Really interesting post over at PrawfsBlawg from Paul Horwitz, where he looks back at his ten years of blogging in the world of legal scholarship.
Overall, he finds that:
"All this has left me somewhat dispirited about blogging, especially given my dissatisfaction with online discussions, 'news' sites, and so on altogether"
Personally, every time I see blogging spoken about in academia it usually feels like it's being described as a somewhat new, experimental, strange thing. This always baffles me. To me it's just writing something and putting it on the internet so it's easier to discover. I always wonder if bards spoke of the printing press with a similar air: "I dunno – this whole printing stuff on paper and sharing it isn't as satisfying as going from city-to-city telling my tales..."
Some of my other reactions to the post:
"To some degree worried about having too many voices or not being 'serious' enough"
I feel like this is something I see a lot with legal scholars in particular and somewhat among scholars as a whole - "just how much of myself can I be online." Has any scholar truly had a public interest in pop culture that has take anything away from their scholarly work?
Paul also reflects on anonymous commenting:
"The usual justification offered by these individuals is that they blog anonymously to avoid any job consequences. I think this is one part true and three parts bullshit."
This too, is a subject that occurs often on legal blogs. People being trolls under the cover of "but it could hurt my career if someone knew who I really was." This reminds me of a post I saw once were an anonymous commenter mistakenly included a link to their LinkedIn profile in every comment they made. Whether or not anyone ever cared who he was or if it had any bearing on his career whatsoever, I don't know.
In two weeks it appears that he'll write more on potential "forthcoming changes, or an absolute decline, in legal blogging as a whole." I personally don't see a reason for a decline unless it's a result of blog posters militantly self-policing. To me it seems very simple: write about what's interesting to you, put it somewhere other people can see it, and move on.
I do find the question of "how do you present yourself online" to be really interesting. Will you take me less seriously because I post about rap music, pop culture, academia, and programming on Twitter despite the fact that I've been instrumental in producing a great academic peer-review platform?