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Channel: Poiesis and Prolepsis
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Blogging and the Academy

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Blogging holds an unstable place in academia.

Timothy Stephen and Teresa M. Harrison (1994: 768-69), writing about mailing lists in 1994, the early days of the internet, suggest that the academy is a ‘hierarchical meritocracy’, which means that a key measure of a scholar’s stature is the degree to which his or her communication is restricted. It is rendered 'scarce':
"...the culture of the academy is essentially an hierarchical meritocracy. Voices become privileged through individual accomplishment; in fact, the degree to which communication is restricted is often one of the few public signs of a scholar’s disciplinary stature. Those at the top of a disciplinary hierarchy are more difficult to access and often restrict their public communication to prestige channels. Thus, it is doubtful that achievement-oriented academics will be natively inclined to carry their dialogue to a venue in which the relative anonymity of authors and audiences reduces the ability to gauge the impact of one’s contribution." 
The advent of the blogosphere has challenged this situation by enabling both established and emerging scholars to reach readers more quickly and potentially address a wider audience via their own self-publishing than is possible through academic publications.

The status of blogging as non-peer-reviewed, however, complicates the situation, as does the issue of how important is it that academic authors address a wider public rather than a restricted audience of peers. The two kinds of communication, blogging publicly and publishing through a conventional academic channel, might be considered two distinct types of discourse.

The further question of cost (who bears the cost of the time spent writing and the opportunity cost of writing), the question of price (whether and how that cost is passed on) and the question of profit (from writing and from distribution) remain salient.

Reference

Stephen, T. and Harrison, T. M. (1994). "Comserve: Moving the Communication Discourse
Online." Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 45 (10), 765-770.

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