I'm not sure I can make this make sense, because I'm very tired, but I'm going to take a stab and I'll get back to it eventually.

This article from The Chronicle of Higher Ed is making the rounds of the academic blogs these days, including danahboyd (here), purselipsquarej (here), and here. It's being discussed over in academics_anon here. Briefly summarized, the article is by the chair of a search committee for what is apparently a very conservative college. He eliminates three candidates based on their blogs--one for keeping a strictly personal blog, one for having an outside interest in Techno Geek stuff, and the third for an argument that has me completely lost . . . something about how he made his research relevant to current events. Most of the possible arguments about these were already made, but I wanted to say something really quick about the third: we ALL change our research around to make it relevant to current events. That's a basic selling skill for not only academics, but many other media. For instance, I have a passing current interest in nanoscience and social neuroscience, and a larger, more long term interest in STS/computing, media anthropology, health anthropology, and disability. When I realized how much money NSF is giving out for both of those topics, I decided that my NSF application this fall for the GRFP in science policy will focus on a project in one of those two "crosscutting" areas that uses the methodology from the latter. I'd be happy in either, and the fellowship isn't a life sentence. Furthermore, relating our work to current events is something that a committee should WANT to see. As humanities/social science professors, we should be able to teach our students tools for analyzing the world--how to critically read discourse, and how to intervene in discourses in any way they like.

This brings me to my point, though. For people like me, a personal blog does important work that an employer should want to see. By writing about my disability in a consciously analytical way and discussing disability with others, I'm "practicing," in a sense, for the ways in which I should manage that disclosure in the academy. As tsenft says, every time I go to post something, I ask "why am I engaging in this performance?" My blog is, in short, ethnographic data and fieldnote at the same time. In the case of the blogging research, it puts the participant in participant-observation. The internet is a place for me to practice the kind of courage and honesty that my specific vocation in life requires. And using those skills to reflect on how my personal experience connects to current events as well as academic readings is a very powerful methodology for thinking about the issues that matter to people in my field. And without some self-disclosure, it couldn't fulfill it's function as a part of my academic life.

I do think, however, that this is sort of inevitable. For a long time, those academics tech-savvy enough to have an internet presence were a small group, and they had kind of an unspoken covenant that you don't air people's dirty laundry, because we all had identities on the internet that we needed to protect. Our internet identities as blogging academics were secret from the rest of the academy--they were our way of redressing power differences. That balance is shifting as more people become tech literate, and I worry about what that's going to mean for my generation, which I think is going to be the second generation of internet/social networking-savvy academics, and how difficult it might be for us to get hired. No wonder there's a lot of paranoia.