(with examples from religious studies)
Mark Goodacre at NT Blog makes the argument for blogging’s benefits, part of a series of blogger responses (links in his post):
I sometimes wonder whether one should think of publication as being on a continuum, from tweets to blogs to critical notes to articles to introductory books to monographs. The summit of all publication is the monograph, and the well-written monograph actually takes some real skill and effort. Tweets, on the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, are forgotten almost as soon as they are uttered. Blogs are somewhere in between. They take a bit more effort than a tweet but like them they are pretty ephemeral. It’s remarkable just how quickly we forget them, and that’s if we ever read them in the first place.
Now, back to the monograph.
I love how he talks about “the blog” as if there were a unified standard for blog posts (somewhere between a Tweet and a monograph). It’s a content delivery system! Not the content!
Yes, blogging is a delivery system, and a blog entry might be shorter than a tweet, but in the academic blogosphere of which he is writing, there is a rough spectrum tweet – blog – critical note, etc., which any academic writer would recognize.
Another pertinent issue is that of the intended – as well as the potential – audience. Academic papers and monographs rarely make much of a splash outside relatively limited academic circles.
In part that’s probably due to academic publishers charging fairly high prices while at the same time failing to advertise to a non-academic audience. It might also reflect a general disinterest and misunderstanding of academic literature among other segments of society. I know bright, intelligent (non-academic) people who are fascinated by heritage, religious studies etc and who avidly watch television documentaries on these subjects, but who are put off by the very thought of reading an academic text, which they perceive will be dry and impenetrable. I know that that’s just an anecdote on my behalf, but I would suspect that sociological analysis might show that it’s indicative of a much wider attitude, at least in Britain.
Blogs, tweets, and also shorter articles in popular magazines and such therefore have the potential to reach a far wider audience than that which the traditional academic publishing sphere has shown itself able to reach. Whether they are succeeding in doing that or not is another matter.