If you are wondering what a blog is, and why a fine upstanding academic such as myself would choose to spend time self-publishing daily opinion columns, you might be interested in some of the writing that has been done recently about weblogs (blogs) and bloggers. Andrew Sullivan's "Blogger's Manifesto" was the piece that got me thinking about starting a blog. There is also a good description of the "blogosphere" in a recent Washington Post column. If you want still more, see Newsday's "Jog Around the Blog".

The basic idea behind blogs is freedom. Blogs make it possible for anyone with an internet connection to make their thoughts available to the world. The overhead is minimal, and if you are any good at what you do, the payback is phenomenal. Not in terms of dollars, but in terms of satisfaction. If you have something you want to say, you put it in your blog. No selling the idea to overworked editors who don't know you from Adam, no waiting months for readers' reports, no wondering if anyone, ever, anywhere, reads what you write. With a blog, you get instant gratification. You capture a thought that would otherwise pass into oblivion. That's gratifying. You take the time to find words for the thought, and to write them down. That's gratifying, too. There is a precision to it, a discipline and even a bit of art. Instead of just grunting at something that strikes you in the morning paper, you take a minute to work out what it was that struck you and you write it down. Then you post what you have written, and you have transformed what could have been just a passing private reaction into a formed, framed piece of lasting communication. Anybody in the world can now link to your blog and read what you have written. And, amazingly, all kinds of people do.

I've had thousands of readers in the first six weeks of Cant Watch, from all over the world. Some of them I know--they are students and colleagues, friends, family, and the occasional enemy. Most of my readers I don't know. They are from Finland and Japan and Estonia and France and Jamaica and just about anyplace else you can think of. Some are regulars, others just pass through. The regulars I know not by their names, but by their internet providers. These regulars and I have a sort of relationship. They stop by each day, usually at about the same time. Some are morning surfers--I try to get my daily blog posted early enough that I won't miss them.

I started my blog with the goal simply of catching some of the day-to-day thoughts I would otherwise lose. I had hoped it would give me a way to think more systematically about a subject that occupies me more or less continuously--academic cant, and the damage it is doing to higher education, doctoral training, and to scholarship. My goal was to use the blog to track patterns, to frame questions and to follow up on them, to learn a little history, and to begin forming a vocabulary for talking about what ails contemporary academe. The blog has done all that and more. Not only do I have a place to try out ideas, but I have an audience. My audience, in turn, votes with its feet (or its mouse). My blog gets read as long as it is worth reading. For an academic used to writing for the proverbial audience of none, this is heady, thrilling, invigorating stuff. I recommend it highly.

As I have made abundantly clear in previous blogs, I think the bulk of what passes for scholarship in the humanities is terrible, terrible stuff: unreadable, ill-conceived, irresponsible, uninformed, unconscionably solipsistic and disingenuously pretentious. If you think this is harsh, know at least that I am fair: I include my own first book in that assessment. I believe, too, that academic writing is as bad as it is because it is done not to communicate, but to impress; not to convince but to dazzle; not to express the writer's original ideas, but to advance a career. Many, many scholars write not because they want to, but because they are required to, because they will not get jobs, or tenure, or promotion to full professor, without it. As a result, most academic writing does not have a developed sense of an audience. It does not even typically believe it needs one, nor is it written with a mind to acquiring one. This is a sign of deep professional pathology. To require and reward such writing is criminal. To perform such writing is a crime against intellect, conscience and personal dignity. At the same time, it is a crime made utterly mundane by the sheer number of people who willingly commit it year after year, and who assess their students and colleagues by their willingness to collude in the intellectually dishonest culture of publish or perish.

As a writing mode that offers the possibility of instant, guaranteed, self-determined publication, blogs are a fantastic way of getting around (or over or beyond) writer's block and the related procrastinations and self-censorships that come with more traditionally "scholarly" forms of writing. Blogs are also amazing ways to overcome the debilitating sense of "audiencelessness" that plagues so much academic writing. When you know you are posting to the world wide web, and that you are doing it now, and that you are then going to be able to watch readers flock to your blog or flee, it's amazing how readily words and ideas come together. Obfuscation ceases to be either an ideal or a problem. Your word choice becomes at once more colorful and more concise. Your tone varies when and as tone should. Your prose cleans itself right up, becomes clear, accessible, and sometimes even trenchant. You might even discover a sense of humor. Certainly you will discover what writing ought to feel like: meaningful, connected, rewarding.

Blogs are a godsend to academics laboring under the debased conditions of a professional system that perverts the act of writing by demanding that it be done on cue, to prove oneself to others rather than to record one's ideas because one is moved to do so. Or they might be, if more academics--particularly young ones--began blogging. I know it has been a godsend to me.