Sunday, January 28, 2007
(10:35 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Prolegomena to Any Future Meta-Blogging That Will Be Able to Come Forward as a Science
The academic blogosphere has been rocked by a wave of unprecedented meta-blogging. Certainly Scott Eric Kaufman has been responsible for well over 60% of the material in this deluge -- and in fact has gone far beyond the bounds of meta-blogging and founded a new genre: meta-dissertation-writing. His achievements in this field are unmatched and we will never be able to calculate the debt that blogging as an enterprise owes to his heroic labors. Yet it is Carrie Shanafelt, a lowly "guest author" at The Valve, who has moved the conversation forward decisively. She notes the proliferation of meta-blogging as well, but has reservations:But with all this metablogular talk, I haven’t seen much in the way of a real, useful rhetorical analysis of academic blogging that could be accessed and understood by those who have experience with blogs and by those who need to be convinced that “the internet” is the present of academic discourse, not just the future.Also the future, certainly -- that was never in question -- but not just the future. This is where academic blogging asserts itself and begins to exercise hegemony over the other subaltern academic classes.
It is no accident that the same world-historical individual who proclaims the present sway of academic blogging is also the one who calls for a more rigorous theory of blogging. "[A]ll this metablogular talk" has been just that: "talk," undisciplined, free-wheeling, everyone reinventing the wheel every time (even if few have had the courage and fortitude of an RIPope, who found himself able to say in 2006, "It seems, several years into the blog phenomenon, few have pondered much about the medium itself"). It's almost as though these so-called meta-bloggers have just been ranting on a blog, the whole time!
What we need is a true meta-blogging, a methodologically sound meta-blogging, something that can account for such diverse phenomena as open threads at Atrios, posts of Holbonic length, the Troll of Sorrow, blogspats, the singular persistence of Robert "KC" Johnson, the color scheme at Scott McLemee's blog, Matt Yglesias's insistence on doing basketball posts, the precise function of links to former comment threads at Unfogged, Bitch PhD's marriage, and those times when you try to publish in Blogger and it just sits at 0% for like an hour. (Even this catalog is much too bloggishly impressionistic.) We need a meta-blogging that will introduce some discipline into this haphazardly assembled collection of tubes, that will allow blogging to be truly professional, truly CV-able.
It is not enough to have an academic panel at the MLA about blogging, nor even to write a peer-reviewed article on the phenomenon -- no, since we are both the present and the future of academic blogging, we bloggers must be recognized qua bloggers, recognized as professional academics precisely insofar as we blog. Our product is indeed superior in every way to the doomed academic practices of the past. Our chatty style makes us accessible to the unwashed masses. Our dutiful comment and trackback trolling guarantees that our latest thoughts on academic blogging will be read by far more people than would ever even learn of the existence of whatever tedious, jargon-ridden monstrosity that the latest self-hating assistant professor produced while on the verge of suicide.
The monograph: dead. The peer-reviewed journal: dead. The classroom: dead. Only blogging can guarantee the future of academic discourse, and indeed it is the only thing keeping it alive in the present! Open up your eyes, people! Look around you! Everywhere you look: blogs, beautiful blogs! Our blogs will give us tenure. Our blogs will give us cultural relevance. Our blogs will help us get the attention of that girl from college who was really cool but only seemed to want to date assholes. And if we manage to get into a flamewar along the way, all to the good.
