Note: this could use a copy edit, but I'm not spending a minute more on it.

Some people might remember a recent column in the Chronicle of Higher Education by "Ivan Tribble" (a pseudonymous Humanities Professor at a Small Liberal Arts college)that warned would-be academics, "Bloggers Need Not Apply". Although a number of people drafted serious responses to that piece (I even did one myself), some were suggesting that the the article had to be joke.

Well, it's apparently the joke that wouldn't die, because The Chronicle is back at it again. This time, the piece is called, "They Shoot Messengers, Don't They?". Tribble begins this new article by explaining that his last essay apparently "hurt the feelings" of certain people in the blogging community." For this he, he offers an "apology to any who will accept it." However, he declares, "I stand by my basic point," which is that his musings on a series of (possibly fictious) blogs were meant simply to represent a "trend worth warning others about."

There's much to take apart here, but let's begin with the hurt feelings/apology business. I don't know if it's because he's been reading too many blogs of late, but Tribble seems to have a hard time with the very thing he warns bloggers about: separating the personal and the public.Tribble claims that there were a number of bloggers who chose to "howl, fume, and call for my head," and he apologizes for hurting their feelings. Why? Apologies are for drinks spilled on rugs at faculty parties, not salvos launched in the "Jobs" column of the U.S.'s premier academic newspaper. The former is personal, while the latter is undeniably public. Don't apologize. Do make an argument.

( Read more... )

How do you guys like to read your RSS feeds? I've been using LJ to do it, but I think I'd like to experiment with separating church and state for a bit. All advice welcome.

Thanks!

Is TypePad's default font Times Roman 8 point or what?
When I'm online, like to read things in Helvetica, I guess about 12 pt.
I use that font to post here, and to read other people's entries on my Friend's List.
Too-small fonts online feel off-putting to me, and I'm trying to figure out why.
Remember when people would type ++++ around entries all the time?
OTOH, I wonder if people read too-large fonts is dorky?

Please give insight if you have some. I have some questions about social niceties on LiveJournal versus other places in the blogosphere (please someone come up with a better word soon):

1. Many people on LiveJournal ask if they can befriend one another, yet I don't see many bloggers asking if they can blogroll one another--they just do it. Have you noticed this as well?*

2. I've seen people ask someone to take them off their Friends List (remember the Nazi troll guy?) Do bloggers do the same to weird people who blogroll them (can blogroll be a verb?)


3. People on LiveJournal like to announce from whence they came before they comment (i.e. "I got here through x's journal...) I think this happens on blogs too, though, right?**

* For better or worse, I never ask if I can befriend someone else on LJ.
** For better or worse, I never remember to say from whence I've arrived.

Someone just emailed to ask if they could send people from their journal to mine to talk about their icons with me. Of course! Anyone should feel free to swing on by here and talk. That's why I made the entries public. The more the merrier, and I always appreciate getting folks outside my normal readership to weigh in on things.

People who use icons with political images/phrases on them, can you answer some questions for me?

1. What images/words are featured on your political icon? (If you could post them, that would be great)

2. Do people seem to "get" your political icons, or do they require explanations? (I'm thinking of people who have say, a photo of Trotsky or Emma Goldman as an icon)

3. DId you ever use an icon that you might not have intended as political, but became so (I'm thinking here of the "No shame" sexual abuse logos that went around)

4. Do you use your political icons all the time, or just in special places ( like political communities) or at special times (like when someone mentions politics)?

5. Have you ever received negative reactions regarding your icons?

6. Have you ever had someone tell you they learned something about your politics just from your icon choices?

People who use icons with celebrities on them, can you answer some questions for me?

1. Which celebrities do you have as icons?

2. Any reason besides "I just like them" for why you use a particular celeb as a user icon?

3. Do your icons feature just images, or do you like to use images with words on them? If they feature words, do you write the words or bother other people's words?

4. Do you use these icons all the time, or just in special places ( like fan communities) or at special times (like when someone mentions the celebrity)?

5. Have you ever witnessed any sort of drama regarding the use of celebrity icons? I don't read fan communities so I'm relying on experiences of other people, here...


(If you could post them, that would be great)

Generally, ratings communities don't bother me at all, so I'm surprised to realize I am mildly unnerved by a community like theskimyoucrew, where people submit their LiveJournal entries to be judged as formal pieces of writing by the admitted members. In theory, there's nothing wrong with the existence of the community: it's all by choice, they don't go trolling for journals to judge and the people submitting their journals for jugment are asking for it (and not in the "she has a short skirt on" sort of way).

I guess (and again, this is a PERSONAL response, not a global indictment) my anxiety stems from the fact that it took me a number of years to be comfortable doing 'snapshot' writing on here, to give up being right and clean and solid with my prose before releasing it to the world. And and now that I'm used to this sloppy yet generative way of writing, I'm protective of my little space on the internet where it's okay to go from pre-release book material to questions about soap to videos about Power Rangers. Which raises the question: just who (or what) do I think I'm protecting myself from?

Let's face it: LiveJournal is pleasurable for writing because it is a technologically engineered safe space. Where else you can ban detractors and "unfriend" readers with the click of a button? In trying to figure why I feel vaguely uncomfortable with a LiveJournal community, I'm reminded of how my friend Greg responded when I asked about the weather in Quatar: "How would I know? Everyone with a desk job hasn't been outside air conditioning in months, maybe years." So maybe discomfort isn't the right word, given the fact that I'll go eat dinner in half an hour and forget all about this, but I started this entry so I might as well push on...

Alright, so here is a realization: I just figured out that although I'm certainly guilty being the person who judges the writing style of other people's journals (that's arguably how all reading works, and why would my reading practice be any different) to this point I've been pretty successful at suspending judgment on my own journal writing. On this most public of venues, I've been relatively successful at turning off my own my superego off from time to time, which is no small feat.

This is not the same as saying, "I write for myself." It's about staying committed to the idea that I wouldn't know my whole self it bit me in the ass.

Maybe I'll write more about this later. Maybe not. Hit send.

*Thanks to Roland Barthes for the quote

Big thanks to my gorgeous sister-in-law for sending me this bit, from the New York Times:

Here we have an employer's essay about her nanny's blog.
Here we have the nanny's response.

The employer's essay is just embarrassing (for the employer.) The nanny's response, while admittedly defensive and over-wrought (but who would not be defensive in this situation) is fascinating. First, because it rightly protests the erasure of workers' subjectivity in the so-called "caring professions" with statements like this one:

I take issue with her because she suggests nannies are not workers, that our service is not labor. Isn’t the problem that traditionally defined "women's" work is not considered real labor? Real labor that is valuable? Caring for children is work. It can be great work, it comes with real highs and real lows. Just Like Everything Else.

Second, the nanny rightly calls her employer on her narcissistic fetishizing of singlehood, here (I'm especially interested on how the employer keeps making things personal, and the nanny keeps bringing the issue back to WORK):

It is particularly sad when Ms. Olen expressed "fear" that I would "judge her life and find it wanting." This might be hard for Ms. Olen to understand, considering this article reveals that she lives in an insular inner world where everything is about HER, but I didn’t judge her life. Why? Well, I never really thought about it at all. She employed me to care for her children. Her choices? Her compromises? Not my business. The only times I considered [in] her life was in relation to my employment: Would she manage her schedule so she would stop changing my hours? Would she and her husband figure out if they were staying in Brooklyn so I would stop having to listen to them debate moving to the suburbs? But I think it is also relevant to point out that Ms.Olen's expressed fear that I would judge her life, is really to try to paint me as anti mother and anti children. When in fact, I have consistently blogged about how I want to make professional choices now to ensure that I can be a mother some day…

Third, and by no means least important, I'm happy to see that this young woman has some forum to state her case at all, given that the editors at the New York Times Styles Section (that bastion of hard news) seem to have no interest in giving her equal voice in their pages. After all, why talk about women, class, labor and the right to write when the Sex in the City crowd is waiting for a column shrieking that "The New Nanny Diaries Are Online," right?

I wrote this in response to a piece called Bloggers Need Not Apply, in which a pseudonymous member of an academic committee at a midwestern university describes reading applicants' blogs as a "train wreck," and warns people not to put things on the internet because they can be "easily Googled." The Always Great Danah Boyd had some good thoughts on the topic,. Below are my additional musings:

I had trouble with the Chronicle article, and not just because I just posted a video of myself in a PowerRanger suit chasing four year olds. This is one is the kicker sentence of the piece for me:

It would never occur to the committee to ask what a candidate thinks about certain people's choice of fashion or body adornment, which countries we should invade, what should be done to drivers who refuse to get out of the passing lane, what constitutes a real man, or how the recovery process from one's childhood traumas is going.

Um, thanks?

I wonder if the problem lies in the title for this piece. It's called, "Bloggers Need Not Apply," but as you rightly hint, it's really intellectual freedom (with the should-be-old-by-now notion that the personal is political), rather than blogging, which is at issue, here.

Understand this: committees aren't doing anyone a favor by not asking these questions; they are simply obeying the law. Every hiring committee knows that asking certain question in a job interview will almost guarantee that some candidate will take legal action eventually.Anyone who has ever sat through an interview knows exactly why these laws exist: to protect candidates from undue duress during the application process, when they are at their most vulnerable.In short, and at least in theory: nobody should feel forced to give personal information in a job interview. The issues mentioned by the author are one of a million on an employer's "don't ask" list.

But as some of us learned after the Clinton Administration's handling of the military, not everyone does best in a climate of not asking and not telling. Here are at least four things I've been warned by others (but interestingly, never my employers) not to discuss in public until tenure:

1. Sexuality and sexual politics

2. Labor issues at the university

3. U.S. sanctioned military activities

4. Disability issues in general, and mental health issues in particular

Now, according to Dr. Anonymous at MiddleGround U., I should add to these the following:

1. Interest in technology beyond Microsoft Word

2. Passing familiarity with anyone else on the internet who might overstate the scope or importance of my research

3. Feelings about the passing lane.

Contrary to the author's position, I'm going to go out on a limb and argue it's GOOD to be a potential job candidate and a blogger. The issue of brand that Danah addressed is one reason. Another is that some of us actually want to have a life with fewer, rather than more surprises after being hired. The author of the Chronicle piece says it straight out: blogs are easier to track and read than scholarly papers. When someone hires me, I assume they've done due diligence and are comfortable with someone for whom the personal, the political, and the pedagogical are of a piece. This means I can come into a place committed to working my butt off and not pull back for fear that I'll be asked to leave once someone discovers the Real Me.

Perhaps the writer of this Chronicle piece is right and perhaps there are some bloggers who really don't understand how their blogs display them as political and social beings. Perhaps I'm being too harsh and all this writer is doing is reacting to the latest warm and happy gushing about blogs. Perhaps all she wants is to warn potential job applicants that writing in public carries risk. With that I would agree, but in the end, I still think it's a risk worth taking. Disclosure requires trust and trust carries the potential for betrayal, but it's in those moments that a life worth living unfolds. I don't think anyone dies thinking of the last chapter of their dissertation, but there is a strong chance that some of us will carry in our final moments of life a photo, a text fragment or a memory of an interaction derived from some time spent online. For me, that's probably the best reason to insist on an identity as both an academic and a blogger.