Continuing something of a theme, and also the Online Opinion theme of the value of blogs and internet sociality and interaction, I’m posting to draw attention to an article in the Village Voice about academic blogging, and in particular these remarks:
“It takes a certain kind of style, patience, and openness to non-specialists,” explains Jay Rosen, associate professor at NYU’s journalism department and author of the influential media blog PressThink. “You actually have to communicate with the public. It’s really for those who want to enter into public debate somehow, and despite all the blather you hear about ‘public intellectuals’ there are very few academics who want to do that.”
Say you’re already a public intellectual. Why start a blog? “I started blogging because I wanted to understand it,” says Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, who blogs at lessig.org. “I write about the intersection between technology and policy, and this is an important intersection to understand.”
Lessig found that blogging opened up his sphere of interaction considerably. “I’ve published a bunch of articles in law reviews, and I think I’ve gotten maybe a total of 10 letters about them in the history of my career as an academic,” he says. “I publish stuff on the blog, I get literally hundreds of e-mails about things all the time.”
If I remember correctly from a previous thread, Nabs is having lunch with Lessig soon. If he’s reading and wants to do a guest post to report back, he’s most welcome.
