Curious about research blogging, but not sure where to start?
Alice Fleerackersand Lupin Battersby of the ScholCommLab have put together a good post on Blogging your research: Tips for getting started. Despite being committed to blogging (this blog has been going since 2003) I must admit that I’m not sure blogging has the impact it once had. Twitter seems to have replaced blogging as a way to quickly share and follow research. Blog platforms, like WordPress have become project news and promotion systems.
What few talk about is how blogging can be a way of journaling for oneself. My blog certainly serves as a form of memory by and for myself. If only I search it (which I often do when I’m looking for information about something I knew but forgot) then it is still useful. Does everything in academia have to be about promotion and public impact?
In this age of fake news we seem to be back in the situation that Socrates and Gorgias sparred about in Plato’s Gorgias. Gorgias makes the point that the orator or, in today’s terms the communications specialist, can be more convincing than the scholar because they know how to “communicate”.
Socrates: Then the case is the same in all the other arts for the orator and his rhetoric: there is no need to know [459c] the truth of the actual matters, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know.
Gorgias: Well, and is it not a great convenience, Socrates, to make oneself a match for the professionals by learning just this single art and omitting all the others? (Gorgias 459a)
It certainly feels like today there is a positive distrust of expertise such that the blatant lie, if repeated often enough, can convince those who want to hear the lie. Does communicating about our research have the beneficial effect we hope it does? Or, does it inflate our bubble without touching that of others?