Blogging political science has gotten complicated, man
Blogging will be light for the rest of the week, as I’ll be attending the International Studies Association annual meeting in San Francisco. If you’re also attending but new to these things and therefore unsure of what the informal norms are about such events, check out Megan MacKenzie’s indispensable ISA Guide to Newbie Graduate Students. ...
Blogging will be light for the rest of the week, as I'll be attending the International Studies Association annual meeting in San Francisco.
Blogging will be light for the rest of the week, as I’ll be attending the International Studies Association annual meeting in San Francisco.
If you’re also attending but new to these things and therefore unsure of what the informal norms are about such events, check out Megan MacKenzie’s indispensable ISA Guide to Newbie Graduate Students. Oh, and come attend the First Ever Official ISA Blogging Reception. I’ll be there too, and I’m bringing my #TFC12 finalist flask with me!!
My other piece of advice would be to read Rob Farley’s provocative new PS: Political Science and Politics essay, "Complicating the Political Scientist as Blogger." Farley is responding to a 2011 essay by John Sides at the Monkey Cage, which offers what I would label the "standard" narrative about how blogging can be a help rather than a hindrance to good political science — hell, I wrote something similar to it in 2008.
Farley considers this standard narrative, ponders it for a second, and then puts all his chips into the middle and raises the stakes:
Although I appreciate the effort to “just add blogging” to the discipline of political science, I worry that in making blogging safe, Sides gives away too much of what makes it interesting, influential, and fun. Specifically, I have two major objections to Sides’ characterization of blogging in political science. First, the article heralds an effort to discipline the political science blogosphere, establishing metrics for differentiating between “good” blogs that can contribute to (or at least should not be held against) a political science career, and “bad” blogs that do no one any good. In short, Sides’s article served both prescriptive and proscriptive purposes. Second, by emphasizing the “safe” elements of blogging, Sides has left winnings on the table; blogging could play a larger role in political science than he suggests.
Read the whole thing. I have, and I’m still sorting out how I think about it. On the one hand, I think Farley makes a really good point. There are ways in which the "standard" narrative leaves some things out. Let a thousand IR blogs bloom!
On the other hand … well, I’m leery of advising junior faculty and grad students to throw caution into the wind and blog outside the box, as it were. Blogs are becoming more mainstream in international relations scholarship and political science, but I wouldn’t describe them as truly mainstream just yet. So I have some residual caution.
There’s something else, however. If blogs are going to occupy a more central role in the field of political science, then they’re inevitably going to be measured, assessed, evaluated, and quantified in any kind of professional assessment. That’s what happens when people are hired or promoted in the academy. But for blogging, this is problematic, because the distribution of traffic and linkage in blogs is highly asymmetric. I worry that any kind of assessment will skew against the majority of blogs. More generally, I’m kinda dubious about the metrics we do have to measure blogs. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it — but I think we need to be aware of the risks going forward, and I think I’m less sanguine about them than Farley.
Clearly, technology is changing the way we in IR scholarship do business. We’re going to need to figure out what that means in the years ahead.
Developing…
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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