American academic trade publication The Chronicle featured an article last year about Scholars Who Blog. As you might expect, those who do it often find it rewarding: Blogging ‘has some of the best aspects of peer review built into it,’ Jacob Levy wrote in a “post about blogging”:http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/2002_09_01_jacobtlevy_archive.html#81283697. Scholars’ entries ‘are instantly monitored and responded to by others as well-informed as they are.’ Interestingly, the article claims:
“To a remarkable degree, blogs also appear to bring full professors, adjuncts, and students onto a level field. With no evident condescension, senior faculty bloggers routinely link to the political-affairs blog maintained by Matthew Yglesias, a senior at Harvard University.”
It certainly isn’t just faculty producing interesting stuff – I was impressed recently when I came across “Read Me”:http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/ReadMe/ – which turned out to be produced by students in the Department of Journalism at New York University.
It seems to me the UK is far behind the US when it comes to the amount of academic blogging going on (see “PhDWeblogs”:http://www.phdweblogs.net/ for evidence – if it is working). I wonder if it is the speed of diffusion of technology, cultural differences between the US and the UK or attitudes to technology or self-disclosure here that make the difference?
People in Britain are too busy ‘texting’ to bother with maintaining something as time-consuming as a weblog!
http://www.text.it/mediacentre/default.asp?intPageId=675
Seriously, though, most people kind of skipped (or skimmed) the web revolution because they didn’t yet have home computers. Phone technology became more advanced and more important in the meantime and now the UK is more reliant on this technology than the US is.
Comment by jwordsmith — 6 June 2004 @ 3:53 am