish I hadn’t wasted their time on something that they couldn’t immediately cite and make ‘normal’ scholarly use out of?—and because I feel a little like the guy who goes to lectures by engineers and tries to tell them about his perpetual motion machine. Sometimes it’s like being under the spell of some alien intelligence, on the other side of an ethnographic divide, a native mumbling to the patient, civilized researcher about the inexpressible interior feeling of his own culture.
Burke adds, “… I am constantly transformed and affected by relationships with are entirely in my own head as far as everyone around me is concerned.”
The world of blogging is a small town, an inside joke, a blunder, a chimera, yet very real. Read it.
Apt. 11d 
ADH said last night that we were a bunch of sad nerds who couldn’t stay away from the computer and who tend to reinforce each other’s viewpoins, making us feel more important because “so-and-so agrees with me.” I think that that might be true in some parts of the blogoverse, but I tend to see the relationships between and community of academic bloggers as being much more like Timothy’s version. Some of us are in very small departments or are adjuncts — blogging provides us with a larger community, and one not bound by the constrainsts and sometimes dysfunctionality of our own campuses. I know that my teaching has changed since I began blogging, because I get great ideas from my “friends.” My on-line colleagues also model the kind of academic I want to be — a student-centered teacher who is also a productive scholar. There is some of that at the CC where I teach, but the general attitude of people who do scholarly things is one of distrust. Consequently, I think we have a good thing going.
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I agree with Laura and just quoted Timothy Burke yesterday! It is like voices in my head, but since I hadn’t set up a blog until this week, there was no interaction except for a few comments left, often anonymously. So I’m looking forward to having a name, if not a face, certainly the persona comes through from all of these web acquaintances.
ADM – exactly, my teaching has changed so much since I started reading, listening to the interaction, picking up links and information, and some emailing (esp with Jocalo). At the cc where I teach, going to guest lecture yesterday was considered an odd thing to do (unlike grad school); the interactions are so often limited.
looking forward to continuing the conversation.
oh, and Laura, I’m sorry if my blog looks too too much like yours! I realized it when I flipped back and forth and there was this eerie similarity.
timna
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That’s great to hear that blogging has helped your teaching, ADM. I would say it has broaded my research interests, but we’ll see about the teaching when I get back into again.
Timna, great minds think alike. And use the same typepad templates. Welcome to blogging and our fun, little group.
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