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Why do so many academics blog anonymously? And why are so many of the anonymous ones women? Scott Kaufman of Acephalous blogged recently about this phenomenon:
There are two distinct academic Blogistans. This blog represents the more scholarly and less communitarian of the two. The other Blogistan is largely populated by anonymous academics who are building a vibrant community of shared professional and extra-curricular interests. Now I've reached the minefield:
I've crunched the numbers-I'll "show my work" after the article's published-and it turns out that 74 percent of the anonymous academic bloggers of a certain linkage-gauged stature are women. I don't want to draw any conclusions from this.
He asked for responses and received plenty.
Of course, this issue isn't limited to academics; every blogger with a job (or looking for a job) has, I hope, considered the consequences of posting personal anecdotes on the web. Kaufman believes that for academics, the advantages of blogging naked outweigh the liabilities, careerwise.
My immediate response mirrored that of Laura, who noted,
this post of yours is quite insulting about styles of blogging you believe are less scholarly, and thus I suppose worth while, than your own. I don't imagine you mean any harm, but there it is. I certainly don't wish you any. But one of the many people who practice this non-scholarly blogging you speak of may read this and feel slighted.
Yeah, I was one of those. Yes, my blog is a diversion, an outlet for me to be more creative than I can be when writing my dissertation. (And I confess--frequently it's an aid to procrastination on said dissertation.) But as other academics have pointed out online and offline, the line between career and personal life in academia is very, very blurry, if such a line even exists. Thus my academic life constitutes a good part of my personal life and vice versa, in so much as I write about the things that interest me personally. (It's for this very reason that I get ticked off when my students talk about life "in the real world"--as if I don't work in a world that's very real.) And for reasons that are too many to delve into here, but which include women's traditional roles as nurturers, as keepers-of-order in the household, and as people whose labor again and again gets rendered invisible, I think this personal/professional blurring is more significant for women than it is for men.
Belle Lettre followed up on this academic-blog-versus-blog-of-an-academic distinction on her own blog, and asks her readers which kind of blog they'd prefer:
You want just another law blog by a lawyer or a legal academic? Or do you want one by a lawyer/legal academic who can tell you a story about how in her third year of law school she flew across the country for a vacation in Washington D.C. with her best friend without her Nazi, anti-fun, puritanical parents finding out? How when the plane shook with turbulence she thought that maybe the God that she didn't believe in was punishing her for filial inpiety for daring to have a vacation instead of studying 24/7?
(The latter, please! That's why most of my BlogHer round-up posts are drawn from the blogs of academics who write about their lives behind the scenes.)
In the comments section of Kaufman's post, many academics expressed their anxiety about publishing their thoughts in the age of Google. La Lecturess was one of them, adding,
I wonder whether part of my pseudonymity isn't also the result of being reluctant to speak as an AUTHORITY on questions of larger academic interest--I suspect that my insistant use of the first-person singular is a way of particularizing rather than universalizing my experience; I wouldn't say that that's a "female" trait, per se, but I imagine that it IS a trait typical of those who feel themselves to be in a subordinate or less powerful position, as I am, as both a non-tenure-track faculty member and as someone still feeling her way toward scholarly confidence in her own field of specialization.
Ancrene Wiseass responded on her own blog in a post filled with additional links on the subject. An excerpt:
I'll echo the several people who've said that female academics' hesitation to post openly may well be due to pre-existing structural inequalities. Given the reality of Tribble-esque anxieties about blogs, I'm guessing most women in academe aren't interested
