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Thursday, July 07, 2005
Blogging and Annonymity
I'm prompted to write a post about the more functional aspects of blogging because of this post at The Valve in which Scott wonders why many academics using the Blogger.com platform blog anonymously. While I haven't seen such a correlation personally (I really haven't been paying attention to blogging platforms, although I do notice them for aesthetic reasons), I have noticed the two major groups in academic blogging: those who divulge their personal information and professional affiliations and those who do not. As Scott points out there seems to be no reason for anonymity if your blog is professional, on-topic, and not too political. My experience has been that academics that choose to remain anonymous do so because they write about individual colleagues, students, and controversial opinions.
In the comments section of the Valve post I describe why I chose to put quite a bit of information in my "About" page:
As a pre-first-semester graduate student (how’s that for “new to the game") I recently began writing an academic blog of sorts. I chose to divulge my name and bio only after careful consideration of what that may mean down the line. No matter how much we like to think it’s not, academia is characterized by its politics as much as its quest for knowledge. I’m about as new as you can be to higher education and while I’m not sure where I’ll end up, I’m fully aware of anything I write on my academic blog (as opposed to my personal blog) now can have very real implications for future plans, jobs, etc.
Pretty straightforward. I have nothing to hide because most of what I write on Nomadic Thoughts is on the topic of anthropology: news stories, general observations, and responses to posts on other blogs. My personal blog, on the other hand, could get me in trouble only if it provided a direct affiliation between my career as a new graduate student and my personal life. I think it's pretty obvious that what I write in The Journal has nothing to do with how I conduct myself as an anthropology student. However, in the wake of the story about the Brooklyn College professor who "chose" to remove himself from the process of becoming the Chair of the Sociology department (see my post here), I am starting to rethink how controversial I do get on my personal blog. The last thing I want is for something I wrote years ago to come back and haunt me at a very inopportune time, although I like to think such a scenario is unlikely.
Update: Oneman throws down in response to this opinion piece in the Chronicle for Higher Education criticizing academic blogging (first noted by Bitch, PhD. here).
Posted by Will at July 7, 2005 12:14 PM in Internet and Blogging