Over to you
Posted on April 14th, 2008, under Academia, Politics, Web(log) Stuff
Thanks to everyone who responded to my call-out for help! I am now very happily assisted and looking forward to the year of work ahead. Except that I’m unlikely to be blogging with any regularity for the time being. On top of the Working From Home project and the online cultural studies book, plans are underway for a couple more - a monograph looking at recent representations of ‘Work on TV’ (I’ll put an outline up about it somewhere soon), and something on Underbelly written in collaboration with Jason Wilson. In light of some of these reflections I’ve also managed to gain approval for a CCCS postgraduate course starting next semester which I’ll be teaching with Graeme Turner and Mark Andrejevic.
These aren’t the only reasons that it feels important right now to step away from the insistent temporality of blogging in preference for some long term thinking, planning and writing. I must admit that the past few months have made me increasingly concerned about the relationships developing between blogging, scholarship, celebrity and elitism (for some stimulating reading on these issues, including insights on why the ‘winner takes all’ economy affects scholarly blogging as much as any other creative industry, take a look at Matthew Hindman’s manuscript, Voice, Equality, and the Internet available here. Among other things, it signals how empirics will slowly build the case against the participatory utopians).
I’m not suggesting that academia has never operated free from elitism or celebrity of various kinds, but I’m also on the record as being committed to self-reflexivity and using institutional power in ways that avoid reinforcing established voices of authority. In that sense, I wonder if this space might be better used by other people to continue discussing issues in academic life. I’m not at all sure it requires me to be the one leading it.
This isn’t a resignation, then - I’m wary of the manifesto imperative blogging itself seems to encourage - more an invitation to offer thoughts in comments, including expressions of interest for more people to become writers for Home Cooked Theory. I have always wanted to believe that blogging held the potential for collaborative, ‘world-building’ experiments, and that’s why I’ve stuck with it this long. But, I have to say that the evidence is looking pretty shaky these days… or maybe it has just felt particularly lonely here lately.
The sense I have now - of a moment being over, of an idea that may have run its course - is similar to the one I had when I passed on the work of facilitating the CSAA-forum. There is only so long anyone can manufacture enthusiasm, optimism and connection when the raw material of mutual will isn’t there. This is about an equation between labour and value that my arms and shoulders tell me I’ve been on the wrong side of for too long. I hope that this space won’t suffer the same fate of becoming an anonymous repository for book announcements and conference notifications. There is more to a career in academia than these things, otherwise we wouldn’t work so hard to try to get one. This blog has been an effort to reflect on those other dimensions that distinguish a vocation and mean more than the triumphs of output: the things that occupy us most of the time, every other day. That was the intention at least, from the beginning. The future is up to you 
On April 15th, 2008 at 2:48 pm, Nick Caldwell said:
I wonder if perhaps a forum or social network application — something more conversation focused than post + comments focused — might not be a good way to achieve what you’re talking about in your third paragraph. I’ve certainly been nursing thoughts about building something in that direction with the Memes site.
On April 15th, 2008 at 7:33 pm, Mel said:
Is it a little ironic that just as your work in online cultural studies really seems to be taking off, it’s making you relinquish your online activities, one by one?
Anyway. I see this as your space and wouldn’t read it any more if you weren’t blogging on it. No offence to the excellent people who’d no doubt write interesting stuff here. Despite your misgivings about being an ‘academic blogger’ you ought to acknowledge that this blog is also a way for other people who don’t see you often to keep up with what you’re doing.
Your relinquishing blogging also underlines the end of an era for me: the era in which I thought I might become an academic. It is like the doors of the academy are closing behind you in my face.
On April 16th, 2008 at 9:30 am, melgregg said:
Hi Mel,
Hoped you might have picked up my reference to your customary invitation to comment! You know, it’s not as if I am relinquishing my online activities really - I’m using Facebook a lot (it’s much more democratic, affirmative and interactive than blogging ever was), I still use MySpace and Flickr, I’m going back to LJ, I read heaps of feeds through Google or del.icio.us, I’m tethered to Skype and two email programs all day long… which is why (with all due respect!) I don’t agree with Nick’s understandable desire for a technical solution. The problem is not whether people have the right space to interact - it’s that they have more options than ever before. This might be a space people take for granted as a way of keeping up with me, but a) I wouldn’t know it, based on the amount of responses I get and b) why should they? In any case, I’m not going away for good, just reprioritizing.
On academic blogging, my point is worth expanding on slightly. The more I study online culture the clearer it appears that there is a hierarchy in the scholarly blogosphere, particularly in new media fields, that normalises particular modes of engagement. This is epitomised in Henry Jenkins’ recent incitement that academics blog which ends with the advisory: “posted by Henry at 1.00 am”. I’ll have more to say about this in the book, but overall it worries me that the knowledge that media scholars have about the infrastructure of the web - including how linking to each other and tagging posts increases their search rankings - can have the effect of significantly skewing the representation of what scholarship currently exists and is available to an outside audience (note the only comment on Henry’s post so far, but thinking too of journalists ‘under the pump’ and looking for quick copy).
For the moment, then, I figure that as someone without access to a suite of grad students or industry insiders to provide regular content under my header, at a rate of output that the pundits have deemed necessary to retain eyeballs, I’ll get on with doing some actual scholarship that might be able to expand the currently very narrow pool of (mostly American) voices available in my field - if not in a Google search, then at least in a database search, presuming we can encourage our students to move beyond citing only bloggers in their essays and teach them the literacies appropriate for academic writing in these times.
On April 16th, 2008 at 7:02 pm, michelle said:
From “Face Up And Sing” by Ani Difranco
Some chick says
thank you for saying all the things I never do
I say
the thanks I get is to take all the shit for you
it’s nice that you listen
it’d be nicer if you joined in
as long as you play their game girl
you’re never going to win
Today I just want someone to entertain me
I’m tired of being so fierce
I’m tired of being so friendly
you don’t have to be a supermodel
to do the animal thing
you don’t have to be a supergenius
to open your face up and sing
Somebody do something
anything soon
I know I can’t be the only
whatever-I-am in the room.
So why am I so lonely?
Why am I so tired?
I need company
I need backup
I need to be inspired.