I don’t think it’s reasonable to hold all forms of communication as being the same. A formal presentation has social, cultural, and academic expectations that a simple “conversation” does not.

Nor do I think Ms. Boyd devalues her blog’s value — it’s a different sort of mode of discourse that she explicitly *values*, as she describes at the end of her response.

Boyd went to some lengths in her original paper to repeatedly emphasize that she was reporting impressions, thoughts, concerns. She was apparently blindsided by the spotlight of slashdot and BBC, and by people leaping to conclusions without reading her work. And by using high-academic terms like “hegemonic” and being read by a different tribe. And by having people conflating a musing with a formal declaration, or conflating a thoughtful analysis with an ethnographic exegesis.

If we as authors can’t intentionally distinguish between various forms of context, or discourse, or conversational venue, then how can we, as authors, have anything but the highest-falutin’ content out there? I, for one, would feel seriously constrained if I thought every word I ever wrote had to be cited, with chapter and verse — or conversely, if I thought my polished prose was considered the same as a blithely typed notion, complete with emoticons.

Why should I “imagine a universe where blogging is not automatically put into a ‘not really up to par for the academy’ category”? I don’t want that. I want signals that indicate the level of rigor and formality. The format doesn’t dictate the formality: the self-defined context and approach does.

If someone says “I don’t have the language to get at what I want to say, but I decided it needed to be said anyhow,” as Boyd does in her long post, that says to me, “this is to be read as an engaged mind trying to formulate something difficult to communicate,” and read it accordingly, not as a formal research paper, or an academically rigorous presentation.

Bob, I think we mostly agree on this — I don’t like seeing blogs de facto painted as lower forms of life, or as third class forms of discourse. But really it’s just a new format that has strengths and weaknesses, whose conventions are still being determined, and Boyd’s experience is an example of pushing (and being pushed by) the boundaries of those conventions. I agree that it’s a format well suited to back and forth, which is important to most all academic and social communications, and can make public (and valuable in its own right) the messy middle between coffeehouse conversation and formal presentation.

I agree with Bob that danah’s clarification falls short of standing up for the blog as a serious mode of engagement. My take is that there’s a slippage between thinking of blog as genre and blog as medium. Blog as genre clusters a set of assumptions about mode of writing (quick thoughts on a screen), tone (casual and personal), and goal (generating conversation rather than formal presentation of ideas). Blog as medium allows for a wider range of writing genres within a blog format, such that a well-researched & argued essay can be blogged and take advantage of the medium’s conversational abilities to spread research beyond the printed page. I’ve blogged essays-in-progress with that goal quite effectively (although certainly generating none of the buzz & heat of danah’s piece), and believe strongly that blogging should be considered an appropriate site of formal and informal academic knowledge production - and hopefully raise questions about the goals of scholarly writing in the first place.

I’m sorry to be weighing in late, particularly with what turns out to be a “me, too” comment. I was a bit disappointed by danah’s distinction between the blog and “real” publishing as well. On the one hand, a lot of the critics who attacked the paper attacked it on the basis of perceived flaws in the research, so I understand her wanting to say “but this is just preliminary, not a ‘real’ paper.” On the other hand, her willingness to release this article to the world — despite not expecting the enormity of the response she got — indicates its importance. So I kinda wish either that she had done whatever she felt she needed to do in order to make it “real” before she released it (thus erasing the perceived gap between online publication and “real” publishing), or that she had stood more firmly by the value of the blog entry as a mode of generating the kind of knowledge production to which Jason refers. For better or for worse, though, the way she was forced to release it — in a document outside her blog engine, which wouldn’t allow for a post of that length — made it seem more like a “real” paper than anything else, and so many readers responded to it that way.

Can we imagine a universe in which the academy takes blogging seriously as a mode of publication? Sure. But I think that, as Michael suggests, there are always likely to be different standards of evidence or support or authority that are going to be required of different kinds of publications. The standards of formality and proof associated with formal academic papers are hard to maintain in a publication that moves at the pace that a blog moves. That said, I think we’ll get better at it as time goes on, as those of us committed to blogging as part of (rather than alongside) our research develop the standards through which such blogs are read.

This is all rather ironic for me, as I was just writing my “farewell for now” post on my own blog!

Blogs (as cultural form, to use a purposefully vague term) and blogging (as cultural practice) are certainly becoming standard parts of our experience of and interaction with the world. But their relationships to more established forms and practices is still very much work in progress. I’ve decided to put my own blog on the backburner for the time being because I can’t value it enough, relative to my own pre-tenure tasks and duties, to justify the time necessary to maintain a regular schedule. That is, to be blunt about it, it would actually be a liability to my career (regardless of its content) if it limited my production of other, more “traditional” forms (including not only published books and essays, but also lectures, courses, and collaborative curricular development).

It would be helpful if maintaining a blog was not only an informal expectation but also part of the formal expectation of academic life. Until that day, we’re going to be in this gray area of formal experimentation and development which, while undeniably stimulating and knowledge-building (in the broad sense), will make it difficult (as danah found out) to “locate” blogs (per se) as a particular, coherent form of academic discourse.