Coming from a background as a practicing lawyer, I can understand the approach to academic blogging as marketing oneself as a scholar. In the legal profession, there was initially fierce resistance to blogging as unprofessional, plus the added complication of being seen to be offering legal advice and the potential ethical problems that could pose. The latter issue was easily fixed by the now ubiquitous disclaimer (“This is not legal advice” or the like). The professionalism criticism took a bit longer to address. Like academia, the law is a conservative profession, slow to change and adopt new models. Younger lawyers, like younger academics, were the first to blog and often did so surreptitiously, not under the banner of the law firm. As law firms slowly understood the marketing power of the blog, they eventually offered blogs under their own banner rather than individual attorney personal blogs.
There certainly are legal and academic blogs that are “inchoate” and “immature” (C. Long), but writing is how we evaluate both professions. Good legal blogs address in advance when the author is merely musing or reacting to a recent opinion, rather than offering critical, long-thought-out advice. The same can be done by academics. The trick is to have thought enough about the subject to have something to say – really, something to ask. For example, one of the best legal blogs is SCOTUSblog, which offers almost immediate analysis of Supreme Court opinions, following later by critical, longer analysis of the opinions. The earlier blog entry is still the result of lengthy research. The author has already read the briefs and followed oral argument and has an idea of where the opinion might go. The ability to write a thoughtful analysis within a few hours comes from the hard work put in long before the opinion was handed down. Bad legal blogs only read the opinion, having done none of the background work, and offer little or no substance other than the result and vote count.
Faculty now have webpages providing their CV, research interests, links to research projects, syllabi, etc. Why shouldn’t graduate students do the same? I did like Sayres advice that a website shouldn’t be something you figure out at the end of your PhD program when on the job market. Instead, it should be an organic part of your graduate program, adding posts or projects as you go along in your career. And, of course, it’s highly dependent on department and specialization. What are the modes of scholarly communication outside of peer-reviewed journals? If there is an existing blog, listserve, or other online community, by all means use that to post original content. I very much liked the notion of “middle-state publishing” (Sayres) where the website acts as something more than a blog, but something less than formal publication.
Having said all of that, I am not a fan of having one’s personal or professional identity online for all to see. I am happy to cultivate a professional identity within the less public confines of conferences and publications and personal interactions – or even narrow Slack channels or Facebook groups. I am not very comfortable with cultivating a professional identity for the entire world to see. I did have my name, rank and serial number on my law firm website, but that was about all I could tolerate. This is what Barbour referred to as the “formal self.” I may also have some residual lawyerly reluctance to talk about my work in public due to concerns about attorney-client privilege. Old habits die hard.
Other than acting as a service to link to a URL with longer content, I am not a fan of Twitter in this context. I have enough email lists and social media groups to keep up with as it is. There is simply not enough room in 140 characters to make a nuanced point. Clever meme, yes. Nuance, no.