11 October 2008
blogademics
The THE (that is still sounding wrong) ran a piece about, ahem, academics who blog.
'Some even blog anonymously' they say, shocked at the very idea. As an 'anonymous philosophy lecturer' I apparently said that I do it 'for relaxation and as a sort of strange complement to my work' (it was a phone interview, so I have no way of proving it). That sounds probably about right, although the chances of me doing anything 'relaxing' are about as likely as my body at given time not exhibiting a single bruise. Slowly clawing my way back into some sort of sleep after days of wretched, anxious wakefulness, I dream of mushrooms and giant underground marbles, as if the radix of my cortex was covered in mud and I needed to root hog or die to discover it (yeah, I know that last bit doesn't make any sense, I'm still asleep a bit). Searching for the truffles of my unconscious! Dirtier than the dirtiest of human dreams!
Anyway, erm, the blogademics thing. Some mild arse is spoken:
'Peter Smith, a senior lecturer in philosophy at Cambridge and author of the blog "Logic Matters", as being a "lopsided conversation over virtual coffee".'
That is such a senior lecturer in philosophy at Cambridge thing to say, twee and slightly arrogant at the same time, but also silly, as if bloggers and blog-readers weren't all the time tweaked on real coffee as they sit by their sickly screens. Although perhaps I am just cross because I've not had a cup of coffee in two days, in a desperate bid to finally get some sleep. AARGH! It's horrible. Tea is to coffee what a cocktail sausage is to a hog roast. Blogs aren't conversations, either, they're the demented scratchings of malcontents incapable of dealing with the word without messianic levels of linguistic mediation. I mean, dur.
This Smith fellow also says "I've certainly heard other senior academics express contempt for it - that bloggers are like adolescent girls scrawling in their diaries - but I suspect they are merely ignorant of the level of content on serious academic blogs,"
But if blogs are good, they are good for precisely this reason! I mean, come on, what would you rather read? A 15-year-old girl's intimate secrets, or some boring-arse disquisition on funding opportunities for interdisciplinary work?
Others in the article are just meretricious:
'Derek Morrison, associate head of e-learning at the Higher Education Academy, "The simple rule for everyone should be 'don't affect the share price', no matter what technology you are using," he comments.'
Henceforth I will beat a spoon against a rock repeatedly until the share price of all universities reaches zero, before chucking my laptop down a ravine. I'm going back to bed.
