Pretentious Ass-hatted Wankery

The question has recently come up (like 5 min ago and raised by myself) about why I don’t blog much. About academics. I blog about other things, like nerdery. And cake. And occasionally politics (no links for you tyvm). But not so much with teh skool.

Oh yeah, by way of lame-ass exposition I’m an academic (kind of) but a rather ambivalent one. One thing I don’t like is other academics, or people who call themselves academics. Worse than this is the community of mewling egotistical twits that seems to cling to the label of ‘academic’ on the blogosphere (insert theme music).

For now I’ll restrain myself to speaking of an ideal type (don’t worry names are named a few paragraphs from now). This ideal type first came to my attention as part of the ljsociology community. If you don’t know lj it’s basically a clearing house for attention-whores and people who want to endlessly blog about their self-diagnosed mental disorders. Yes I have an account. Make of that what you will.

Anywho. The lj version of academia is a lot of critical theory wankery and people asking you to take their ‘omg sooo sceintifik sooperduper quiz about being a furry’ and how that’s uhhh, sociological I guess. There’s also a fair amount of deep question asking, the type of deep questions you probably tossed around when you were stoned with your roommates in your late teens but hopefully realize are really dumb once you get to grad school (or if not you’re ok writing essays that look like this.) Also disucssions about which schools to go to. The primary requirement for that is ‘how easy is it there’. A bit of free advice. If your main requirement for grad school is how easy it is to get in and get out you should do yourself a favor and just fucking apply to wal-mart now. Pretend you’re Barbara Ehrenreich if it makes you feel better, but save yourself the liver damage and debt.

Anyway. Academics with blogs. Particularly budding academics (like me, and my ilk but less mean I’d guess) have a horrible tendency to use their blogs, and especially the community of co-dependent hangers-on that they call their commenters as a sort of self-therapy and hugbox all rolled into one (fair warning on the hugbox link, it’ll probably offend you. It vaguely offends me, but only in as much that I close the office door before giggling quietly to myself over it.)

Anyway, all this ranting brings me to a group blog run by a bunch of academics (I originally was gonna call people out but fuck it, let the commenters have dignity). While the blog itself is vaguely amusing in that ‘oh my god is that what an aborted fetus looks like’ kind of sense the post I’m talking about regards a grad student upset that someone dismissed his discipline, his website, and, one would assume, his overall ability as a teacher to inspire interest in the subject (FWIW I totally agree with the sentiment that I’m not here to make my students happy, telling them that may not be a great idea however) but did so by handing in a paper authored by “Hugh Jass” <gasp>.

My advice would be what he already know, just drop it. Walk away. If that’s the worst thing a student has ever said to you count yourself lucky. Honestly. But just reading through the comments you know that’s not going to be what happens. The circle-jerk of enablers has started circling like the disassociated loons they are and offer their increasingly hysterical and inane suggestions.

Let’s just look at the grab-bag of crazy shall we?

Outrage? Really? Over a kinda humorous dismissal of the class? You get outraged over people dying, not over undergrad dismissal. Reality check on aisle 4.

Threatening? Oh. My. Fucking. God. Hello commenter, the Boston police department called, they’d like you to help them identify a bunch of children’s toys that may be terrorist devices. But hey, let’s report this kid and get the cops on him. Totally worth it to engage in second hand oppression over a goddamn piece of fucking paper. And two the two twits who agreed,? I hope the dept. chair would have the good sense to laugh this out of their office.

Is this about power? Well that would certainly make it all high and mighty. And maybe justify the fact you’re letting yourself get all worked up over it. And hey, maybe it is, but it’s probably not going to address the power issue by getting worked up over an angry student. It will however provide the lulz for those of us putting off working on our dissertation who needed to be reminded what a pack of fools most of us actually are.

So I guess the take home message is this; academic blogs can be amusing exercises in stupid (both the author’s and whatever is being blogged about) but the true comedy and tragedy come from the commenters.

Blogging! What is it good for?

Self-introspective post here. Consider yourself warned.

So I have, oh I don’t know, let’s say 8 or 9 blogs. These are either blogs I have solo or share with other people. There may be more but 9 or so is a good number to think about so let’s keep it there.

The problem is that I’m not too particularly good at keeping up with any of them. Partially this is a problem of time and motivation. Blogging is something that takes time and sometimes I don’t feel like I should be spending my time blogging.

But mainly it’s a question of audiences. Who do I blog for? This is a problem because as much as I’d like to believe I blog for me the fact is that if that were true I wouldn’t be blogging. I’d just write in a journal. So take, for example, this blog. VF is for me, mostly. But it’s also stuff I wouldn’t mind other people seeing.  I talk about academics, I talk about politics, I talk about things I share with other people.  These are all social activities and should be shared with people.

But there is the problem of audiences.  From past blog experience I’ve learned that audiences definitely have an affect on how often and what you might blog about.  And the question of audiences is one that’s going to grow increasingly important.  I’ve seen people lose out on jobs because of things they’ve blogged about, it’s that chilling effect that occasionally worries me and keeps me from posting the really personal stuff.

Of course you could always go with filters but the problem with filters is that they’re only as good as the people who access to them.  Anyone who can see past the filter can cut and paste to share with anyone else on the other side.  As long as it’s in print it can, hypothetically, get out there.

So what’s the point?  Good question.  I’m kinda bad about the whole ‘point’ thing.  But if pressed I’d have to say that this is probably my primary blog but will remain a bit impersonal on the whole.