Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that there are 4 reasons why academics should blog!
Excerpt:
The virtual subway. For journalists and writers, blogs are a place to practice and refine their craft. As Rainer Maria Rilke put it, writers don’t write because they want to; they write because they can’t imagine doing anything else. For writers, blogs are to publishing as speed chess is to a formal tournament: the same basic game, but faster, edgier, and rougher in an interesting way. To invoke another metaphor, for many writers blogs are less like op-ed columns than virtual subways, a place to play for a couple hours and maybe pick up a little extra money.
Credibility = transparency. Some professionals who blog have realized that the very fact that they’re blogging will impress readers. If you’re willing to be so open about what you do, the logic goes, you must be good. And it’s not bad reasoning. We all know that jargon and obscurity are crutches for marginal performers, and that professional poses can obscure as much as they assure. Transparency, on the other hand, is easy to understand, and easy to trust.
New court, old game. Then there are professionals– academics and scientists, most notably– for whom blogging is a natural extension of what they already do: network, cite each other, and argue. There are a number of high-energy physicists, string theorists, and cosmologists who are bloggers; they all seem to post extensively on each other’s blogs, taking online arguments they’ve been having for years, or that start at a conference or colloquium and just jump to cyberspace. Charles Darwin called his Origin of Species “one long argument;” the same phrase could apply to most science. Blogs turn out to be hot-houses for disputation. If e-mail encouraged flame wars, blogs encourage intellectual feuds– which figure prominently in academic life.
The brand of me. Finally, some use blogs to build their personal brand: to widen the reach of their ideas, to increase name familiarity, whatever you want to call it.
Red Herring Blog: If you’ve got a day job…
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang