Blogging academics as part of labour politics

I recently read an article by Melissa Gregg and have been thinking of her approach on academic blogging. The title is Banal Bohemia: Blogging from the Ivory Tower Hot-Desk and she discusses how PhD students and junior faculty bloggers differs in the way they uses blogs from senior academics. Her point of departure is subcultural theory, which I never heard about before I read this, and it’s interesting to see a similar idea like mine as the starting point for her discussion. That is, it is similar in the sense that blogging practices is situated in other cultural practices. For Gregg that means that the blogging academics she has studied uses the blogs as a way to handle the pressure that they feel in their work as academics. The blog community forms a place, a subculture, for the blogging researchers were they can discuss the changing conditions in an institutionalised academia which have changed for the worse. Gregg says “blogs offer parables of these wider shifts, a suite of ideological narratives for explaining and understanding what is happening”. Even if I can see Gregg’s point I haven’t at all seen that kind of discourse in the blogs that I have studied. Some (most?) of the blogs in Gregg’s study are anonymous and I have myself specifically chosen blogs were you can identify the person behind it. Maybe that is the big difference? However, I find the notion of blogs as “an embryonic site for labour politics” intriguing.

Lund University and blogging

A new sub site is added to the Lund University web presence, it includes the blogs that are written by researchers, students or others at Lund University. You will find a link from the top page of the university’s web site to the “Focus on Lund University” site. Here blogs and facebook groups as well as RSS for news are collected. My blog is of course in the list ☺ even though I am a bit slow on updating it…however to be more frequent is one of the promises for the new year.

Blogging scientists requires new attitudes

In Nature a big survey has been presented about science journalism. One thing they point out is the influence off blogs in this enterprise. How science journalists both find their stories in blogs and themselves are part of the blogosphere.

In addition in the editorial in Nature yesterday it was mentioned that the attitudes towards science blogging is till mixed and that it is maybe time for a change?

[...]in today’s overstressed media market, scientists must change these attitudes if they want to stay in the public eye. They must recognize the contributions of bloggers and others, and they should encourage any and all experiments that could help science better penetrate the news cycle.

from
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7236/full/458260a.html

[Update] Malin is writing an interesting blog posting in Swedish about the report. She has penetrated some of the material from the survey which is freely accessible and found some interesting comments.

Trust in blogs?

I had to move my blog due to server trouble were it was hosted before…and yes the server trouble actually was that someone hacked the server and caused a virus in my blog. When I was going to move all the content I ran into the problem of lacking either some skills in database hacking, access to the server or a tool within the WordPress software to export all of it. I don’t know if I missed something in WordPress, but after some googling and also searching WordPress FAQ and help pages for a while I gave up. I decided to move the content by hand. Yes it was tiresome and yes it wasn’t a perfect solution. What has this with trust to do? Well since I had to move each blog posting and each comment one at a time I also had to change the date of publication in the new environment to at least try to resemble the way it looked like in the old set up. This made me think of how simple it is to twist things on the net and how the technology also allows these tweaking. I don’t think my blog is less credible now than before, but it is still not genuine, but the fact that I had to do the same kind of adding an old blogs’ postings into a new tool 2007 (the one that now is outdated and hacked) makes you kind of wonder how reliable the web is in terms of what you see is actually what was done…I think that it in addition says something about how fast the development of technology is in the online world. It is also interesting that my old WordPress version 2.0.7 wasn’t possible in an easy way to import into the newest version of 2.7, it’s almost like the problem in archiving old VHS etc., you have to have the old equipment to be able to see the old stuff if you don’t find a way to transfer it.

Bloggvirus

Jaha då har man drabbats av bloggvirus…och det är inte i form av ett virus som gör att man själv producerar ett större antal poster eller att jag utvecklats genom virusimplantat till bloggexpert på något vis. Nej detta handlade om någon ond hackare som bestämt sig för att göra intrång på servern och lägga in en massa skräp i mina tidigare poster för att på något sätt “marknadsföra” vissa URL:er, lite ala spam som kommer med e-post (fast elakare). Vilket resulterade att hela bloggens administration var låst för mig och att jag inte kunde uppdatera överhuvudtaget.

Stort tack till Patrik “the IT-wizard of Kulturanatomen” som räddade bloggen i sista stund!

Förgänglighet

Sedan jag lade över min blogg på en ny server har jag inte riktigt haft tid att fixa till den så som jag tänkt. Jag vill fortfarande använda något annat tema för utseendet och lägga till mitt delicious-flöde tex. Dessutom har jag tyvärr inte lyckats importera allt mitt gamla från den förra plattformen. Det är väl tyvärr så det är. Webben är i ständig förändring och saker går förlorade på vägen. Det förgängliga på webben är något som jag ska försöka skriva om i samband med att en forskargrupp vid Lunds universitet kallad HEX (Humanistisk EXperimentgrupp) jobbar med det temat i ett gemensamt projekt.

Språk

Jag har skrivit om det förut och jag förstår inte varför jag envisas…dvs att försöka skriva på engelska innan jag har fått ett flöde på svenska…Jag har tänkt i en vecka på olika saker som jag vill skriva här. Varför det inte blir av? Därför att tröskeln blir för hög just nu när jag först ska tänka ut kreativa saker och sedan formulera det på ett vettigt sätt på ett annat språk. Så två saker jag har kommit fram till av denna anledning är:
1. Skriva på svenska så fort motståndet blir för stort
2. Anmäla mig till en kurs för forskarstuderande i “English Writing for research students” på högskolan i Kalmar till våren

Man kan ju tycka att detta inte skulle ta en vecka att fundera ut men bättre sent än aldrig.

Hopelessly looking for a solution to import

I’d of course like to add my old blog posts and comment to my new set up, but still haven’t found any good solution. My old set up is a bit cranked and I can’t get how I shall find xml-files from it to be able to import it. Still I haven’t given up but it will probably take a while before those postings can be added.

new place and space

I moved to a new flat just recently and really love the new place. There is a lot of space and I can spend hours thinking about how to decorate it and make it cosy. Very recently the web site for my department moved and suddenly my blog was a bit homeless so now I decided to move in to a new blog environment. At the moment I feel that I like the new place and here is a lot of space to fill with my ideas. I think there is a possibility that also here I will be able to spend hours of thinking about the decoration and to make it cosy.