Jan. 3, 2007

Against Phalloblogocentrism

Not quite 40 years ago, Andy Warhol said that in the future everybody would be famous for 15 minutes. It was a good prediction, one that verged on announcing a new entitlement. By 1997, someone had tweaked it for the post-Warholian digital era. “In the future,” the formula now went, “everyone will be famous to 15 people.” Again, a good call. Presumably the next version will involve intervals of 15 seconds.

But a small crowd gathered for a much longer interval on Saturday to attend the session of the Modern Language Association convention called “Meet the Bloggers.” While introducing the panelists, I quoted the “15 minutes/15 people” formulae – and added a corollary that seems to apply to academic bloggers: Anyone who wins more time or audience than that must bring to the table a particular knack for the kind of discussion fostered by the medium. Being well-respected within one’s area of specialist concern is not quite the same as being able to hold one’s own in what the maverick American cultural theorist Kenneth Burke called “the parlor.”

Here’s how Burke explained the image, back in 1941:

“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”

The ability to orient oneself in that sort of free-for-all requires a kind of discursive finesse that probably cannot be certified (let alone quantified). For that matter, there is no particular reason to equate success in this endeavor with reaching a vast audience. For some topics, 15 people is a lot. Just this morning, for example, I saw a blog post that started by asking, “What is the future of phenomenological geography, and why is this question even important?”

Well, it’s a big parlor. It contains multitudes. And even if some administrators fail to grasp the fact, the existence of such a space provides a necessary — if at wildly unregulated — supplement to the standard venues of publication and formal scholarly gathering. Whenever the phenomenological geographers do get together face-to-face, for example, it has to make some difference that they have already had a chance to talk in a forum that is also potentially open to objections from structuralist geographers who don’t wish them well. (Please consider that a hypothetical: I don’t actually know if there is such a rumble now underway.)

The four speakers at the MLA session had each found a broad audience, as academic blogs go. The organizer of the event, Scott Eric Kaufman, a senior instructor in literary journalism at the University of California at Irvine, has a personal blog and also writes for The Valve. The latter was founded by the second panelist, John Holbo, who is assistant professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore and the editor of Glassbead Books, an imprint of Parlor Press. (The name of which comes from that Kenneth Burke passage. Small world!)

The third panelist, Tedra Osell, an assistant professor of English at the University of Guelph, is very much better known as Bitch, Ph.D. (Even though Osell has now very publicly “outed” herself as Bitch Ph.D., it still feels like a violation, somehow, for anyone else to do so, although I use her name here with her permission.) And the last speaker was Michael Bérubé, whose day job is professor of English and cultural studies at Penn State University.

The text of Kaufman’s and Holbo’s papers can be found online, here and here, respectively. Bérubé indicates that he won’t be making his discussion of the phenomenon of the “blogspat” available online, if only because it would probably just start another one. But I’d like to think that Osell’s talk will end up in print soon. It would yield a well-turned essay on blogging, gender, 18th century periodical literature, the vicissitudes of Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, and the paradoxical overtones of the pseudonym “Bitch Ph.D.”

There was one moment in Osell’s presentation that must have hit close to home, given the panel’s Y-chromosomal preponderance: her reference to the “old-boy network” in the blogosphere. This is no joke — and no exaggeration, either. Just before heading off to Philadelphia, I had photocopied an article from the summer 2006 issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly called “The Gendered Blogosphere: Examining Inequality Using Network and Feminist Theory.” Looking it over now, it’s striking how exact her formulation really is.

The authors, Dustin Harp and Mark Tremayne, are both assistant professors of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. “Sampling over one year from blog rankings,” they note, “we found that 10% of the top [political] bloggers were women.” They consider various explanations of why this might be, but conclude that “the linked nature of blogs” has had a skewing effect given certain tendencies familiar to network theorists.

“Original players in any network have an advantage,” write Harp and Tremayne; “the longer you have been around, the more links you are likely to acquire. In the 1990s men outnumbered women on the Web by a sizable margin. While that is no longer true, the early advantage may continue to grow and snowball. But this explanation alone cannot explain the pattern.”

A “second principle of network growth — preferential attachment — may [also] be responsible,” they suggest. To rephrase this in terms of the Burkean “parlor” analogy, the Internet throws open the doors so that many more participants may enter the fray. But if the conversation long-since well underway is headed in a particular direction — if a few topics are dominant, and a few very full-throated conversationalists are making themselves heard — it had can very difficult to get a hearing.

“In attempting to ‘subvert the hyperlink hierarchy,’” as Harp and Tremayne conclude, “women bloggers may be unwise to remove all links to the top male bloggers because linking tends to be reciprocal behavior. But positive action is needed. More links between and among women bloggers and others who understand the importance of inclusive spheres of discourse will be a step in the right direction.”

But will it be enough? You have to wonder. The problem seems to run deeper than network-generated patterns of communication. For example, the editors of Inside Higher Ed tell me that the site’s readership is more than 50 percent female. But you would never know it from the comments section — which, during a full moon, is populated almost entirely by 60 year-old guys complaining about Ward Churchill. (Even if the topic is federal funding for astrophysics research, Ward Churchill is making it worse, somehow.) It is possible that I am exaggerating but that is often how it seems.

Now, there is no bias in favor of running such comments. As a venue for discussion, the comments section beneath each article is quite open. You have to avoid libel, and stay at least somewhat on topic (with “somewhat” being the operative word). Other than that, it is a very accessible forum — and it would be a good thing if more women took to it.

The same principle applies to the blogosphere, academic and otherwise. But it’s easier to say this than to overcome either resistance or inertia, whether among writers or readers. For now — as Osell’s paper at the MLA made clear — pseudonymity is as viable and necessary a solution as any at hand.

“We all joke that ‘on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog,’” she said. “But it seems to me that, in fact, this isn’t true. Even unschooled readers are fairly savvy about generic form, and one of the formal conceits of public discourse is that people whose social identities are marked as “other” — women, in this case — will, when writing personally, draw attention to their persons. Pseudonyms prevent texts from being impersonal, from pretending to objectivity; they draw attention to the author’s role in a way that a straight byline does not. At the same time, though, pseudonyms make a text more fully public: by hiding the author’s identity, the author becomes potentially anyone. Pseudonyms mean something, and one of the things they mean is that the pseudonymous writer has a reason for pseudonymity.

“When pseudonymity becomes a generic feature, as with essay periodicals and blogs, one of the things that means is that the genre entails risk, that publishing is risky.... The desire to talk about work conditions, or personal problems, or politics, or parenting is (apparently) more important than fears of being fired, or embarrassment, or shamed. But because those risks are real, writers publish pseudonymously.”

One bit of news from the old boys’ club started to circulate just after the panel: the decision of Michael Bérubé to wind down his blog, which has been running at a steady and even breakneck pace for three years now.

“The blogging has started to take three to four hours a day for longer posts, and one to two for shorter ones, and my days aren’t so fluid anymore,” he told me. “But actually it’s the longer term that has me worried. Right now I do the blog, plus teaching, plus all the usual committee things, plus some other writing, plus hockey. Something’s got to give, and even though the hockey’s the obvious first choice, I figure I only have another five years of meaningful hockey in me (‘meaningful’ here means ‘hockey in which it actually matters to either team whether I am on the ice or not’).”

The reference to a five-year window turns out to be overdetermined. He is now writing two books, one called The Left at War, the other Disability and Narrative. (“No overlap whatsoever, I assure you!”) And he might write a sequel to Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child, his memoir about raising a son with Down’s syndrome.

“As it happens,” he says, “Jamie is out of school in another five years, and whatever arrangements we make for him, they will be vastly different than the arrangement I have now. Indeed, this will be the last year in which he has his after-school program, and in a few years his summer program disappears, too.... The thing that jumps out as being the least necessary to my overall well-being between now and 2011 is the blog.”

Given Tedra Osell’s paper during the panel, I wondered if he had any insights, as an old boy leaving the network, about what would be necessary to change things.

“More Tedras!” he answered. “Besides that, of course, it hasn’t escaped me that the vast majority of academic bloggers are junior faculty and graduate students. Most female academics’ blogs are anonymous, as well. Both things are related, and both things are factors. Perhaps the Valve and Crooked Timber lineups could use some shaking up, or perhaps there could be a few similar group blogs made up mostly of women.”

He noted that things actually have begun to change to some degree outside the academic blogosphere. The feminist group blog Pandagon has “something like five times my readership of 9,000 people per day. How much longer will it take before the academic blogosphere sees the same kind of thing? I have no idea. Another 2-3 years? I think it’ll depend on how many female graduate students and junior faculty keep it up, and how many do it under their own names — post-tenure, I would guess.”

Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week. He also blogs at Quick Study.

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Comments

Okay, I’ll bite. As Scott points out there are a lot of women bloggers. But male bloggers pretty much ignore them — they don’t link to them, don’t discuss them, don’t include them in real-world meetings. Then, every now and then, they wonder where the women are! I mostly read blogs by women, btw. Bitch PHd is always fun. Mary W. (a pseudonym)

, at 7:45 am EST on January 3, 2007

Why no mention of University Diaries?

margaretsoltan.phenominet.com/

francofou, at 9:00 am EST on January 3, 2007

Gendered blogging

What’s a little odd is that book/lit bloggers are much more evenly spread. The two biggest blogs are Bookslut (Jessa Crispin) and Maud Newton. The leading crime blogger, til she became co-editor of GalleyCat was Sarah Weinman. Of course pblishing is known as a more woman-friendly profession (perhaps because the money is so bad...)

Richard Nash, Soft Skull Press, at 9:16 am EST on January 3, 2007

I believe that if you look at the blogesphere historically, from the point where you no longer had to be a programmer to have one, blogging is dominated by females. And it is likely to remain so. Until now they have been between 12 and 17, and use the word “like” more often than I think necessary. However, they are beginning to enter the ranks of academia and don’t seem to care if there are already a bunch of old duffers writing blogs or not.

ArthurConan Doyle, at 1:40 pm EST on January 3, 2007

For 15 people

I’m pretty sure the origin of the line “famous for fifteen people” was David Weinberger, who used it in Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

Alex Golub, at 1:40 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Female bloggers and pseudonyms

For some reason, academics who would never be sexist to someone’s face can tend to draw extremely sexist conclusions from blog personae. At MLA, I engaged in several conversations with blog readers and writers about the possibility of academic discourse online, and was surprised by how quickly many women’s blogs were dismissed as “not really academic” or “something she should do pseudonymously” because of a few personal anecdotes or half-formulated thoughts, although that less-formal material runs through most academic blogs by men as well.

I suppose it’s not surprising that a male blogger’s picture of his cat is “charming,” while a female blogger’s cat picture is “creepy.” Female academics tend to use pseudonyms so that, even if you think their personal lives are creepy or unprofessional, you won’t associate it with them as job candidates. But as academic blogging becomes increasingly legitimate in the offline sphere, it seems the men, who have been more fearlessly blogging under their real names, will be reaping the benefits of recognition that the more-commonly pseudonymous women cannot.

Carrie Shanafelt, at 2:10 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Oh come on, I am not at retirement age, yet.

My personal view is that most of the blogosphere is female. However, most of the legal and scientific blogosphere is male. Nevertheless Xanga blogs, complete with pictures of drunk people, constitute a vital part of our social discourse, and inspire female bloggers.

I do think it is funny to note that commentators on IHE have found new, innovative, and exiting ways, to link Ward Churchill to anything. Sort of like Kevin Bacon or Paul Erdos is inevitably linked to anyone. (I am not a mathematician, but my Erdos number is 6. My Kevin Bacon number is also 6, if you count a college appearance in a film.)

A female blogger’s picture of her cat is not “creepy,” unless – and this is a big “unless” – the cat is creepy. There are some cats that are creepier than others. Likewise, not all cats are charming. There are some cats that will sexually harass people. Trust me on this one. Also, you can’t trust all cats. Some of them might steal your checks, go to the bank, and spend the money on cat toys.

Finally, and quite frankly, most female bloggers with their constant whining about how cruel academe is, and how their students are stupid do not generate too much confidence. I don’t think I would hire any of them, since they seem too self-centered for my taste.

, at 3:01 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Someone wrote:

As Scott points out there are a lot of women bloggers. But male bloggers pretty much ignore them — they don’t link to them, don’t discuss them, don’t include them in real-world meetings

I don’t buy this, mostly because 1) it’s certainly not true of the Valve and 2) it certainly isn’t true of what I experienced at the MLA. Thumbing through my mental flip-book, the gender distribution of both blogging-related gatherings was 50/50. Now, this may mean that academic blogging/the blogs of academics (to retain the distinction I drew in my talk) differs from other types in this respect, but I can’t be sure.

Scott Eric Kaufman, at 4:16 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Not reducible evidence?

I agree, Scott, in that the blogs I associate with tend to be those that value a diversity of voices, but it’s awfully difficult (and unfair) to have to ignore misogynistic discourse online, especially within academic circles. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen women finally say something about a male-dominant conversation that is threatening or disrespectful to women, only to be called “amateur,” “self-centered,” “hypersensitive,” “libellous,” or “censoring.”

As everyone knows, the only way to keep from escalating a situation online is to say nothing, but saying nothing is also what allows misogyny to perpetuate itself.

Carrie Shanafelt, at 5:00 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Female Bloggers

I’m not an MLA type but I’ll jump into the fray. First, I spend less time ‘blogrolling’ than simply finding new sites related to my subjects of interest (history and education), so the gender inequity topic is news to me. Mr. McLemee’s story and resultant comments caused me to explore a few of the blogs cited and blogroll them.

Still, I will hazard this guess: It could just be the case that the types of blogs being written by academic women are not ~yet~ diverse enough to insinuate themselves in the entire blog scene? For my part, I welcome any blogrolling suggestions topically related to history and education (and all intersections of those topics) that result from this commentary. — TL

Tim Lacy, at 5:00 pm EST on January 3, 2007

But to be fair, Scott, you yourself distinguished between “academic blogs” (i.e., professional discourse) and “bloggers by academics” (i.e., personal discourse). I think Bérubé’s right: the problem with women academic’s blogs is directly related to the fact that women predominate at the lower end of the academic pipeline, which is why we’re more often pseudonymous.

I also think that Kipnis’ piece “The Cringe Factor” hits the nail on the head: a big part of what a lot of us are doing, intentionally or no, is challenging the professional/personal distinction, in no small part because it’s disadvantageous to us. That’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable, and it does me, sometimes, as well (hence the pseudonym). But it’s work that needs to be done.

In re. pseudonym, btw, for those who read this, I’d generally appreciate it if the link between Bitch and Tedra were treated with some discretion. I have no desire to put my current or future university or colleagues in an awkward position, and the cringe factor means that, alas, the kind of blogging I do is sadly likely to do that.

bitchphd, at 5:11 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Re. the anonymous commenter immediately above Scott: (1) In fact, most bloggers *are* women. I’m on dialup now, though, so I’m not going to track down a link. You can take my word for it, or not. (2) That “whining” thing is precisely the problem. What most privileged folks think of as whining is, in fact, honesty. As is griping about students, which we all do from time to time. And, if you pay attention, women academic bloggers also write glowingly about students, because it’s also true that many of them are real gems. The fact that academia is an uncomfortable place for a lot of junior professors, a lot of graduate students, a lot of women, and for that matter a lot of people of color, is something we *should* talk about, and our doing it is brave as hell. The fact that talking about it means a lot of people will refuse to hire us is why so many of us do it under pseudonyms. But we’re not so foolish as to think that we’re not taking risks by doing so.

bitchphd, at 5:11 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Scott’s right about the live get-togethers at the MLA: the one I attended, on the night of the 29th, included five female bloggers and three male bloggers (one of whom was me). That said, Carrie’s right to point to the annoying prevalence of online misogyny and the widespread dismissal of some academic women’s blogs as “merely personal.”

Clearly, more male bloggers need to retire. Particularly the old ones, like me. And old boys who are giving women a hard time for being FWO (female while online) should just STFU.

Michael Bérubé, at 6:00 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Oh, and I don’t know anything about this Bitch. Ph.D. person, but I have to say that Professor Osell’s paper on our panel was terrific. One of the more fascinating MLA papers I’ve ever heard, on _any_ topic. I do hope she decides to publish the longer version in one form or another—

Michael Bérubé, at 6:35 pm EST on January 3, 2007

It’s a sad day when thoughtfully pointing out the ways in which academia needlessly makes life difficult for many of the people who work there is cavalierly referred to as “whining.” That word is, as Dr. B points out, a favorite tool of the privileged.

What’s remarkable about conversations concerning academic blogging and gender is that they reveal—intentionally or otherwise—so much about academia and gender.

And what they reveal ain’t pretty.

As for this gem: “I don’t think I would hire any of them, since they seem too self-centered for my taste.”

Surely I’m not the only one who sees the irony in this sentence.

In any case, readers might be interested in exploring this resource on gender and blogging, created by Clancy Ratliff while she was working on her dissertation. (She’s now an assistant professor in the Department of English at East Carolina University.) The links only go up to March 2005, however.

George@WorkBook, at 8:25 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Carrie:

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen women finally say something about a male-dominant conversation that is threatening or disrespectful to women, only to be called “amateur,” “self-centered,” “hypersensitive,” “libellous,” or “censoring.”

Agreed, which is why I answered your question at the panel as I did. We certainly shouldn’t ignore the misogyny, but we can exclude it from the discourse. The only way to keep the situation from escalating is not to say nothing, but to police the discourse via vigorous deletion. I understand that this may seem paternalistic—"women who can’t handle online discourse shouldn’t participate in it"—but I’m really only condescending to my betters. At the Norton gathering, I had the same conversation with Gerald Graff. Granted, his concerns about online discourse weren’t gender-based, but still, he made it clear that until they’re more friendly to a wider swath of thinkers, academic blogs will have trouble attracting new commenters.

Tim, I don’t think that’s the case. For example, one attendee said Acephalous “devotes itself to relatively abstruse literary and philosophical reflections.” That’s an accurate assessment, and it places me far outside any mainstream, even an academic one.

A big part of what a lot of us are doing, intentionally or no, is challenging the professional/personal distinction, in no small part because it’s disadvantageous to us.

As my talk revealed, this is a topic I need to consider in more detail. Initially, I considered the distinction in a way that dovetailed with your talk: an “academic blogger” would’ve delivered your talk as you did, contextualizing it within a body of scholarship; an “academic who blogs” would have skipped the Tattler discussion and moved directly to implications of pseudonymous blogging. I’m not sure this distinction holds — or makes sense even — but it’s how I think about my own online production. More later.What most privileged folks think of as whining is, in fact, honesty.

Following Michael, I think the “raw vs. cooked” discussion should recognize the value of each. Honesty about the conditions of academic life shouldn’t be dismissed at all, much less as whining. Such conversations are valuable, necessary, but they occupy a different place in my mind then, say, the Valve, if only because of the difference in potential audience. An “academic blogger” draws readers in via content, not personality or sympathy; an “academic who blogs” draws in other academics in (or who’ve been in) similar straits, and if they acquire the popularity you have, it’s largely a function of your personality, the quality of your prose and the way in which you handle what life, academic and otherwise, throws at you. When people hit the Valve for, say, the Walter Benn Michaels book-event, I know who the star of the show is.

Scott Eric Kaufman, at 8:25 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Indeed

Tedra Osell is our generation’s Samuel Johnson, and Bitch PhD is her Boswell.

Adam Kotsko, Graduate Student at Chicago Theological Seminary, at 8:25 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Be Careful

Google one “Meg Spohn” and find out what happened to her for a bit of “water cooler kvetching” about her university on her blog.

AF, at 8:30 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Scott, maybe a distinction could be between disciplinary blogging and a more general academic blogging—e.g., discourse within a given disciplinary context and discourse that’s more applicable to the profession generally? Admittedly, you’d still run into the problem that a lot of people would surely say that their undisciplinary blogging was deliberately interdisciplinary in nature, but it would avoid the problematic value judgment in raw/cooked, or academic blogging/academics who blog?

Adam, I think that other person is *my* Boswell.

bitchphd, at 9:28 pm EST on January 3, 2007

Supply and Demand?

A room full of individuals, each with their own perspective, feelings, experience, and genetics; why listen to (read) any of them?

A few individuals in this corner or that who have deeply and consistently researched “the known world” of experience in that discipline; further, they politely and respectfully take risks. Extend their observations based upon research and patient discussion with others; assertively, but not aggressively.

Dedication to the subject and willingness to consider the perspective and expertise of others. Also willing to take the personal and political risk of navigating against shallow, popular opinion.

Who is one to read or elevate? The many shallow, self-centered who vomit volumes or the few who have sacrificed personal for the deeper group knowledge? The observations of the latter may not agree with one’s affective perception, but stands up to decades of public critique.

Gendered and political discrimination or a discrimination based on wisdom and investment of self that seems always in short supply?

Some discriminations are not only legal and ethical, but necessary for cultures and peoples to consider very deeply and dearly. The Sophist culture worships the golden ox of vanity and fades away; they disparage and sacrifice the leather plow horse which does not please the senses and so the culture starves.

Dr. F. Gump, at 4:30 am EST on January 4, 2007

whining and felines

I wrote the above comment about “whining” and I stand by it. Sure, I am male. But, I have dealt with my share of nastiness. I don’t talk about it, because it is a waste of time, and my clients don’t care. I just pick myself up and go on. Sometimes I try and find a solution. (The women in my family are like this, too.)

Look, academe, and the real world is tough. It is unfair to everyone. People need to stop complaining about their personal lot in life, and do well for themselves, and THEN try and improve things for others.

Some time ago, I read a quote about graduate school, which went a little like this: When you walk outside your house, and it is raining, and someone throws a bucket of water on you, you don’t try to separate out the water that was the result of prejudice.

A little stoicism wouldn’t hurt.

Oh, post pictures of your cats if you want. I will judge them on the merits.

Larry, at 8:55 am EST on January 4, 2007

The limits of “the parlor”

The comments from Larry and Dr. Grump demonstrate the limits of applying Burke’s image of “the parlor” to online forums like IHE comment threads or the blogosphere.

A conversation has been going on for a very long time (about the artificial divide between the personal and the professional, about the ways in which the workplace is structured disadvantageously to certain categories of people and whether or not it needs to be, about the history of personal essays, about the nature of authorship, about new media).

Some people enter the parlor and recognize that they have missed a great deal of this conversation, so they listen and they read widely to try to catch up before contributing.

Others—from what I believe Michael Bérubé has called “The Department of What’s All This, Then"—barge in and immediately begin pontificating, ignorant of the complexities and nuances of the preceding conversations.

One group operates in accordance with a sense of intellectual responsibility and cordiality. The other operates in accordance with a sense of unselfconscious privilege.

Re: Meg Spohn. Google Liz Lawley, Elouise Oyzon, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Miriam Burstein, and Miriam Jones, all of whom have earned tenure while blogging. Or Google Rebecca Goetz, Caleb McDaniel, Clancy Ratliff, Chuck Tryon, and Ryan Claycomb, all of whom landed tenure-track jobs while blogging.

And Clancy Ratliff’s resource is located here: http://culturecat.net/node/637 The link did not take in my original comment.

George@WorkBook, at 10:30 am EST on January 4, 2007

reply to George

George, Instead of insulting me, show me what parts of the discussion that I missed. This debate is not new. Women have always complained of disparate treatment. Female academics have claimed that they were treated. Female bloggers have claimed that they are not respected because of their style of writing. Male bloggers have faulted the female bloggers for being too wrapped up in themselves. Sorry this doesn’t sound nuanced, but is there some major facet of their argument besides talking about “comfort zones” and “creepy pictures of cats” that I missed. Oh, sorry, that I “operate[] in accordance with a sense of unselfconscious privilege” whatever that means.

Larry, at 12:25 pm EST on January 4, 2007

Shorter Larry: I like to whine on the internets about people who I think are whining on the internets.

Henry, at 12:30 pm EST on January 4, 2007

According to this website Professor Osell is an Associate Professor and not an Assistant Professor and believe me the distinction means a lot in academe. Please do acknowledge the correction.

Anonymous, Prof. Osell is an ASSOCIATE professor., at 2:20 pm EST on January 4, 2007

Larry writes, “George, Instead of insulting me, show me what parts of the discussion that I missed.”

You believe the parlor conversation is about women whining.

I’ll repeat myself, then. You’ve missed the parts “about the artificial divide between the personal and the professional, about the ways in which the workplace is structured disadvantageously to certain categories of people and whether or not it needs to be, about the history of personal essays, about the nature of authorship, about new media.”

Did you miss the link to Clancy Ratliff’s page? That would be one good place to start, but even the resources listed there are but a fraction of the conversation.

George@WorkBook, at 3:15 pm EST on January 4, 2007

What’s all this, then? Harrumph! I applaud Larry for posting under his real name, and I’d like to lodge a complaint about people who whine. Fie on those women! For statistics show that 95 percent of them are women.

And I’d also like to take this opportunity to point out that Ward Churchill has ruined our astrophysics department.

What’s All This, Then, at 5:46 am EST on January 5, 2007

I’m not sure why one would want to be a ‘top’ blogger. Myself, I’ve blogged since 2001, and am disappointed when I get less than one hundred hits a day, and alarmed when I get more than 300.

I think there are a lot of reasons to blog. Some bloggers really do want to be in the top. Some just like the challenge of writing something interesting every day. Some want a chronicle for friends, some want funny pics. I have noticed that the more popular blogs do a lot of commenting on trivial things, or things to attract an audience, and this is the price you pay for being at the top. You get used to popularity, and you start bending the site to get it. That’s fine if you want to pay that price. However, I think of it as the fast food syndrome — less nutritious, more filling. If I started doing that, I’d shoot the blog.

The kind of surveys that find the “top” political blogs rather ignore the spirit of blogging, or at least one of the spirits in the confab — it derives from zines and from garage bands and is about making, in Hugh Kenner’s phrase, a Homemade World. Since it is agreed that there are more women bloggers, perhaps, just perhaps, the desire to be on top isn’t a huge desire among most of these bloggers. And perhaps that is why they continue to be interested in the blogging project. And those people aren’t going to be taking their advice from journalist professors who obviously have no understanding of the whole ethos.

roger, just say No to being on Top, at 5:05 am EST on January 6, 2007

I just want to echo Roger — I think he’s got the right spirit. I too think it’s crass for people to want to reach more readers — I call it “fast food syndrome.” They’re probably not writing about important stuff like I am. And I too think that if female bloggers aren’t getting readerships, it’s probably because they share my sense that readerships aren’t worth getting. I mean, I’ve been blogging since 1998, and I don’t know what I’d do if I ever got more than 100 readers in a day. Probably I’d just stab my blog to death and then bury it.

Fugazi, at 5:15 am EST on January 7, 2007

Fugazi, I’m surprised. I thought you had started blogging in 1980, but — in order to avoid crassness and keep down your readership — were only going to release your blog posts in 2020. So you have changed your policy?

I look forward to seeing your blog rise to the top, then! You need to get the blogging for Dummies book. And remember, it is a matter of link link link. Keep those numbers up! Soon, you can sell ad space on your blog, and be a Net personality, and maybe even get interviewed by two journalism professors at a major university! Thus, the joy of life can be yours, for a little extra effort. Good luck.

roger, just say No to staying on Top, at 3:36 pm EST on January 7, 2007

Interviews? Shudder.

I might blow up but I won’t go pop.

Fugazi, at 4:35 am EST on January 8, 2007

Pseudonyms and content

I put a comment on Literary Valve which I’ll repeat in brief here. I regret at the session I attended there was no talk about pseudonyms. I think the subject as such important: who uses them, why, and their effect on how the blog functions outside the blogosphere (as well as in).

It seems that Bitch Ph.D. is going to have difficulty carrying on with her pseudonym now that her name was announced at the last session.

My other comment was on the nature of blog content. I think an important aspect of its strength is making intimacy public. It brings a new kind of content into the public. We can see how strong this is since such content is often verboten in public; hence by the way pseudonyms. You are telling about contemporary people.

Examples: Bitch Ph.D. in her talk began with how she started her time here in cyberspace by telling about herself: she was pregnant. I will testify that many women would begin with autobiographical information, and men wouldn’t. It was refreshing to me to hear this kind of truth.

Two Iraqi bloggers (both women) have had books written about them (one produced one) because the kind of content is something until the Net kept out of the public sphere until long after people die and then most of what really counted is forgotten or never got said.

This intimacy factor does make blogs less respected by conventional thinkers.

Finally, the term “whining” is a form of bad-mouthing; it’s name-calling. I ignore name-calling as it tells more about the person who does it than anyone he or say derides and dismisses that way.

E.M.

Ellen Moody, at 7:50 am EST on January 10, 2007

not convinced

do we have any reason to think that this Osell person really *is* BitchPhd? I mean, anyone can go to an MLA session and claim to be somebody.My guess is that this will be only the first of a variety of people who will try to cash in on the fame of an anonymous blogger by “outing” themselves, when they are not really that blogger at all.

not convinced, at 10:41 am EST on January 11, 2007

parlors ....

Scott: Well, it’s a big parlor. It contains multitudes. ...

I despise parlors.

Give me a noisy, smelly, messy agora any day.

loren, at 10:45 am EST on January 16, 2007

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