Yeah, what Jonathan said. I'm done for a while. But I'll be back in a few weeks. In the meantime, Ralph Locke and Brent Reidy (the latter of Musikwissenbloggenschaft) will be holding it down. Welcome them! I might poke my head up from time to time, but for the next few weeks I'm on vacation in Canada and will try to be thinking about things other that music, musicology, and related matters. It's summertime!
…which is the very apposite final word of the first act of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. In the interest of getting my mental lines blown out, my book manuscript finished and sent, and to take a family trip to look at Californian universities (relevant to A Certain Young Man) and after Californian family, I'm going to be checking out for a while—as currently planned, until after July 4 or so. Highly competent and trained professional guest bloggers will be here in my absence.
Catch you all on the flip side!
The current self-examination and comments engendered make for a good thing for Dial M, I think. I’d like to amplify the comments to acknowledge not only that we do have a faithful readership, they tend to be an appreciative readership, which is much appreciated by me. Phil and I blog differently, which is part of the reason Dial M has worked thus far; we can do simultaneity, we can do counterpoint, and we can do antiphony. We can also do Dada. What I meant by “powdered,” by the way, was “ground into powder,” a phrase learned from my Angeleno brother, and which seems to be an accurate ongoing description of my existence.
I blog for a couple of reasons. The first of these is that I got sick of the recurrent self-flagellation bursts on the AMS list—bad us, we haven’t done enough to educate the populace, it’s our fault, we must reach out more, everyone is so ignorant about music. I still post there occasionally, but the fact is that you’re writing for the same relatively small group of friends, colleagues, and specialists; if you want to reach beyond that community you’ve got to do something else. When the opportunity to participate in this blog came up, therefore, I jumped at it, even with trepidation about what it would do to my other activities. My responsibility it to try to write comprehensibly, and to write about what I care about in such a way that others will care about it too.
And to steel our joint resolve: good newspaper columnists produce what amounts to a blog every week, every couple of days, whatever. They have restrictions on length, they do it for years on end, and the columns can approach poetry—I remember wonderful stuff from the Los Angeles Times’s Al Martinez (anthologized in Dancing Under the Moon), and from the San Francisco’s Jon Carroll. Why would I shoot for anything less? I’m sure columnists have flat periods, too, and they push through ’em.
I also try to use this to improve a kind of essayistic tone. Too often, musicological research, no matter how important, reads in an unfortunate way: jargon-laden, syntactically byzantine, insular and self-referential. True scholarly objectivity being nonsense, a well-reasoned, persuasive tone and approach will obviously serve whatever subject I’m writing about, so it seems to me that regular labor in that vineyard is both discipline and reward. An added benefit is that I get to write about musical and academic matters not directly pertinent to my research and other writing assignments.
For me, this is like good, solid, regular piano practice (which I wish I did more of). I appreciate—deeply—that people read and like our blog, and I continue to think that we have something important to contribute to the wider musical and academic discourse. We’re entitled to rest (which we probably will, and some point soon), after some solid work, but I hope that we come back tanned, rested, and ready.
Jonathan writes that we both feel "powdered" (I'm assuming in the Colorado-centric sense of crashing into a big pile of snow). Never has a truer thing been blogged. Sorry to resort to the Teachout Method once again, but this post will consist largely of bitching about not having time to post.
I think it's the usual end-of-year frenzy, though, because it's not just Dial M that's been phoning it in. Phil at 2'23" asks "is it just me, or has the world of musicology blogs lately been a bit...well, humdrum? I certainly haven't been helping matters myself, but what's going on? Are we all bored with blogging all of a sudden? Is all of the energy of technically-adept musicologists going into maintaining the job wiki?"
No, it's not just you. After making certain biggity claims for the blogosphere as a new model of scholarly enterprise, I've been more and more aware of the limitations of academic blogging. It really does suck that the best stuff you write gets ignored and the stupid novelty isn't-this-weird stuff is all anyone seems to care about. I've been cynically keeping Dial M on life support by posting tons of Youtube things, and it's worked. Our numbers are basically as good as they ever are. So does this mean that I never have to take any trouble with anything I write -- just trawl through the internet looking for weird and funny stuff and we'll get hits? Probably. This doesn't say anything good about academic blogging, though. I've written that I hold a weak technological-determinist view of blogging -- you can resolve to write anything you want, but the exigencies of the medium tend to knock the edges off your resolve. And this is a case in point. Youtube, lolcats, and whatnot are easy fixes -- the spackle of blogging. If you don't have time to write something real, you can find something cool or funny in no time and fill a hole in your writing schedule.
And, further, I just haven't been feeling it. I was just at the Experience Music Project pop conference this weekend, and saw some amazing things. Joshua Clover's paper "Terrorflu, or Where in the World is M.I.A.?" was perhaps the best presentation at an academic conference I've ever seen. The panel on the Iraq war was a revelation. Finally, after a number of false starts, I think we're seeing the emergence of a strong music-scholarly discourse on the post-9/11 cultural scene. (That is, a discourse minus the bullshit affectation and condescension usual to academic work on current political issues, or at least relatively free of it.) Although all the papers on that panel were good, I'd have to single out J. Martin Daughtry's paper as something that's finally synched into the undercurrent of dread that's been missing from scholarly discourse on the Bush years. For a conference about pop and politics, there was surprisingly little grandstanding -- just a lot of dread, a lot of ambivalence, and a lot of doubt. But that's all I'm really going to say about it, because, as I said, I'm not feeling it. I don't want to write about it; it was enough to be there.
It's the time of year. I'm ready for the semester to be over, and so is everyone else. One of the melancholy jobs I have to perform every now and then is to weed out the "music academics" blogroll. Peter at Loose Poodle has stopped posting, which makes me sad, though I understand why he's stopping. Blogs, if you do them right (and Peter's was one of the best) take a lot of headspace, which might be better devoted to writing other things -- things like a dissertation, for example. Posting on People Listen To It has slowed to a crawl; The Black Torrent Guard is apparently inactive; Byronotes hasn't updated since October; etc. I'm not criticizing anyone here, because blogging can be a brain-sucking monster and it's not as if we don't all have other things we need to do. The thing is, I've been able to do this blog because it's helped loosen me up. I figure that, even with the time it takes me to write this stuff, I still come out ahead with the other writing I have to do, because blog writing keeps the pot on the boil. It's like playing scales or something -- it keeps you in shape even when you don't have a lot of time to practice. But when you have so many things going on it's a strain and a pain.
The blogosphere is littered with "goodbye cruel world" posts -- people who have kept a blog going for years and then just up and quit. Often they write about how they're sick of wasting their time, how they now realize that blogging doesn't do anything useful, etc., but I don't feel that way. I still think blogging's great. But I can see how you can suddenly find yourself waking up and saying, y'know, I don't feel like doing this anymore. But I haven't hit that point. Yet. I think.
Scott McLemee (whose blog Quick Study I have had cause to mention from time to time) has written a column at Inside Higher Ed that performs an invaluable service: it says nice stuff about Dial M.* Oh, yeah, and it gives us an excellent interdisciplinary tour of the academic blogosphere.
What's especially good is the article's basic conceit: Scott asked a bunch of more-established academic bloggers (including me) to recommend an academic blog that non-specialists might not have heard about. This means that Scott's tour of academic blogs both reminds us of old favorites and gives us something new to think about. Since I have made it something of a personal crusade to make blogging seem a little less bizarre and scary to my musicological colleagues, this article is particularly welcome. See, colleagues, look at all the smart people who blog! Look at how many different things you can do within the medium! My personal favorite discovery from this article: bookporn. A favorite picture:
A lot of people who distrust blogs do so because they think that the medium encourages self-indulgence, incivility, and incompetence, which, OK, yes, it does, but it also encourages great writing and thinking -- indeed, a specific kind of writing and thinking rewired by the medium and, I believe, destined to rewire the entire academic enterprise.**
Scott's article mentions a number of blogs I've started following myself, including Ben Wolfson's waste, Lester Hunt's E pur si muove!, and the libertarian group blog Liberty and Power. waste has been on our blogroll for a while, but it's time to add a few new ones. My own suggestion when Scott asked me for a recommendation was People Listen To It, which has developed its own voice very quickly and which offers an intriguing new model for the academic group blog -- an institutional blog featuring the work of both grad students and professors. Well, one professor anyway, namely Gabriel Solis. Good lookin', G!
*To wit: Dial M is "almost excessively enjoyable" and is "the one that seems most like a really good magazine." We own other team.
**Of course, bloggers are much given to such sweeping millenarian claims, so take that with a grain of salt. Wait -- what if making sweeping millenarian claims is itself an effect of the medium? Hm.
Condolences to Jonathan on the death of his friend.
I haven't really felt like blogging for a while. I needed some time to unwind. Didn't we all? And now we're all trudging back to school. No, not trudging -- skipping! Merrily!
Fall semester always has a funny rhythm to it. Thanksgiving comes so close to the end it effectively lops off the last couple of weeks. Everyone is going through the motions in their classes, just trying to get done. It feels like the semester is already over, and that the last two weeks are just a technicality. And there's nothing much you can do to convince your students otherwise.
There's a lot I felt thankful for this Thanksgiving. This was the most thankful Thanksgiving ever. I'm thankful for our wonderful neighbors, who cut down the dead tree between our houses and even cut it up for us for firewood. I was thankful for my new house, which is small but pretty and cozy and which I love, and I was thankful that we are no longer paying both its mortgage and the one on our old house in Texas. See, we *did* sell the Austin house back in May, but then the deal fell through 24 hours before closing, and then the national housing market went kablooie, and we were stuck with an extra house on our hands, with little hope of selling it. But we sold it shortly before thanksgiving. I was thankful for this.
I was thankful for the blog, to be honest, because I've come to value it for making me a smarter, better, more productive scholar. A lot of people ask me how much time I spend on it, because it seems like an awful lot of work, and I guess it is, but I believe it actually makes me more productive in my non-blog-related writing. Writing these little feuilletons feels like playing scales or something -- it warms up the writing part of the brain, it primes the pump, it keeps me in shape when I don't have time to work on bigger things, and it helps me work out ideas that I didn't know I had and which would otherwise languish unformed somewhere in the back of my mind. And, while I'm being thankful for this blog, I'm also thankful for our readership -- the musicoloblogosphere and our commenters. Check out the comments threads on a larger site, like the Onion AV Club blog, and you can kind of see why so many people think blogs are evil. Why are Dial M readers not like this? Probably we're too small-time to be hated on, but still, one of the reasons blogging can keep the mental pot on the boil is that, ideally, you get people reading who will say stuff to you that you don't see coming and that forces you to think in institutionally non-prescribed ways. I guess I've said this before, but it's worth repeating.
I'm also thankful that there are a couple of new musicology blogs added to the blogroll. Go check them out.
OK, I guess that's enough gratitude for one post. On a totally unrelated note, I would like to propagate a blog meme: the care bear stare.
Julian Sanchez, who has demonstrated his connoisseurship of cheap 1980s animated kids shows before, recalls that the Care Bear Stare "was a sort of deus ex machina the magical furballs could employ when faced with some insuperable obstacle: They'd line up together and emit a glowing manifestation of their boundless caring, which seemed capable of solving just about any problem." Julian goes on to note that the political left and right each has its own version of the Care Bear Stare: for the neocon right, it's the notion that "the American military can produce just about any effect imaginable if only the Will of the American People is strong enough. When any foreign intervention fails, this is proof that our will was insufficient, presumably due to the malign influence of fifth columnists in the media." For the left, it's that "we know perfectly well how to solve problem X, if only we cared enough or had the political will to address it." What is the musicological version of the Care Bear Stare? Perhaps it's something Jonathan has identified in his post on Richard Taruskin's big TNR piece -- when we're faced with massive public lack of interest in the Relatively Unpopular Music we teach, our response is always "keep listening!" As Jonathan notes, this only works if you're already listening. Musicologists are good at telling people how to listen in new ways, but not so good at getting people started in the habit.
I was going to do a post on blogging (which means that I was going to do some meta-blogging), but screw it. From the webcomic XKCD:
Good evening --
I am speaking tonight on Thursday, November 1, at the American Musicological Society Annual Meeting in Quebec City. The session at which I am speaking is the Committee on Career-Related Issues forum on collaborative internet tools. If you are attending this conference, you might be hearing my words as I speak them, though it's more likely you're drinking at the opening-night reception. Or you might be reading my words on Dial "M" for Musicology, the blog I write with Jonathan Bellman, since the blogging software I use has allowed me to write out my remarks in advance and arrange for them to appear online at the same time as I am delivering them in person.
And I'm doing this because I think it's kind of cool, and because I can. But I suppose I could also use it to illustrate why I blog at all. As I speak these words I'm in a small roomful of academics. Not just academics, musicologists; not just musicologists, members of the AMS; not just AMS members, but that subset who have paid especially punitive travel costs to come to Quebec City; and, of that already small subset of the academic community, we are left with those who have resisted the temptation of caffeine-, nicotine-, and alcohol-fueled socialization in the ballroom. But there are no such restraints of space, time, and academic specialization on my blog, or on any blog. Granted, the people who come there regularly (and we get between 200 and 400 site hits on an average day), are self-selected -- people with an interest in music, musicology, academia, or some combination of all three. But we also get people who surf in on false hits, like the guy who found my post on Tom Lutz's cultural history of slacking with the search term "wife discipline," or the unknown soul, perhaps tormented beyond endurance by her accompanist, who found us when she typed "I hate pianists" into the Google search box. More to the point, there is no prior restraint on who might find us, or why, and no restraint on who might link to us, or how they might respond to what we write.
Neither, in writing the blog post version of this talk, is there anything preventing me from littering the page with cuss words, or passing unprovoked personal remarks about Ryan Bañagale, though I would certainly forbear both in the Committee on Career-Related Issues, out of fear of community disapproval and a stony glare from the moderator. As we all know by now, blogging enables virtual communities but erases the social restraints enforced by real ones. Bloggers can choose to be anonymous and write with all the unrestrained savagery of the anonymous student evaluation or journal peer review. But even when they're not anonymous, bloggers can fall under the spell of an illusion common in ostriches and toddlers: the belief that if I don't see you, you don't see me. I see the same crew of friendly, helpful blog commenters every week at Dial M, and can believe that they represent the views of our much larger silent audience. But they don't: there will always be people who hate you and hate your stupid blog and will lie out there in the weeds, silently hating. And every blogger will at some point say something mean, ill-considered, or frankly stupid, because even when you're not anonymous, you kind of feel as if you are, and anyway, it's an informal medium that discourages lengthy reflection. All of which is to say that when you're blogging you're exposing yourself in ways you can't control or even fully understand, and this exposure, with all its associated risks, is probably why there are still so few musicology blogs out there, and why many of them disappear after a while. Academic careers are bought and sold with the currency of peer evaluation, and academic bloggers get freaked out when they feel themselves losing control of the image they present to their disciplines.
Some non-blogging scholars are freaked out by all this, too, and argue that blogging lures people to do damage to themselves and their careers. Quick hits for easy kicks, fun in the short term and personal ruin in the end -- blogging is like crack for academics. And there's another argument against academic blogging that's familiar from debates over Wikipedia: how can anything of value emerge from a medium where there's no-one in control, no editorial board, no-one maintaining intellectual standards and norms of civility? Without such oversight, blogging is mere anarchy.
Well, this is quite right. The natural state of the blogosphere is anarchy. The essence of the medium is the reciprocal and nonhierarchical relationship between bloggers and their audiences. In fact, writing about "bloggers and their audiences" is misleading, because it implies that this is a clear distinction of roles, like the distinction between those who read a newspaper and those who write it. But in the blogosphere there is nothing preventing any reader from turning into a writer, and every blogger has the same megaphone as everyone else. To be sure, there's a pecking order -- Alex Ross is more widely-read than I am, for instance -- but it's an abstract, intransitive kind of authority. Alex Ross has authority, but he doesn't have authority over anyone. He can't shut me up, or compel me to talk about the things he and other A-list bloggers have deemed most important. If I hate Alex Ross I can buy the domain name ihatealexross.com and devote my site to mocking everything he writes, and while this would be nutty and pointless, people would probably read it. And it is the ability to attract readers and links to your page that makes you visible, and nothing else. You may get links only because you're that crazy guy who hates Alex Ross, but still, you're getting links. It's a kind of anarchy that mirrors the anarchy of an unregulated free market, where the only thing that controls what is being offered for sale is whether someone is willing to pay for it. A geek show gets the same pull as a poetry reading. In the blogopshere, the currency is not money, but popularity, but the principle is the same.
Now surely this is inimical to the values of scholarship, if not art itself. It is infamous to judge ideas according to their popularity, and besides, very few of us went into musicology because we wanted to be more popular. I suspect that many of us became academics because we wanted to preserve the things we love from the tyranny of popularity, from the demand that artistic values line up with worldly success. Better, then, that musicology stay where it can be protected; better that there should be protectors.
When anyone says that we need protectors, the first question you should ask is who they have in mind. Usually it's them, or people who think just like them. So then the second question should be, why you? And it is at this point that we start hearing moral arguments that appeal to things unseen and benefits we must take on faith. It is here that people begin to insist on transcendent goals to which our universities and scholarly societies should be directed. Musicology should resist the philistinism of the market, or preserve the cultural heritage of the West, or work for social justice and fight race and gender discrimination, etc. But of course there is never any agreement on these goals. While all academics pay lip service to the idea of free and unfettered intellectual inquiry, we all have our blind spots. There is always some school of thought to which we cannot extend even a minimal assumption of sense and good faith. The new-musicology debates of the 1990s were envenomed by the fact that people on both sides simply could not believe in any of the warrants that underwrote the scholarship of the other side. The only thing you can really say about who was right is that they all thought they were right. But when the question of who's right is also a question of who should call the shots, as it inevitably is in zero-sum situations like, say when we're deciding who's getting published in JAMS, intellectual matters become political matters. Not any particular kind of politics, necessarily, not politics of the left or the right, but the principle of politics itself, which is power.
And it is here that the abstract and intransitive power of the blogosphere becomes a very great virtue. No-one can shut anyone else up, ideas can cross-pollinate unpredictably, and since the blogosphere is not a zero-sum enterprise, there is nothing forcing people to "take a side" with this or that school of thought. Those who gather around their shared faith in Academic Theory X might face questions from which they would otherwise be insulated by institutional mechanisms. And I suspect that this is something a few academics secretly resent and fear about blogs. They don't want someone who hasn't been properly housebroken asking cheeky questions, and they don't want to be denied the institutional authority to control the discourse.
People who complain about blogs, like those who complain about Wikipedia, ask why a medium that puts any random crank on the same footing as an expert should be taken seriously. Defenders of Wikipedia always point out that it's self-correcting: the damage that malicious and incompetent people cause is quickly undone by dedicated Wikipedians. Now, you can't quite say this about blogs. A stupid blog post stays stupid. But there is a kind of self-correction at work -- call it peer review. The freak who writes ihatealexross.com may get links, but this won't earn him a place in the minisphere of classical music bloggers. A geek show may get the same pull as a poetry reading, but it's not as if they have the same clientele: poets don't have to start biting the heads off chickens. And while one of the charms of blogging is that it allows you to post a long piece of serious writing one day and pictures of your cats the next, a clarinetist who only posts pictures of her cats isn't going to get any play, except from the crazy cat people. (And that's a whole different scene.) The classical music blogosphere and the smaller sphere of academic music bloggers are communities of interest, and while you can be an enormous hairbag, you also need to be an interesting, entertaining, and at least marginally relevant hairbag if you want anyone to read you. This kind of peer-review is non-binding, of course. It won't keep you from saying dumb things in public and getting denied tenure.* It is implemented only in blunt remarks in your comments section, rebuttals in other blogs, or ostracism, in the form of no links and no love. But again, there's no one person doing the ostracizing. Decisions are collective (if non-binding) and power flows (intransitively) from a decentralized structure enabled by the logic of the internet itself.
Which means that blogs have something in common with Wikipedia: they rely on what Yale law professor Yochai Benkler calls commons-based peer production (CBPP). Peer production means that knowledge (in the form of a Wiki, Project Gutenberg, Librivox, a piece of open-source software, or whatever) is being created by a widely distributed, non-hierarchical network of volunteers whose willingness to work on a shared project is their main qualification for doing so. Commons-based means that nothing created in this way is proprietary and no-one's doing it for money. The magic ingredient that makes it work is the internet, which allows for a decentralized peer review structure and which also permits a large number of people to make something huge (i.e., an ongoing self-sustaining intellectual conversation on music) by adding tiny pieces to it.** This is a model of production that now drives a good deal of software innovation, and something like it is beginning to happen in scholarship as well. The academic blogosphere is self-selected, ungoverned, and nonhierarchical; the knowledge it produces is generated collectively as ideas are passed along, argued, and transformed from one blog to another; and while individual blogs (including Dial M) might stipulate which rights they reserve on their own work, no-one can be said to own a conversation.
However, the problem with understanding the musicoloblogosphere as commons-based peer production is that the musicological commons is still very small: for reasons I've described, there just aren't a lot of music-academic blogs yet. But perhaps this is also a secret strength. There aren't enough music academics to sustain a conversation, but this means that those of us who are in the blogosphere end up spending a lot of time conversing with music people who aren't academics, or academics who aren't music people. And the best of them are brilliant: aforementioned critic Alex Ross, pianist Jeremy Denk, composer Matthew Guerrieri, and intellectual critic Scott McLemee, to name only four. And what happens when you spend a lot of time sharing space with these people is that you start to develop a lingua franca, a border language synthesized from the things you have in common. And as I've argued elsewhere, that common tongue has its own special characteristics. It is "cool," in the McLuhanesque sense: readers can profitably interact with it in a wider variety of ways than they can with more traditional forms of academic communication. Blog writing tends to be "porous," filled with open spaces that readers can fill with their own contributions. This kind of writing doesn't make the "hotter," denser kinds of academic writing obsolete, of course, but I would guess that as academic blogging continues to grow it will "cool down" academic discourse generally. Whether this is a good thing or not is a tough question, and maybe at this point an unanswerable one. I should blog about it some time. Or maybe someone else can. I'm looking at you, AMS.
*But then, we're all grown-ups, aren't we? Grown-ups take responsibility for what they do and don't blame their bad decisions on the medium. It's not "the medium" making you post all those pictures of cats, it's you.
**Benkler treats these conditions of commons-based peer production in "Coase's Penguin," the article where the term was first introduced. See also Benkler's book on the subject, The Wealth of Networks, which (of course) has a Wiki. Other things you should read that I didn't have space to mention in the main text: James Boyle's classic article on the "second enclosure" of the intellectual commons; the CHE forum "Can Blogging Derail Your Career?", and Alex Ross's recent New Yorker piece on classical music in the internet age.
Item 1: Scott Spiegelberg's daughter wrote an awesome Halloween story.
Item 2: Scraps is right: Weird Al's parody of Devo, "Dare to be Stupid," bears the bell away.
I love this because it not only makes fun of Devo (see here and here and here for points of comparison), it's also a great song that scratches the exact same itch that Devo does. It's the best Devo song that Devo never wrote. Maybe musical parodies are doing their job when they remind you of what you love about some kind of music.
I loved -- LOVED -- Devo when I was a teenager. If you had told me at age 15 that it would some day be my pleasure to write about Devo for an audience of . . . well, however many read this blog post, I'd have wet the ill-fitting brown corduroy pants my Mom bought from By-Way. Sometimes it's worth taking a moment to realize what blogging allows you to do . . . and how incredible it would have seemed not so long ago.
Which brings me to Item 3: Alex Ross's New Yorker article on how classical music is doing really well in the internet age, and how blogging in particular has profited classical music in surprising ways:
Classical-music culture on the Internet is expanding at a sometimes alarming pace. When I started my blog, I had links to seven or eight like-minded sites. Now I find myself part of a jabbering community of several hundred blogs, operated by critics, composers, conductors, pianists, double-bassists, oboists (I count five), artistic administrators, and noted mezzo-sopranos (Joyce DiDonato writes under the moniker Yankee Diva). After a first night at the Met, opera bloggers chime in with opinions both expert and eccentric, recalling the days when critics from a dozen dailies, whether Communist or Republican or Greek, lined up to extoll Caruso. Beyond the blogs are the Internet radio stations; streaming broadcasts from opera houses, orchestras, new-music ensembles; and Web sites of individual artists. There is a new awareness of what is happening musically in every part of the world. A listener in Tucson or Tokyo can virtually attend opening night at the Bayreuth Festival and listen the following day to a première by a young British composer at the BBC Proms.
OK, I'm not mad that he didn't mention academic music bloggers, just a little . . . disappointed. Hurt. But that's OK, Alex! You just go ahead and have fun with your cool friends. We'll just stay here and blog in the cold and the dark.
This is a great article, and it needed to be written. A lot of people in the music world (especially the academic music world) don't really understand what blogging is and fear it. ("Incivility blah blah blah superficiality blah blah blah blah self-indulgence blah blah porno blah." That's pretty much the argument.) I'm going to be covering some of the same ground in my upcoming AMS talk on the subject, and will use the opportunity to MENTION ALEX ROSS A BUNCH OF TIMES. Because I'm big like that.
People Listen To It and Dial M got a nice shout-out at Freaky Trigger, a heavyweight UK pop music blog. Tom wrote that we're "Representative of blogging music academics - I’m not always especially interested in what they’re talking about (music-wise) but there’s an enthusiasm in this microsphere which reminds me of days long gone by." We're the Ramones of the music blogosphere! Daring to be stupid pays off in more than one way.
In my last post, I wrote that I didn't really think full-on academic writing really works in a blog. In response, commenter Mark wrote the following:
My opinion is that academic writing needs to lighten up, without losing its rigor.
I think that writing can be totally serious, dense, intense, without being laden with jargon and only for the initiated. I think that academic writing should take something of blogs' lightness.
The question is, what is lightness? (besides the way Joe Henderson takes a solo)?
When I started blogging, I thought that the medium's main benefit to scholars would be a matter of distribution. Your blog could put you in touch with a wider audience than conventional print media, it could get your ideas out faster, and it would enable a kind of virtual symposium, where your colleagues could challenge your ideas and your own work would profit thereby. And this is all true -- these are real benefits of blogging. But what I didn't realize at first is how much the medium shapes your output. Lately, I've been thinking more that the real change that blogging brings about in scholarly communication is not a matter of distribution but a matter of style and form. The blog medium encourages the "lightness" that Mark mentions. Whether this is a good thing or not is a matter for discussion. I think it is, though I know that many of my non-blogging colleagues will disagree. But before getting into the question of whether lightness is a good thing, it's worth asking what it is.
Since I don't want to be taken for a radical technological determinist, I should say at once that there is nothing compulsory about blogging style: some academic blogs consist of posts that are really just chunks of straight-up academic writing. Mark Zobel's now-vanished pedagogy blog was like that, and Sound and Mind also goes in that direction, as in this review-essay on Carol L. Krumhansl's Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch. But elsewhere on Sound and Mind -- on this post dealing with J. P. Kirnberger’s The Art of Strict Composition, for instance -- you get a mode of scholarly exposition that you wouldn't see in an academic journal. This isn't only because the post starts by begging indulgence for low blog output (a well-worn incipit of academic blog posts). First of all, about half of the total wordage of the post is quoted material, and while there is a brief introduction saying why the material is being quoted, the quotes are allowed to stand alone, pretty much, and speak for themselves. Second, the context that Kris Shaffer provides for these quotes is personalized -- he writes that "this passage has served me well in recent weeks in framing my thoughts
and discussion of the theories of David Temperley, Carol Krumhansl,
Fred Lerdahl, David Lewin" etc. In other words, the ideas contained here (dealing with a phenomenological exploration of musical perception as a corrective to geometric representations of musical space) are presented as items from an evolving project that is taking place largely "off-camera," but which can be glimpsed informally on the blog as it evolves. The blogging of the project is about the process, not the product, and about an evolving personal relationship to the material. Blogging is in this sense more "meta" than most forms of academic communication.
The weaker technological-determinist argument is that while you can resolve to use a medium however you want, long-term engagement with any medium will tend to knock the edges off your resolve and shape your pronouncements anyway. You can start off deciding that you're going to use your blog to post bits of your formal academic writing, but as you do it for longer and develop a relationship to other parts of the blogosphere (the sine qua non of the medium), your style of exposition will tend to reflect your engagement.
I find myself thinking about Marshall McLuhan at moments like this. McLuhan was (and is, for those few who still bother to think about him) notorious for being a bit of a humbug. McLuhan developed ideas through thought-experiments, not arguments -- "probes," he called them -- which means that not everything he wrote was intended as truth, exactly. Which means that a lot of what he wrote was frankly BS -- except when it wasn't. Sometimes, you read McLuhan for truth-statements about the media; sometimes, you read McLuhan the way you would read a sci-fi novel, as a way of imagining what the media might be doing to us (cf. William Gibson); sometimes you read McLuhan the way you read Abbie Hoffman, as someone who may have been full of it, but who was full of it in a typically and interestingly 1960s way; and in any given passage, it’s never entirely clear which of these options you should take. One of his ideas I've always dismissed as humbug was his distinction of "hot" and "cool" media. Hot media, he says, are those that are high-definition, information-dense, and repel interaction. According to McLuhan, the book is the classic hot medium, because you treat it as a kind of data dump from the author's brain into yours, and while you might dispute an author's statements, you are in a basically passive relationship to him. It's not as if you can argue with him, or re-write the book as you read it -- the most you can do is scrawl notes in the margins. (And McLuhan believed that the regimented and uniform appearance of the post-Gutenberg book makes the book an even hotter, less interactive medium). TV, on the other hand, is a cool medium, according to McLuhan. It's a low-definition medium, literally when McLuhan was writing, and more figuratively even now, because there's much less in the way of behavioral and cognitive compulsion. You can customize TV to your use much more easily (mute it, change the channel, go out to the kitchen and make a sandwich), and the nature of the broadcast content (generic, episodic) itself invites participation. That's the argument, anyway. As I said, I never completely bought it.
But the hot/cool distinction kind of works for blog posts, actually. The "four theses on entertainment" post I did the other day is a "hot" piece of writing. It's not quite right to say that it repelled interaction; after all, I got two splendid responses from Galen Brown and Mark's above-quoted comment, which in turn inspired this blog post. But it is the kind of writing (dense, high-definition, "hot") that circumscribes the ways you can profitably interact with it. Galen's comments were responses in kind -- serious, carefully thought-out engagements with my arguments, mapping zones of agreement and disagreement. You don't get a lot of snark, jokes, off-hand comments, links to funny Youtube clips, etc., in response to this kind of post. ("LOL, ur historicization of disenchantment is teh SUCK111!!!")
And you also seldom get links for those sorts of posts. I've often noticed how it's the posts that I took most seriously (like this one), the ones that take 90% of my blog-related time, that end up being ignored in the blogopshere, while the ones I spend 5 minutes putting together get the mad blog love. Posts with funny Youtube clips, posts that are weakly point-driven and wander all over the place, posts that mention Bob Dylan, posts that make dumb or unsustainable claims, posts that try to set memes in circulation, posts that are contests or quizzes (e.g., make your own musicological lolcat, make an iPod random playlist) -- these will win you links, site hits, comments, and contributions, because they are "cool" in the McLuhanite sense. They're less "dense," less "high-definition," and offer a wider variety of ways you can react to them; they have open pockets, lots of interstitial spaces that others can fill in for themselves. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing (the usual whinge that blogging lowers the level of discourse, etc.), but there's no question that if academic blogging has a future -- if people do it more and more and it starts to have an effect on scholarship as a whole -- then I suspect it will have the effect of "cooling down" the discipline. The implications of that are probably best left to another day, since this post has gotten very hot indeed, and rather long.
