Blogging, Academia, and Me

A li'l more self-promotion: here's Eric Rauchway, the panel organizer, talking about that blog panel thing.

What struck me at the time, and what I really wanted to say something about, was what Eric mentions in his post: the fact that most of the follow-up discussion was about the anxieties of blogging: aren't people afraid of what might happen if they blog?

These same questions have come up every time I've talked publicly about blogging to an academic audience, and I think Eric's thought that they're about different disciplinary discourses is at best only a partial explanation. The differences between humanities and science folks (let's include econ on the science side for argument's sake) on this anxiety-of-blogging question is, I think, just a small symptom of a larger disciplinary difference (which might be gendered, too) between fields where there are obvious and well-paying non-academic jobs and fields where there aren't. Which also means fields where there's less anxiety about getting and keeping jobs vs. fields where there's more.

I think that anxieties about blogging are mostly anxieties about unemployment. For academics in particular, unemployment anxieties have different forms: the will-I-finish anxiety, the will-I-get-a-job anxiety, the will-I-publish anxiety, the will-I-get-tenure anxiety. And because for academics, having a job is so deeply bound up with having an identity, these unemployment anxieties become personal anxieties, which are difficult to discuss with non-academics (because they don't share them) or with one's immediate colleagues (who are, after all, also one's competition and/or tenure committee).

So we turn to blogging, in part, to express these anxieties safely--which means impersonally and publicly. Interestingly, it seems that impersonal publication of one's personal private anxieties actually helps a lot--not just in terms of finding a like-minded audience (there are a lot of pseudonymous academic blogs, have you noticed?), but also simply because articulating them subjects them externalizes them: you realize that they're something you can analyze, that they're *not* just you or the entirety of you, that they're something more public, more shared, more systematic than that.

Which, you know, is a good thing. And it's part of the roots of feminist lit crit, too: the idea that expressing the mundane, the personal, the minute is actually a political act both because it gives "mere" experience a material aspect and because it helps/forces both the experience and the author to move outside herself, to become part of the public world.

I think these realizations are generalizable beyond myself, but I certainly have to admit that they're incredibly rooted in my own experience of blogging. It's pushed me from an anxious nobody into a self-possessed somebody even as it's brought me "out" of academia into a more broadly public/populist/common role. Ironically (I think I remember saying something like this a long time ago), the self-possession is more my "old" self than the anxiety. Or rather, the two have always existed in relationship to one another: the anxiety is internal, private; the self-possession is both identity and public performance.

So anyway, that's me. Notes, perhaps, towards a future, longer, and better articulated public effort/essay.