Following my previous post on Professor Pat Thomson’s new blog, a few things have been nagging at me in terms of the wider context of professorial blogging and the nature of influence in social media practices across academic hierarchies.

It is reasonable to assume that professors who choose to blog play a role in inspiring early researchers within their disciplines to do the same, but does this necessarily lead to adoption? If I see a professor presenting at a research conference, I might be inspired, but I may not be eager to jump up there and do the same.

In my experience, some of the most crucial barriers to postgraduates starting to blog centre on perceptions of academic quality, reputation and audience – something along the lines of:

• “I don’t have much to say / contribute (at this stage in my studies)”
• “Nobody is interested in what I have to say”
• “I don’t have the confidence to share my thoughts on a public platform”
• “I may regret putting my ideas online that will appear academically naive in the future.”

We might reasonably assume that senior academic bloggers are highly knowledgeable, confident and articulate, with a rich portfolio of research and experience to draw on, and an ability to attract a critical mass of fellow academics. However, whilst they may inform and inspire, might the apparent maturity, assuredness and gravitas of their blogging practices actually deter early researchers from blogging themselves?

Of course, we should not necessarily assume that senior academics have the experiences and competencies of using blogging platforms. They may be new adopters to social media generally, and cautious of the potential implications to their own professional identities and reputations.

But we cannot realistically expect these busy academics to spend any amount of time on informal online dissemination without good reason. I’ve written before on the multiple purposes of blogging (that are often interrelated in complex ways), and there is no reason why a professor should be any different. For some it may be no more than a minor box-ticking exercise in demonstrating research impact, an online platform for self-promotion, or a resources dump. Others may seek to develop more dynamic, discursive and reflective blogging environments, which invite debate, engage with their current practice and research, and demonstrate a willingness to share ideas and expose their own inconsistencies, doubts and challenges.

Which of these are the most likely to influence and affect social media practice in their field?

Pat Thomson, Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham, has just launched a new blog with a batch of interesting posts.

Having attended a number of her tough but effective sessions on academic writing in the School of Education, I am particularly familiar with her post on Swales and Feak’s exercises in skeleton writing. Her book with Barbara Kamler, Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision, has rightly become recognised as a key text (don’t be misled by the title; it’s just as useful for PhD students). The recently published Routledge Doctoral Companions (for students and supervisors), which she co-edited with colleague Melanie Walker, have also been indispensible in my own research.

Of course, these represent only part of Pat Thomson’s research interests and experiences, so it will be interesting to see how the blog develops. As @PatParslow suggested in a subsequent Twitter discussion, professorial blogging is all too rare. Yet in my experience of talking with other PhD students, professors who do blog can be enormously influential (probably far more than they realise) in legitimising blogs as platforms for research dissemination, particularly in under-represented disciplines.

I briefly mentioned the notion of an ‘imagined audience’ in my recent post on PhD blogging for The Thesis Whisperer. In his thesis, David Brake (2009) uses a symbolic interactionist approach to examine imagined audiences in relation to personal blogging in the UK. He suggests blogging practices incorporate a range of ‘envisaged audience relationships’ where a blogger’s “construction of the meaning of their practice can be based as much on an imagined and desired social context as it is on an informed and reflexive understanding of the communicative situation” (p.3). Drawing on Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology, Brake explains how the marginal role of blog audiences is partly encoded in the socio-technical characteristics of the blogging platforms themselves.

Interestingly, the notion of ‘audience’ assumes a broadcast metaphor. How does this compare with the idea of a blogging community, and the participative web generally? How do we perceive audiences in the social media we use? How are these perceptions formed? And how do they differ across different platforms? Do we transfer audience identities from one platform to another?

Viewing indicators (visitor statistics etc.) are limited in what they tell us, whilst acts of participation and reciprocity (comments, retweets etc.) are often fewer in number than we’d like. Even when a network is largely identifiable – such as followers on Twitter – we have little or no idea of their actual viewing behaviours. I purposely keep the number of people I follow on Twitter to a manageable figure (I’d like to follow more) to be able to most efficiently view my twitter feed on a regular basis. I assume users who follow several thousands of people don’t do this, but rather engage in more inconsistent viewing habits, do more skimming, or employ some sort of filtering.

A number of participants in my PhD study have expressed concerns over the ambiguity of social media audiences, particularly around blogging. As I have discussed previously, doctoral practices can require negotiating a number of different contexts, which, even within my small cohort of participants, can include conflicting academic, entrepreneurial and activist activities. By choosing to use social media, they are committed to engaging in more public, distributed and persistent dialogues. The way they blog, tweet and create other digital artefacts across interrelated platforms and audiences incurs potential inconsistencies and tensions. When those audiences are ambiguous, practice and identity agendas are further compromised.

Reference

Brake, D. R. (2009). As if nobody’s reading’?: the imagined audience and socio-technical biases in personal blogging practice in the UK. PhD thesis, London School of Economics. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/25535/

The Thesis Whisperer is a terrific website ‘dedicated to the topic of doing a thesis’ that seems to be well-liked and respected amongst the online postgraduate community. I was kindly invited by the site’s creator and editor, Dr Inger Mewburn, to contribute a guest post on PhD blogging to launch a series exploring professional digital identity. For my part, I tried to establish a balance between presenting a personal and subjective view of my own blogging experiences, and providing an enthusiastic and critical overview of the multipurpose of academic blogging within doctoral practices. I hope it’s useful.

I get the feeling a lot of people who were actively involved in early online communities and blogging miss the relative simplicity that the smaller number of participants provided. As I commented recently on Virginia Yonker’s blog, the key is in how these were small enough to be easily identifiable and manageable. Being a relatively late adopter, I can appreciate how the affordances of current social media has enabled a mass use, yet with this comes a radically different dynamic of social engagement, which is not necessarily more distributed but infinitely more populated and complex.

Many see the answer in developing Personal Learning Environments / Networks (PLE/N) and employing technology-enabled methods such as subscription and aggregation to keep up with it all. Yet does the adoption of a learner-centric network logic require us to develop aggressive, neo-liberal marketing strategies with an emphasis on self-promotion and immediacy to get noticed? Is this at the expense of the richer communication and identity formation associated with traditional modes of participation and interaction? There remains a natural human inclination to want to engage in, and become identified as a member of, communities, but how can this be cultivated in a more network-based culture?

Does this equate to a trade-off, where we embrace the advantages of an expansive engagement with wider networks and multifarious communities, or do we restrict ourselves to fewer, or even singular, localised groups?

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 in an attempt to unite the world’s bloggers in posting about an issue of global importance on the same day. This year’s issue is climate change, and it falls on the day as it was revealed that the Arctic Ocean will be almost entirely free from ice within a decade.

The Catlin Arctic Survey, completed earlier this year by a team led by explorer Pen Hadow, represents the most current research into the condition of Arctic ice. Peter Wadhams of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, who analysed the data added “the summer ice cover in the Arctic will completely vanish in 20 to 30 years time. There won’t be any sea ice there at all.”

The other day – when I should have been doing something more useful – I started thinking about how I get round to commenting on other blogs, and eventually came up with the following process:

• I read blog posts through my Desktop RSS Aggregator – Vienna on my new Mac (I still use Feedreader on my PC)
• I save any blog posts that are interesting in ‘Marked Articles.’
• If I think I might comment on a post I bookmark it. This involves right clicking the post feed to open it in Safari / Firefox to then be able to bookmark it via the Delicious plug-in.
• I have a system where I do not add tags to any bookmarks I only want in My Delicious site temporarily. That way they automatically go to ‘Unmarked bookmarks’ at the bottom of my tag list. I just write a quick memo in the Notes box (e.g. “comment on this”).
• Sometimes later (if I have time, or remember a specific post, or think of something interesting to say), I’ll go to My Delicious, open up the blog post and finally…write a comment.

This seems ridiculously complex. OK, I could I use a browser-based or online RSS aggregator to simplify the technology, but these tools integrate fairly seamlessly and it’s not a big deal to jump between them. Maybe a lot of the seemingly ‘simple’ processes we develop are as complex as this when broken down? So what’s my problem? Do other people just comment straight away on posts they read? What if there’s a load of them – perhaps they allocate time for replying to blogs. If a blog post is really interesting I often need to mull over it, let it sink in, consider its implications to my work. Hence the ‘loading bay’ process. I might get back to it later that day or the next – often I’ll just forget about it. My PhD study is concerned with such processes, and developing an efficient blogging discourse is one of the key skills that contributes to effective digital and web literacy.

I’m frequently surprised at the quick response rates on some blogs, and on occasions, I’ve been reluctant to submit a comment just because I happen to have taken several days getting round to reading a post. Is a comment devalued because it may be a few days or weeks ‘too late’? Do bloggers give up responding to comments after a given period? I regularly read about 100 blogs through RSS (with my recent switch to using a Mac, I now use Vienna). I try to do this every day, but hey, we all have other things to do in our lives.

Whilst I recognize the affordances of currency and informality which blogging provides over other forms of academic discourse, has the emphasis on immediacy gone too far? Jane Knight’s useful weekly round-up of blog posts and bookmarks (her latest is here) reminds me that, by default, many blogging architectures enable weekly, monthly and yearly summaries, whilst tagging systems provide effective archive retrieval through subject matter. I sometimes come across blog posts several years old that are still of profound interest and relevance. As blog posts are increasingly cited in formal academic literature, how do we best negotiate the vast cultural and temporal inconsistencies which exist between them?