Social Media and Doing a PhD: what do you need to know?

I organised a Sociological Review workshop at the weekend with Jenny Thatcher, Pat Thomson and Inger Mewburn. I’m sufficiently snowed under at the moment that I don’t have the time/energy to reflect on it properly but here’s a sneak preview of the graphic produced by Julia Hayes (below), links to live blogging by Tyler Shores below and live tweeting by Zoe Walshe on the #socialmediaphd hashtag. I’ve also attached some photos of the charts participants produced which I want to come back to later and think about properly.

Reading the philosopher Daniel Little’s reflection on eleven years of Understanding Society, I found myself wondering how blogging will be seen when we are surrounded by personal blogs which are decades old? The blog you are reading is eight years old this month, superseding a sequence of blogs which covered a further seven years before this. Its form and content have changed significantly in that time but its underlying purpose has not, cataloguing my intellectual engagement in a more or less thorough way during that time. It has ranged from what C Wright Mills called fringe thoughts through to elaborate reflections, even documenting an entire program of research on asexuality from start to finish.

It seems likely to be something I will stick with, leaving me wondering about how I will feel about it in twenty, thirty or forty years time? What will be the significance for intellectual culture when there are many of these elaborate texts of such an age? How will they be interpreted as what Ken Plummer called documents of life? In my more pretentious moments, I’m starting to wonder if the sheer fact of sustaining a blog like this over a long period of time has intellectual significance in and of itself, above and beyond the many ways in which it provides the soil from which other more familiar intellectual endeavours tend to grow.

Some thoughts on intellectual self-archiving

Anyone who has read my blog for a while will be aware that I use it to self-archive. As Cory Doctorow explains in this wonderful piece, it’s a mode of information storage suitable for those whose working lives revolve around the identification, evaluation and retrieval of information:

I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living. Whether I’m writing science fiction, editorials, columns, or tech books, whether I’m speaking from a podium or yammering down the phone at some poor reporter, my success depends on my ability to cite and connect disparate factoids at just the right moment.

As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.

Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don’t know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this — it’s one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mentalregisters.

Blogs are far from the only way to produce what Doctorow describes as “a central repository of all of the fruits of my labors in the information fields”. The commonplace book is an obvious precursor to the research blog. Luhman used a terrifyingly intricate filecard system. C. Wright Mills advocated a file or journal to keep track of ‘fringe thoughts’. Any system will entail certain constraints and affordances for your self-archiving. However, the usefulness of an archiving system will depend as much on how you use it as on which system you choose.

It occurred to me recently that my self-archiving has become inconsistent. Whereas I went through a phase of putting everything on the blog, often leading to five or six posts per day, it’s now spread across a number of systems:

Highlights and notes in Amazon Kindle
Ideas grouped together in talks on Artefact cards
Resources archived in a number of e-mail folders
Points to explore archived in Notability
Ideas placed directly into ongoing writing

The first point troubles me because I despise Amazon yet become more dependent upon them with each day I use this system. The latter one in particular troubles me because I tend to over-write. I find producing words relatively easy and it’s only in the few years since my PhD that I’ve learned to edit myself properly. Therefore ‘fringe-thoughts’ that immediately find expression might end up being lost.

The urge to capture everything might seem obsessive. However, there’s something genuinely exciting about the idea of building a living archive of your thought over a period of decades. This blog has been active since 2010, encompassing 3426 posts over almost 7 years. Looking back on it, I’m struck by how much my thought has changed in that time but also how many continuities there are. Things I struggled to express years ago are now clearly defined questions I’m addressing in my research.

Perhaps I need to put more effort into this, embracing intellectual self-archiving as a commitment rather than merely a habit. Though it seems possible that simply having written this post, articulating the issues and archiving it in my ‘outboard brain’, might be sufficient to change my practice. It often is and that’s one of many things which is so engrossing about intellectual self-archiving.

The transformation of academic writing and the challenge of ephemera

What does social media mean for academic writing? Most answers to this question focus on how such platforms might constrain or enable the expression of complex ideas. For instance, we might encounter scepticism that one could express conceptual nuance in 140 characters or an enthusiasm for blogging as offering new ways to explore theoretical questions beyond the confines of the journal article. However these discussions only rarely turn to writing in a more biographical sense, as a recurrent activity which is both personally meaningful and professionally necessary.

Social media is certainly offering us more occasions for writing. The most obvious form this takes is the personal blog, providing one with a platform for exploration whenever we are taken by the feel of an idea worth exploring. However I suspect that many academics who sustain a personal blog do so because it serves a purpose prior to writing, serving as a common-place book or ideas garden. In such cases, the time spent blogging serves as a preparation for writing, even if it is sometimes an oblique one. There is no necessary tension here between blogging and writing, even if sometimes the former can hinder the latter, for instance when the familiarity of the blog draws us away from more formal writing that might not be going well.

What about online writing that doesn’t serve this preparatory function? In the last few weeks, I’ve found myself thinking about the challenge of ephemera increasingly confronting academics. I mean ephemera in the literal sense of “things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time”. Long-established examples include book reviews, newsletter articles and short pieces in magazines. With the growth of social media, we are seeing a rapid expansion in opportunities to produce such ephemera. Multi-author blogs and online magazines will often be sources of invitations to write, as well as offering opportunities for this to qualified parties who are seeking them out. Such writing rarely constitutes much of a commitment in its own terms. One of many reasons I enjoy writing of this sort is that the usual temporal horizon rarely exceeds a few hours work. For instance, it might take a while to read a book for review but not to write the review itself.

To call ephemera a ‘challenge’ may be misleading. In many ways, I remain convinced this is an opportunity, for the enjoyment of intellectual richness and diversity at the level of both individual scholars and scholarly communities. But unlike blogging in the preparatory sense discussed above, it can often take away from time and energy available for ‘real’ writing. The number of opportunities can itself prove problematic, as invitations and inclinations lead to over-commitment in the face of this abundance. For instance, in the next couple of weeks, I’m supposed to write an article for a magazine, a book review for a blog symposium, a blog post for a newspaper and a piece of sociological fiction for a zine. If I’m being realistic, it seems unlikely I’ll complete them all and thus the writing that was chosen rather than invited is likely to fall by the wayside. Though I think it’s a shame that I experience this as in some sense a distraction, despite my enthusiasm for the planned pieces. Much of this is related to journal articles, as things I should be writing but feel little inclination to, leaving it hard not to see a distance from academia as involving a gain rather than a loss of intellectual freedom.

A subsequent conversation made me think back to Richard Rorty’s remark about universities enabling one to “read books and report what one thinks about them”. Is the promise of ephemera a matter of keeping in touch with this aspiration within a university system which militates against its realisation?

Bloggers and their role in the dissemination of scholarly information

Notes from this Webinar. I had to leave after the second speaker so they’re not complete.

Alt metrics are a complement to existing metrics, addressing some of the key issues posed by metrics: the lag time of citations, the limitations of impact factor, the time to publication and their focus on a niche audience. The intention of alt metrics is to expand the focus, in order to assess what a broader audience think about research. This has many aspects but one increasingly important one is blogging, currently encompassing 10,000+ blogs with over 1 million mentions of research, from 2006 to now.

Research commentary plays a crucial role in the public understanding of science. It mediates access to research, sometimes providing a more accessible articulation and other times providing a critical focus. The webinar gave an overview of four different types of blog which Alt Metrics are concerned with:

Newspaper blogs: often hosted on a subdomain, with a large and diverse audience.
Public education blogs: written by specialists and scientists, with public education as a main goal. They tend to have a social media presence and a large but specific audience.
Blogs hosted by academic institutions: a lab or department, often used for promoting that groups work, a narrow academic focus and act as a press release outlet for the group.
Research blogging platforms: these are a large collective domain, aggregating lots of different blogs, with an audience that tends to be researchers, helps build a research community.

One of the guest speakers, Rolf Degen, talked about how the internet has disrupted the work of freelance science writers. What were once 95 weekly science sections had become 34 in 2005 and 19 in 2012. He embraced social media in order to help build the audience for his writing, though encountered the problem of people not following links through to his article from his tweets. He tried to compress the complexity of a science story by taking a screenshot to post on Twitter, inciting readers to click through to the piece itself. Another problem is that people on Twitter like negativity, sarcastic comments and the tearing apart of established studies.

Nonetheless, it’s important to recognise that the ‘dirty side of science’ has been ignored by the media, who get most of their information from big science institutions and their press releases. Many of his followers are well qualified, prone to instantly criticising him if he makes a mistake. His editors have never been experts in his field, with criticism from readers being confined to letter to the editor. For this reason, the quality control is much higher than it has previously been. He argues that social media has created “an acquired taste for criticism” which is greatly beneficial for science writing. It’s creating a climate in which it’s just as much fun to find error in something, as to find great new insights, contributing to a turn away from the bias for positive results.

The next speaker, Neuro Skeptic, spoke about his experiences as a science blogger. He drew a sharp distinction between science blogging and science journalism. Blogs have become an accepted part of the media in a way that they weren’t until recently, leading people to talk less about blogs as they’ve become a normal part of the landscape. He discussed a really interesting case when Science Blogs lost many of its audience in protest over Pepsi Gate, leading this audience to disperse over the media ecosystem. He draws a distinction between science bloggers (as niche content creators and often research active or with research experience) and science journalists (as generalists with a science background). Blogs offer scientists a way to communicate directly with readers (stripping out press officers) but that means they can be used to push an agenda. He warns that we shouldn’t romanticise science blogging as a pristine way of ‘getting the science out’ because it’s agenda driven. This means we can’t take social media popularity as being an intrinsically good thing, because this might mean things are being celebrated within circles we would regard as unscientific.

Some interesting points about their policy for blog tracking which I’d like to know more about:

Their tracking is based on what they happen to hear about.
All blogs are weighted equally.
They are indexed by author, in order that multiple mentions of the same research by the same author will only be counted once.
They are filtered to ensure quality, in order to avoid counting spam blogs etc.

The cultural significance of blogging

In his Uberworked and Underpaid, Trebor Scholz offers an important reflection on the cultural significance of blogging. While its uptake has been exaggerated, dependent upon questionable assumptions concerning the relationship between users and blogs, it nonetheless represents a transformation of and expansion of cultural agency which needs to be taken seriously. From loc 3825:

Web 2.0, to be fair, was incredibly successful as an ideology, a meme, and a marketing ploy with global effects. Already by 2004, the industry claimed that there were some 100 million weblogs. One didn’t have to be a skeptic of numerical reasoning to understand that the claim that everybody on this planet was blogging was based on shaky statistics. Clearly, some of these projections were blind to the digital divide, and overlooked the fact that many weblogs were set up but then never used again. But still, we need to acknowledge that more than a decade after its emergence, blogging had roped millions into a daily writing practice; it made them walk through their lives with the eyes of a participant, somebody who could potentially participate or insert her own perspective.

This is reminiscent of the appendix to The Sociological Imagination, in which C Wright Mills offers practical advice about ‘keeping one’s inner world awake’. It would be overstating matters to claim blogging is intrinsically tied to the sociological imagination, but the propensity to “insert her own perspective” in a life more likely to be lived “with the eyes of a participant” is something we should take seriously, while refraining from assuming that this flows inexorably from the adoption of blogging as a regular activity.

40 reasons why you should blog about your research

It helps you become more clear about your ideas.
It gives you practice at presenting your ideas for a non-specialist audience.
It increases your visibility within academia.
It increases your visibility outside academia and makes it much easier for journalists, campaigners and practitioners to find you.
It increases your visibility more than a static site and allows people who find you to get an overall sense of your academic interests.
It’s a great way of making connections & finding potential collaborators.
It can provide an archive of your thoughts, ideas and reactions which can later be incorporated into more formal work.
It makes it easier for people to find your published work and increases the likelihood they will read and cite it.
Its informality and immediate accessibility can help make writing part of your everyday life rather than being a source of stress and anxiety.
Its a great way to promote events and call for papers. Particularly if you blog regularly and your blog is connected to Twitter.
It helps ensure you can continue to develop strands of thought which, for now, don’t have any practical implications but might at some point in the future.
It encourages you to reflexively interrogate and organise your work, drawing out emergent themes and placing isolated snippets of commentary into shared categories.
It allows you to procrastinate for a further 10 to 20 minutes before going back to NVivo in a useful(ish) way.
It helps you build a community around your ideas and interests – Kath McNiff
It allows you to start a conversation that other researchers can join using comments – Kath McNiff
It’s a tremendous way to access additional relevant information/sources through the connections you make – @drdjwalker
It can also be a great way to increase your sample size by crowd sourcing contributions and through public scrutiny help prepare you for the peer review process when the time comes to publish your work – @drdjwalker
It’s a great way to get international and cross-disciplinary input and reflections on your research – @jess1ecat
It’s a fabulous way to give back to the research community by providing links and resources for other researchers, give and you shall receive – @jess1ecat
Reciprocity through blogging and Twitter shares builds your profile but importantly forges lasting connections to fellow researchers – @jess1ecat
It allows you to publish ideas immediately without waiting two years while things go through peer review and more peer review and wait in a publishing queue – @CelebYouthUK
It’s fun – @CelebYouthUK
It’s a faster way to get your research findings out. Journal/book publishing and the peer-review/editing process can take FOREVER – @ajlusc
Because C Wright Mills would have probably been a blogger. If not, he would at the very least have been a fan – @ajlusc
It is an exercise in disciplined writing. Stuff that doesn’t get used in the bigger thesis project, published papers, and the like, can be glossed for a blog and thrown out for ‘collision’ with others’ ideas. That’s how better ideas get formulated – Ibrar
It makes you a better writer – @drfigtree
It allows raw uncensored ideas to be creatively expressed before stymied by a prolonged peer review process – @DrBenKoh
It allows research findings to be put out there in a format that participants can access, and are actually likely to read – Matthew Hanchard
You have control of the publishing process – @DrHelenKara
It’s a way to publish information about all aspects of research which formal publishing methods won’t accept, whether because it’s too short, too partial, too controversial, or for some other reason – @DrHelenKara
Keeping your own blog can be a daunting prospect, but that’s not the only way: many bloggers are more than happy to accept a ‘guest’ blog on a subject which would be of interest to their readers – @DrHelenKara
It helps to be up-to-date with new findings in your discipline, and often with findings in other fields – @udadisisuperior
It’s a means to be FOUND. People google those words and ta-da! – @everythingabili
It forces you to think of your ideas in simple language that can be easily articulated. It’s communication practice. – @everythingabili
You will have MORE IDEAS – GUARANTEED. The process of blogging almost always sparks off more ideas. How could it not? – @everythingabili
No need to study in isolation if you are a distance learning student, blogging is one way to network, share ideas and your studies with fellow students around the world – Lucy Bodenham
Over time, a blog has helped me to develop more jargon-free and even poetic writing. I have returned to academic publication with a better language with which to express myself – Kip jones
Blogging helps keep your profile out there if you are experiencing a gap between publications – Jeff Craig
Help students know what their (prospective) adviser work on – @dimitridf
It is free global advertisement for your programme/university – @dimitridf

Any suggestions for more reasons? Put them in the comments box and I’ll add them to the list & note who they came from. If you’re on Twitter please include your twitter handle.

There are many ways to keep a digital research journal other than blogging

At a talk I did earlier in the week, I was asked about my focus on using social media to work ideas out in public. This is something I find myself talking about a lot, not least of all because it has been such a consistently valuable experience for me. But as the questioner observed, this isn’t appropriate for everyone. For instance, many people do research that it would be unsuitable, imprudent or unethical to rehearse in this way. Furthermore, it might simply be an approach that some people are uncomfortable with and there’s nothing wrong with this.

The question made me wonder if I overemphasise blogging as a platform for ‘continuous publishing’. My underlying point is as much about the regularity of writing as it is about doing this writing in public. I came across a lovely post by Jon Rainford recently that captured this nicely. He talks about ‘part-time studying but full-time thinking’ as something he’s been able to do through the habitual use of Evernote:

Often it is in the midst of my day job, or during my drive to work that the things I have been struggling with suddenly make sense. This is also something that needs to be capitalised upon as often these thoughts go and fast as they come. For this, Evernote has been a life saver, acting as a multimedia notepad that is with me 24/7. Sometimes, I write a note by hand and capture it with my phone’s camera, sometimes I do the same with a document and other times I type direct into it. This mental scrapbook, however, is what I believe has been the key to moving forward in my thinking even when I’m not technically working on my PhD project.

https://jonrainford.wordpress.com/2015/09/19/part-time-studying-but-full-time-thinking/

The way Jon is using Evernote is directly equivalent to how I’m suggesting blogs can be used. The peculiar value of blogging comes, in my experience, from the pressure it engenders to fully elaborate upon an inchoate idea i.e. you have to develop a line of thought in order to ensure others can read the post. But there are downsides as well, which I perhaps don’t stress enough.

Tools like Evernote, as well as apps like Day One journal, offer really effective means through which it’s possible to keep a research notebook. The point is to write regularly, most of all when the inspiration strikes you. When you enjoy what C Wright Mills called ‘the feel of an idea’. Mobile computing makes this possible in a way that would have previously been difficult, allowing you to keep a file where ever you are. More over, it’s one that can so easily incorporate multimedia, allowing you to capture artefacts of the world around you as part of this process of systematic curiosity.

Options like Evernote might be best for those whose research topics are at all sensitive. But this doesn’t mean blogging isn’t something that should be considered. After all, it’s possible to be a blogger without having your own blog. Such established platforms for guest blogging are particularly valuable to those doing research on sensitive topics because their specialised editors will be able to offer advice on potential issues the topics raise and be able to discuss any anxieties the author has about them.

The Pleasures of Scholarly Blogging

There’s a lovely extract of the Academic Diary in which Les Back reflects on the life and work of the social theorist Vic Seidler. Remarking on the vast range of topics on which Seidler has written, Les suggests that this deeply committed man “writes not because his academic position expects it but because he has something to say and communicate”. For someone like Seidler, writing is something a person does because they are “trying to work something out”.

This captures what I see as the promise of academic blogging. It’s a platform for trying to work things out. More so, doing it in the open grants each of these attempts a social existence, one that comes with undoubted risks but also enormous rewards. Little bits of thought shrapnel, brief attempts to make some sense of the ‘feel of an idea’, come to enjoy their own existence within the world. They’re mostly forgotten or even ignored from the outset. But there’s something quite remarkable about occasions when these fragments resurface as someone sees something of value in them, perhaps when you saw no value in them yourself.

Furthermore, it attunes you to the impulse to write because you have “something to say and communicate”. This isn’t always the case and I worry that the metricisation of scholarly blogging will prove immensely destructive of it. But there is at least for now something deeply rewarding about seizing on an inchoate idea, developing it and throwing it off into the world to see what others make of it. For no other reason than the pleasure inherent to it.

call for contributions to the @sociowarwick centre for women and gender blog

An initiative from the Centre for Women and Gender in Sociology at Warwick, where the centre for social ontology is also based:

A reminder that we are now accepting submissions to the CSWG blog. This academic focussed blog aims to promote the work of academics and students conducting research around topics relating to women and gender studies.

We warmly welcome submissions from scholars working in, but not limited to, the following:

Reflections on issues relating to the production of feminist research, including feminist theory and methodologies;

Academics forging links with relevant contemporary activism;

Issues from any discipline relating to a broad range of gender related topics, such as gender and education, politics, transgender and sexualities, feminism and women’s rights, masculinities and femininities, media and culture, and work, employment and the family.

Submission guidelines:

Anyone can contribute; we welcome, and actively encourage, a variety of voices.

Though the focus of the blog remains primarily academic in nature, we are happy to accept a range of content from opinion pieces to short essays. Please note the maximum word limit of 1000 words.

Please include references so that readers have the opportunity to carry out further reading.

Please include a brief biography – no more than a few lines – with all submissions. Although we would prefer to avoid anonymity in order to promote transparency, we appreciate there may be instances where this would not be appropriate.

Please email submissions to cswgseminarseries@gmail.com for peer review. If you have any further questions, please do email us at cswgseminarseries@gmail.com or get in touch via Facebook or Twitter

With best wishes,

CSWG graduate seminar committee: Elizabeth Ablett, Emine Erdogan, Heather Griffiths, Iro Konstantinou, Kate Mahoney, Isabel Nuñez-Salazar and Carli Rowell

blogging as an outboard brain

This superb post by Cory Doctorow offers a philosophy of blogging extremely similar to what I’ve described as continuous publishing:

As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.

Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don’t know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this — it’s one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mentalregisters.

Blogging also provides an incentive to keep blogging. As Boing Boing’s hit-counter rises steadily, growing 10-30 percent every month, I get a continuous, low-grade stream of brain-rewards; rewards that are reinforced by admiring email, cross-links from other blogs that show up in my referrer logs, stories that I broke climbing the ranks on Daypop and Blogdex (and getting picked up by major news outlets). The more I blog, the more reward I generate: strangers approach me at conferences and tell me how much they liked some particular entry; people whose sites I’ve pointed to send me grateful email thanking me for bringing their pet projects to the attention of so many people.

http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/01/01/cory.html

blogging your fieldwork

Pat Thompson has written a fascinating post reflecting on her use of blogging to record field notes during an ethnographic project at the Tate summer school. She stresses the ethical challenges of such an activity – particularly the need to negotiate consent with participants, including around photos, as well as the need for a framework for naming and recognition of potential harms – but argues that blogging in this context can provide a really useful ‘audit trail’: a record of what was done and in what order.

She makes a compelling case that the resulting posts offer many advantages compared to more traditional ways of recording field notes: it’s easier to discipline yourself to do the blog post, it’s easier to link out in ways susceptible to following up later and the need to make the posts accessible and interesting (e.g. not too long) necessitates editing/filtering which itself requires valuable evaluation of the events of the day. What I found most interesting though were the advantages this can have in terms of building connections, within and beyond the fieldwork site:

(5) participants and research partners like to read the posts each day too. It not only works for you but also works for them as a record of what’s gone on and what resources, people, organisations and “stuff” they used – so they can follow these up too.

(6) participants know more about what you’re doing. We all read our institutional ethics forms about checking with participants and keeping them informed, but this is often not taken very seriously IMHO. A daily post goes a little way to telling people what youre doing, and…

(7) a post can lead to good conversations with participants. if something is online, people can read it and then – tell you’ve got something wrong, or disagree with you, or discuss something further or tell you what they think. If your notes are locked away in your notebook, then this kind of responsive conversation is less easy to begin.

(8) the telling of the events as they’ve just happened has “live-ness” which is often missing from accounts which are heavily processed long after the event has happened (see “Live methods” by Les Back and Nirmal Puwar)

(9) blog readers may get some ideas of their own from reading about your work (I’ve just been contacted by one of my colleagues who is going to play with GIFs and zines on the back of yesterday’s post.)

http://patthomson.net/2015/07/27/blogging-your-field-work/

This is a wonderful example of what I’ve tried to write about in the past as ‘continuous publishing’: the advantages that can accrue from doing work in the open that once would have been done in private. Getting the ideas out there in this way, making them public, means they begin to act instantaneously – in this case, in a way that feeds back upon the process that is being documented through blogging.

Cory Doctorow’s Philosophy of Blogging

The most popular posts on my blog in 2014

Some thoughts on sociological blogging

The potential value and dangers of sociological blogging arise because of an environment in which the demands of audit culture incentivise the production of ‘unread’ and ‘unloved’ publications which are too often written to be counted rather than to be read. The risk is that sociological blogging gets drawn into the pernicious logic of these metrics perhaps with ‘impact’ being measured through the daily visitors a blog receives or the number of times an online article is shared on social media. The temptation arises in part because of the manner in which such analytics are designed into blogging platforms themselves, with all providing numerous ways to view statistics about a blog’s popularity and many third party utilities available which can extend these modes of measurement. Given a broader trend first towards ‘content factories’ and then ‘viral publishers’, as well as the domination of ‘click-bait’, we need to think seriously about the potential for the the logic of the ‘social web’ to act back upon digital scholarship in a way that leads to a slide towards banality. My own experience has been that these considerations can creep in almost surreptitiously, as a seamless extension of rather innocuous practical considerations. If one is investing time in a project that aims to provide a platform for sociological writing then a reliance upon the built in metrics for measuring the circulation of that writing is inevitable. The problems begin when a incipient awareness of the varying popularity of different kinds of writing begins to effect how they are valued.

For example, articles bemoaning the contemporary state of higher education are inevitably very popular (presumably because they both have a broader disciplinary remit then things which are explicitly sociological and appeal to something in the day-to-day professional lives of those reading them) but should this popularity mean that writing of this form becomes particularly valued for the blog itself? It probably should not but it is easy for this slide to happen, with a concern for the blog’s popularity and reach too easily giving rise to a concern for ‘content’ that contributes to these ends. We can see a similar issue with the titles which are chosen on blogs. With even the most casual assessment of the relative ‘performance’ (my unthinking use of this term and overwhelming need to place it in scare quotes reflects the underlying ambivalence I am attempting to convey) of blog posts, it soon becomes clear that the title chosen contributes to how widely ready they are, largely through the mediating factor of how pervasively they are shared on social media. To a certain extent this can be a positive thing, encouraging the choice of informative and evocative titles, as opposed to narrowly descriptive ones. However a recognition of the sheer difference that a title can make, particularly if this is grounded in an engagement with the available data about how widely posts are shared on social media, can surely have a distorting effect. To use a recent example, I found that a post initially entitled “Gender, Reflexivity and Friendship” attracted little attention on social media but was shared extensively when given a new title “The Sociology of Friendship”. Soon after, I found myself rejecting the potential title “Performance, Awkwardness and Sociability” for a similar post (a couple of thousands of words of social theory, too unstructured for an academic article but nonetheless trying to make a serious, albeit meandering, sociological point) in favour of “The Sociology of Awkwardness”. Predictably enough this proved extremely popular and acted as encouragement to pursue similar naming conventions in future. The risk here is that a tendency within online publishing more broadly, in which often quite obnoxious headlines are generated quasi-algorithmically because of their demonstrable impact on the ‘virality’ of a post, creep into online scholarship as a proclivity for data analysis and an investment in the success of a project outweigh the high minded dismissal of these trends.

Perhaps this points towards the emerging need for online editorship to be taken seriously as a form of academic service. It is only in the last two years, partly as a result of editing the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog as a full time job, that I’ve begun to feel comfortable describing myself as such. Previously, I felt there was a degree of affectation about it, as if describing oneself as an ‘editor’ in relation to a blog was a pretence at seriousness about an inherently unserious activity, something which was occasionally reflected in judgements I received from other people (though inevitably my own insecurity led me to give more weight to their judgement that they probably intended). But given the likely continued expansion of sociological activity online then the role of the blog editor is likely to grow in importance over time, as a gatekeeper to opportunities for professional visibility but also as a mediating factor shaping the emergence of online norms.

While some normative standards are beginning to emerge concerning matters such as attribution, style and format, these are inevitably fragmented and partial. The more seriously we take the role of blog editor then the more reflexively such questions are likely to be approached by those performing this function. This is important given that such individuals are amongst the few actually able to enforce standards online, albeit in a truncated domain, with the solidification of such norms otherwise being largely a matter of mimesis, as individuals observe others in their networks (or beyond them) in order to inform their own emerging practice. If we take editorship in this sense seriously as a form of academic service then we help mitigate against the tendency for such questions to be responded to pragmatically, instead creating the possibility of a ‘third space’ between academic research and journalism occupied by those who are concerned to translate academic knowledge. Either in the sense of being writers themselves who work to popularise academic knowledge by writing about it in a form amenable to a wider readership or by working with academics, whether directly on particular pieces of writing or indirectly through creating structures that incentivise certain forms of communication. My contention is that such a function is not straightforwardly academic but nor is it journalistic. Given the much remarked upon overproduction of PhD graduates, with too few academic jobs available for those awarded doctorates to pursue academic careers, it is intriguing to speculate about the likely implications of a potential funded expansion of group blogging for academic career trajectories.

I am personally within the first cohort for whom this is a viable occupational opportunity, albeit still in a very limited way, with blogging having contributed in an important way to sustaining myself financially through six years of a part-PhD (through working full time as an editor for some time but also through more ad hoc work such as running workshops and managing social media accounts). There is obviously a sense in which I have a vested interest in the expansion of this sphere, given I enjoy this work and, if possible, want to pursue a career path which mixes my own research and social media to the greatest extent possible. It is precisely the existence of such vested interests, as well as the significance of broader institutional trends for academic blogging and vice versa, which makes it imperative that we expand discussions of online writing, as well as other forms of social media engagement, beyond the scope of the merely technical. The communicative opportunities afforded by blogging invite us to consider the purposes of such communication. My suggestion has been that they pose tacit questions of great importance which it is valuable for the discipline as a whole to recover: what is sociology for? How do sociologists communicate? How could they communicate? How should they communicate? Many of the risks which have been discussed reflect a failure to address such questions adequately, with immediacy and novelty potentially squeezing out disciplinary craft rather than acting as an invitation to rethink that craft in light of these changing opportunities.

The value of blogging for part-time PhD students

One of the more elusive benefits of blogging has been the implications for my professional identity. As a part-time PhD student, without funding but committed to an academic career trajectory (albeit at times waveringly), I found myself engaged in a diverse array of short term roles within the academy. Some of these had clear relevance to my nascent identity as a researcher but most did not, requiring competencies I already possessed by virtue of my research training or helping me develop ones which might in future be beneficial to me as a researcher; though never quite reflecting the core concerns that motivated my work while nonetheless being close enough to them that I could rarely put these questions out my mind in the way that would be expected in paid work engaged in for consistently and straight-forwardly instrumental reasons. The professional socialisation that ensues from such circumstances is inherently refractory, shaping one’s professional identity in all manner of ways but without the easy unfolding of a narrative that makes sense of the occupational trajectory that is unfolding. This is far from a unique experience within the neoliberal university, as the systematic casualization of academic labour combines with the idealised notion of scholarship as a noble calling to produce an intersection of commitment and precarity with all manner of harmful consequences.

It is in this context that these new communication tools become so significant, with the possibilities afforded by them being misrepresented when conceived as something external to the everyday lives of those working within the academy. Obviously these are instruments which can function to expand the scope of dissemination activities but construing them solely in such terms misses an important set of questions concerning the implications of social media for academic identity. In my own experience personal blogging helped integrate what would have otherwise been a fragmented professional identity, perpetually divided as it has been between different roles and different institutions. Sustaining a personal blog inevitably invites reflection on one’s own experiences, though of course such a use is not dictated by the technology itself. In doing so, it helps imbue those experiences with a coherency which they might otherwise lack, addressing the perennial question of how present commitments relate to potential futures.

The process of using the blog in this way has also led to an increasing awareness of the types of use I make of it, reflected in an initially inchoate working taxonomy which has emerged in my own psyche as to the various tasks which are involved in the development of ideas and the production of academic work. The process of sustaining the blog as an ‘open notebook’ has inculcated a sensitivity to workflow and craft which I had previously lacked. The claim here is a straightforward one: a change of tools can provoke a greater awareness of the uses to which such tools can be put. However this could easily be misconstrued as postulating an untenable juxtaposition of habitual analogue practice to reflexive digital practice. Instead I wish to offer a much less contentious proposition: digital tools offer a diverse range of opportunities for rethinking the practice of research and, in doing so, unavoidably raise questions in virtue of their novelty which can lead to a newfound reflexivity about the means and ends of practice. To make sense of such a claim, it is crucial that we distinguish between the tool used and the purposes to which it is put because the former may be new but the latter manifestly is not. For instance one of the most prominent explorations of the practice of journaling can be found in the explanation by C. Wright Mills of how keeping a file or a journal,

“encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience […] by keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape.”

What concerns Mills here is the cultivation of attentiveness as an aspect of intellectual craft. Through the considered adoption of specific habits of self-reflection, enacted via the medium of the ‘file’, it becomes possible to more fully and creatively engage with one’s environment and to develop the fruits of this engagement in a productive manner. On such a view, the development of ideas is seen as something which cannot be segregated into particular tracts of space and time without proving injurious to the creative faculties on which such work depends. Instead, Mills offers a view of intellectual work as dependent upon a lived engagement with the world and one which, if creativity is allowed to emerge, often overflows the conventional boundaries that society places on ‘work’. On such a view the ‘file’ cannot be adequately understood as an external record simply used to record ideas for future retrieval (though of course it does serve this purpose). Instead, it is seen as constitutive of the process through which such ideas emerge prior to being ‘recorded. For Mills the ‘file’ is the medium through which academic work becomes intellectual craft and, with this, a life encompassing academic labour becomes a life of intellectual craft which may (or may not) contingently be supported by employment within the academy.

Given that talk of ‘craft’ may divide sociological opinion, we might simply reframe this in terms of writing in the most encompassing sense of the term. Not just writing for publication but all the prior working through and recording of developing thoughts which runs prior to more formal writing. As Howard Becker succinctly observes, “by the time we come to write something, we have done a lot of thinking”. In highlighting the degree to which “[w]e have an investment in everything we have already worked out that commits us to a point of view and a way of handling the problem” Becker aims to help his readers overcome the anxieties which failing to recognise this so often provokes. Once we see writing as something intertwined with a broader process of intellectual engagement than the disabling perfectionism which can thrive in circumstances of ‘pluralistic ignorance’ (where the difficulties of similarly placed others are rendered invisible by their privatised working practices) begins to abate: it helps remove the pressure otherwise attached to the writing process by repudiating the myth of ex nihilo creation.

If we accept Becker’s diagnosis of the psychology of the writing process then we can be begin to see personal blogging as an important spur to reflexivity. It very literally serves to clarify where we stand in relation to our own work. Through regular blogging we come to register what Becker, in his discussion of free-writing, describes as “what you would like to say, what all your earlier work on the topic or project has already led you to believe”. Through the iteration which characterises engaged blogging, themes begin to emerge through repetition; some explicitly, as deliberate ways of formulating or categorising ideas, others less so, as repetition gradually reveals the convergence or overlap between superficially distinct interests or enthusiasms. Blogging of this form, as an engaged practice sustained over time, can be conducive to what we might think of as ‘non-linear creativity’: an open-ended creative process generative of emergent structure in often surprise and unpredictable ways. The humanistic psychologist Carl Roger conveys something of this in his account of the transformation experienced by a client in his creative work,

“It used to be that he tried to be orderly. “You begin at the beginning and you progress regularly through to the end.” Now he is aware that the process in himself is different. “When I’m working on an idea, the whole idea develops like the latent image coming out when you develop a photograph. It doesn’t start at one edge and fill in over to the other. It comes in all over. At first all you see is the hazy outline, and you wonder what it’s going to be; and then gradually something fits here and something fits there, and pretty soon it all becomes clear – all at once.”

Mark Carrigan

Tag: blogging

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