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Anonymity in the Academic Blogosphere

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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

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Anne Zelenka 5 pts

I'm not in academic blogging myself, but I blog about tech and I regularly read blogs of academics. In tech blogging as contrasted to academic blogging, both women and men blog under their own names for the most part.

I blog under my own name, but I don't blog exactly the way I want to; I fit myself into the male world. I have chosen to split my blogging into separate personal and professional blogs, because men in tech blogging generally don't get into personal issues on their tech blogs. I would prefer to keep one unified blog. I have trouble in my tech blog with wanting to particularize everything rather than universalizing it as male bloggers do, to borrow a phrase from La Lecturess. This is not the first time I have forced my life to fit male rules instead of doing things the way I want to--I'm not working now, but when I was a full-time software development manager I had to act in ways that felt very foreign to me.

I really enjoyed this post. I'm hoping my sister who's an anthro professor will start her own blog some day. I'll have to point her to this thread.

Anne Zelenka ( http://www.annezelenka.com )
BlogHer Contributing Editor, Technology & Web ( http://209.59.186.51/~blogher/?q=blog/anne-zelenka )

Elana Centor 5 pts

When I first had the idea for FunnyBusiness, I wanted to tell the stories of people who could not tell their workplace stories for fear of getting fired. That was 10 years ago. My idea was to change the names of people, sometimes their gender, their profession. My belief was that there is a tremendous need for people to share what really goes on in their workplace. I wanted to tell their stories, not get any fired.

While I try to write with a light touch, I take the subject matter very seriously.
I find it repulsive that we live in a society that condones 'silencing' people for the benefit of business. I believe that a country that says we have freedom of speech should not allow an iron curtain around the injustices, insanity, abuse and simple stupidity that exists on a day to day basis in the workplace.

Thank goodness these anonymous bloggers are willing to take the risk to tell the tales of what its like to work in their professions.I plan to add the genre of academic blogs to my regular reading. So I would love a recommended reading list!

elana
Blogher Contributing Editor,Business&Careers

Leslie Madsen Brooks 5 pts

I realize in my original post I typed "former" where I meant "latter" in response to the post of yours that I quoted. I don't know where my mind is today. . . Sorry about that!

BlogHer Contributing Editor, Research and Academia ( http://www.blogher.com/topic/research-academia )
Proprietor, The Clutter Museum ( http://cluttermuseum.blogspot.com )

Leslie Madsen Brooks 5 pts

Bravo, Belle. Well said. Thanks so much for bringing this to our attention, and I'm sorry I missed your latest post. I very much enjoy your blog--keep up the insightful posts, please!

BlogHer Contributing Editor, Research and Academia ( http://www.blogher.com/topic/research-academia )
Proprietor, The Clutter Museum ( http://cluttermuseum.blogspot.com )

Belle Lettre 5 pts

Hi, this is Belle--

Of all the lines you choose to quote from that post, you choose the mildly facetious and slightly flippant one? True, the point of the post that this would be a personal _in addition to_ academic blog. But mainly it was a pragmatic real politik defense of pseudonymous blogging. Also, I clarified in a later post that in crunching the numbers, this blog would likely be 40% academic, and 30% personal, including how the academic affects my personal life. Thus, that kind of behind the scenes stuff you mention, how childcare impacts my scholarship, how my cultural restraints of being a daughter of immigrant Asian parents affects my perspectives on gender and the academy. Not just "catblogging."

In a follow up post, I go in further detail:

"Then again, those with the freedom to shout from the rooftops can and will, and the rest will whisper and mumble. It is amazing to me the opinions expressed from the seat of privilege--the senior faculty to the junior, the secure person to the insecure, the male academic to the female academic.

I still think that much of the world operates under "it may be okay for you, but not for me" unfairness. I mean, the unspoken rule is that having an early baby impacts your tenure chances, but only for women. That you can be a homosexual professional, but not a professional homosexual (from Kenji Yoshino's Covering). It's harder to feel like you can speak with your voice and agency when well, you don't have any. So good for you established male academics who don't have to worry about how maternity leave will impact your teaching load and tenure-track process, how to raise kids and write your tenure piece, how to go to all those conferences with a child to watch and no long term baby-care. It's still a world where mothers are the primary child-care givers. You can change that one family at a time, but it's still going to take a while to change the big picture and level the playing field between male academics and female academics (not to mention their numbers, their tenure-track status, their pay...). If it's harder for female academics to get positions, get tenure-track, go to conferences, do al that networking, get tenure, then it's surely harder for them to engage in "risky" behavior like blogging under their own name.

So that's yet another reason for my anonymity. Then again, it's mainly because I get personal, rather than not wanting credit for using my blog for ad hominems, or inappropriately trashing other people's ideas (critique as in opinion yes, but I'm not attacking and breaking down other's arguments). I'm not afraid to, it's just that when I do so I write under my own name. If I'm making a scholarly argument, well, it should be in a scholarly paper. And I definitely have strong beliefs about having a collegial, detached tone, avoiding ad hominems, avoiding straw-man arguments, and just contributing to civil discourse. I try not to get things wrong, but inevitably I will."

Link: http://lawandletters.blogspot.com/2006/02/further-... ( http://lawandletters.blogspot.com/2006/02/further-... )