Writing for myself and others: a reflection on academic blogging
Several readers have asked me to write about how I came to blog and what it’s like to blog as a professor. I have no idea if more than just a few people are interested in this, so apologies if this comes across as unearned navel gazing!
When I was 10, I started keeping a diary. I wrote about myself, toys I wanted, and conflicts I was having with my brother and friends. Like most pre-teen diaries, it was wildly hyperbolic, hilariously unfocused, and deeply personal. But I kept at it, writing to myself throughout my adolescence, trying to make sense of the world around me and trying to make sense of myself.
I never really trusted my ability to hide my diary, and I didn’t really have any space that was private and secure, so once I was old enough to realize that someone else might find it, I just stopped writing my personal thoughts. It wasn’t until I got an early version of the PalmPilot as a Freshman in high school, mimicking my mother’s amazing use of papers planners, that I found a way to secure my diary that I trusted. Deep in a dark corner of Palm’s proto app store, I found a secure notes app, installed it, set up a password, and I was set: I could once again write and reflect in private, this time writing about anything I had the courage to put into words. Most of it was deeply personal secrets about girls I had crushes on (and confusingly, thoughts about girls I wish I could be).
As I entered college, my diary became more intellectual and less personal. I started thinking about the big ideas I was being taught in classes. I formed elaborate theories about the problems in the world, ridiculous solutions to them, wondering about everything from politics, art, gender, technology, nature, and literature. I was embarrassingly nerdy. One quarter, I was deeply fascinated with whether Edgar Allen Poe would have ever exist in a globalized, connected world, because he’d be unable to focus on one specific darkness. Or maybe everyone would become Edgar Allen Poe because it would be so depressing! I blame two excellent English and Sociology courses and a lot chronic depression for that one.
As I entered graduate school and my professional career in research, my diaries shifted to reflecting on my work. I wrote about books I was reading, research I was synthesizing, research questions I was pondering, and inventions I was considering. I wrote extensive summaries of conferences I attended, ranted to myself about reviews I’d received. And of course, I’d occasionally reflect on myself, slowly letting back in those queer feelings that I’d eventually accept as gender dysphoria.
Near the end of graduate school, blogging had become mainstream. I started to wonder whether some of my diary entries would be worth sharing. I was writing about new ideas, reviewing research, and reflecting on academia. If I was going to spend all this time writing to myself, why not share some of it with others? I set up a blog on the Blogger platform and started sharing.
My earliest posts were like poorly constructed versions of what I still write about today:
- October, 2006: On static versus dynamic typing.
- December, 2006: On the epistemological tensions of empiricism about technology
- January, 2007: On the tensions between tech-utopianism and humanism
- January, 2008: Computation-infused silly poems about depression
It wasn’t until after tenure and my startup a few years ago in 2016 that I started to blog regularly (almost weekly). My catalyst was a question that many of my colleagues at the Information School asked me after receiving tenure: what I would I do with this great privilege of academic freedom? When I thought about all of the thoughts I’d written to myself, and how few of them anyone would ever read, sharing them felt like the perfect use of institutionally reinforced freedom of speech. I re-committed to keeping my diary, but instead of only writing for myself, writing for others too.
At first, it was really terrifying. My entire reason for keeping a private diary was to reflect in private. The idea of sharing my ideas with everyone on the web meant opening myself up to more scrutiny and critique than I’d ever faced. It meant putting my reputation at risk. But most of all, it meant sharing myself with the world. I’d barely been comfortable sharing my self with myself. How could I possibly share it with others?
Of course, early in blogging, I quickly learned that I wasn’t sharing myself with all that many people. When I started, only a few close colleagues read what I wrote. Most shrugged. My Mom, a wonderful copy editor, always sent constructive feedback. I’d get excited when I got more than 5 views. As I wrote more, and got modest amounts of reaction, I felt safer to share more and write more. And after about 6 months, I felt like I could write regularly, share my ideas, and learn an incredible amount from people’s reactions.
Now, after 4 years of blogging almost weekly, I’ve discovered a fascinating set of professional benefits to sharing my thoughts:
- When I have research to share, a short web-based summary is far more consumable and accessible than a paywalled PDF. I don’t do this for every paper, but I encourage all of my students to.
- Sometimes I have ideas about research or academia for which there is no academic venue. A blog post allows me to share that idea immediately and learn from people’s feedback. Sometimes people even cite them in their research papers.
- It gives me a voice beyond my publications and my university. With my academic publications, I might get hundreds or thousands of people reading my work. Some of my blog posts have been read hundreds of thousands of times, and more importantly, by people well beyond academia.
- Blogging can be service. For example, I spent a lot of time and money attending conferences that people can’t afford to attend, and largely funded by taxpayer money. The least I can do is summarize what I learned, so that others can learn from it it too. I now have a practice of writing trip reports for every meeting I attend.
- It affirms my commitment to public institutions. I believe that publicly-funded work at publicly-funded institutions should be accessible to the public. By being active and visible on the internet, people can see that academia is actually just passionate, committed, curious people trying to examine our world and ensure a better future for humanity and our planet.
Some of the benefits go beyond personal:
- I really love writing! But I used to despise it. That changed when my junior year English teacher told me, “You know, you could be really good at this if you put some effort into it.” He offered to let me revise my B- essay about Hamlet and Macbeth as many times as I wanted, each time getting critical feedback. The essay improved immensely, as did my writing, and I learned that writing, and probably everything else, was just a matter of good practice and good feedback. I spent the rest of the year enamored with my teachers weekly 1-page essay assignments where we could write about anything as long as it made a coherent point; those assignments were a lot like my blog posts to this day!
- Sometimes I find the writing therapeutic. I have a lot of thoughts, all the time, and if I don’t write them down, they just bounce around in my brain and consume my attention. Externalizing them, but equally important, sharing them, helps me release intellectual tension.
- Writing publicly has also been a great way for me to learn to be vulnerable. It gave me the confidence to come out as trans. It helped me develop a resilience to personal attack that’s been valuable professionally and personally. And this vulnerability has helped me be a kinder person.
There are some things I don’t like about blogging:
- Writing about ideas frequently is great, and the feedback I get on social media can be insightful, but it’s no replacement for conversation. I wish there were a way to have more frequent dialogue about my ideas and others ideas in face-to-face, synchronous settings. Universities should be that, but they currently aren’t, because everyone is so busy. I mostly get this at conferences.
- Because of context collapse, and my ability to only write for one audience at a time, sometimes my writings are read by people I never intended to reach. They read my writing out of context, think I mean something different than I’m saying, and interpret my words ways that lead to frustration, hate, or a sense of exclusion. This leads to conflict on social media and some rough days for me emotionally, where I feel verbally abused, strongly disliked, and unwanted. I’m lucky that the worst of this has been lots of character assassination and verbal assault. But I fully expect to be doxxed and canceled someday by communities angered by my ideas, or angered by their interpretation of my ideas.
Despite some of these painful experiences, the benefits are worth it. I get too much personally, and learn too much professionally to feel like I’ll ever want to stop sharing. Probably the only reason I’d stop is that I stop having things to say. Who knows, maybe I’m there already? You’ll tell me, right?
Should you blog? If the list above is any guide, this is a very personal choice. Maybe some of those benefits resonate with you. Maybe some of those risks scare you. For me, it took trying it to find out what I did and didn’t like about it. And the nice thing about it is that it’s incredibly easy to stop!
If you do choose to blog, the simplest advice I can give is:
- Take it as seriously as you do your other responsibilities in research, teaching, and service. Figure out what kind of writing you can do well, however small or infrequent that might be, and do that.
- Take the time to develop your voice. It took a long time for me to figure out how I wanted to write, how authoritative I wanted to be, and how I fit into my numerous communities. Of course, I’m always evolving what and how I write; it’s an ongoing effort to improve and adapt.
- Put effort into building an audience. That might mean starting with a small group of people you know will read what you write, give you feedback, and help you disseminate it. Writing frequently for four years has led to a reasonably solid audience of thousands, which feels like a great sweet spot between “why is no one reading what I write” and “OMG Twitter stop.” My sense is that anything larger becomes unmanageable.
- Get ready to develop some thick skin. The internet is not a very nice place right now. I think many are realizing this and are looking for ways to make it better, but don’t blog and share on social media unless you’re okay with having people be nasty to you (even people you know).
If you do decide to blog and have more questions about my experiences, don’t hesitate to write!
