Lago, on the blog Rational Ignorance brought up an issue in response to a blog entry by Joi Ito (Joi’s response) that I think is very important for the academic world to chew on. The net, in many respects, reproduces, in a warped and tilted fashion, the offline state of debate on almost any issue. This includes the more personal and casual reproduction of knowledge about any given issue through the commentary of blog writers like Joi, and also the cooperative and more explicit attempts to reproduce knowledge online in environments like a Wiki. I’ll be blogging more about Wikis when I get some notes in order, but for now, what I want to point out is that I think there are three central problems we face:
1) No matter how much wonderful stuff there is online, the vast majority of empirical data on just about anything is still offline. This immediately limits the ability of online postings on issues to mirror offline debates, especially in fields like mine (East Asian history), when many posters simply don’t have access to the materials. Some, like myself, hope to spend their careers getting lots of fascinating offline material online and encouraging everyone to get their ideas and research online (hopefully released for free and open exchange). Some, however, might argue that there is no compelling reason to transfer the “offline” world of knowledge to the net and that we need to give up the myth of knowledge being a cumulative enterprise.
2) The blogosphere has not only radically reduced the cost and difficulty of sharing your ideas with the web-accessing world, it has radically accelerated the speed of exchange in a global (in so far as the rich, mostly western and English-speaking blogging world can be called that) conversation called the internet. If academics, obsessed by peer review, imagine a future world in which the traditional academic discourse would simply shift online in the form of searchable journal databases and archives of various kinds, I believe they have underestimated the changes that the medium of the blog, the online forum, the wiki, and technologies like it can potentially have even on “academic” discourse in the long term. In other words, when Lago initially complains in his posting that some list of works should have been read before a particular post was made, this frustration can actually be expressed in two ways: a) the vast collection of research on a particular issue is not necessarily ignored, it is often simply not ready-at-hand in the form of a google search or some free bookmarked database. b) Even if we have access to a vast amount of material online, we (and this includes many scholars who blog too) are often compelled, out of either laziness or busyness, to post our thoughts without doing all the background research or consulting our notes. This is what Lago calls the lack of “academic rigor”.
I believe that those of us with academic aspirations must realize that a blog is not an online version of the world of academic journals. For those of us prowling the halls of the ivory labyrinth, the blogosphere might be more accurately described as the online version of a graduate seminar: Sometimes we back up our comments (postings) with logical arguments, vaguely remembered data, or a few scribbled points from our notebooks. Other times, well – other times we just pull it out of our ass.
3) The third issue is related to network effects and hegemonies in ideas. I really don’t want to “raise my hand” in this “graduate seminar” of a blogosphere to comment on this until I have read a lot more.