Blogging as an Academic Medium

Andrew Cline notes:

While some of the best bloggers are academics, the weblog form has yet to spark much interest in academia as a venue for publishing research or criticism. That's to be expected. What's been interesting for me, however, is how much I've had to defend the form as a venue for public dissemination of my academic thinking. But, then, many academics, working under the pressure of publish-or-perish, are loathe to engage the public with work that's unlikely to count toward tenure. And some are just loathe to engage the public for any reason at all.

I think that clearly the tenure issue is relevant, but I think that there are three others reasons of note why blogs have not become a more mainstream academic medium.

Th first is that instant analysis tends to have a less than academic quality to it, as it is typically made without the rigorous research that the academy tends to require. Indeed, punditry can be dangerous, as it often requires conclusions when there is likely insufficient information to reach a conclusion. It is something I must admit I struggle with myself.

The second is the lack of peer-review prior to publication. If you think that the problem of non-edited newspaper blogs was an issue, you can be guaranteed that was nothing as compared to the issue of peer-review in the academy.

The third is simple, and likely the best explanation: go look at the web sites of most profs and you will find that they are either quite lame, nonexistent, or a cookie cutter put together by some web guy on campus. The academy hasn't fully figured out how to use the web to disseminate basic information (although it has gotten radically better at it in the last 5 years), so it is no surprise that they haven't figured out blogs. My guess is that most academics don't even know what a blog is.