Imaginary magnitude

Elizabeth Lane Lawley make some bold predictions about the use of blogs for creating contacts in the academic world. Blogs

are actually more important to us in terms of collegiality than the connections we have to people that we work with. I “know” Jill and Seb better (at least professionally) than I know most of the people in my hallway. I think this will be increasingly the case for academics—social software tools will foster and support collaborative networks that cross disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and those networks will become the important spaces in which creativity research develop.

(my emphasis)

A quite substantial claim, actually. One would like her to be right - naturally, since we are all bloggers here, but one would like some kind of data to support this kind of projections in to the future.

Sure, Liz knows Jill and Seb. Right. Fun for them. Perhaps they would not have met without blogging. But how many academic collaborations have come out of blogging, that would not have come out of the other arenas where academics mingle? Saying that social software is crucial for this thing is … well, a bit odd. In what way is it different to saying that email is responsible for me being able to co-author a paper with someone on another continent, or that paper, printing and pens were crucial in developing the new science in the scientific revolution? (As if truth had no social history, but just a tool history …)

Saying that blogging is of great importance is a bit like saying pen-and-paper was important to Henry Oldenburg. Sure it was, but the analys of the networks of communication that he constructed could not stop there.

I follow a lot of blogs run by other scholars. In that way I keep track of what they are doing, and sometimes get impulses for my own work. Some of these scholars, like Alex, I knew about before blogging, some, like Susanne, I met through blogging. Perhaps, I might even some day co-author a paper or develop a course with someone I met through blogging. But I communicate, mingle, gossip, publish in many other ways.

Elizabeth Lane Lawley is right about one thing: sometimes, we care more about our fellow comrades in our communities of practice, than we care about the people that happen to be available at our department. Such networks that cross various boundaries are sometimes where the important action is in the scholarly world. That is an interesting phenomenon in its own right. One that should be analyzed in detail. Why just study how blogging affects such communication?

I can’t see that it is really obvious that blogging will make such collaboration take a quantum leap in a way that did not happen when other forms of communication where introduced. Sure, blogging facilitate communication among scholars. But so did cheap international airplane tickets, e-mail, fax, telegraphy, scientific conferences, cafés and a whole group of other technologies and social meeting places used by scientists when they want to meet new or old collaborative partners. What makes blogging so different?

Scholars love to gossip. They communicate, they build up networks. They will use a whole range of tools in doing this. Blogging is just one of these tools.

I would not be surprised if things like Arxiv, PLoS, and the Berlin declaration are signs that tell us that other factors than blogging are important in the emergence of a new landscape of scholarly communications.

An alternative scenario is that blogging is instead used for connecting scholars with audiences in various places outside of the communities of practice that are important for us as scientists. Such connections are indeed important, but they are something else than the meeting of scholars that Elizabeth Lane Lawley envisions.

I have argued earlier that for the fields of technology studies and technology, not much inter-culture discussion is going on via blogs; blogs aren’t perhaps by automatic the trading zones some would like them to be.

I am still a bit sceptical about blogs being the revolution in scholarly communication some think it will be. I hope I will turn out to be wrong, since I’m a blogger myself.