After a link from marginal revolution our blog’s popularity skyrocketed. I emailed Jeremy, excited, but noted how I would be sad when things got back to normal (oh how popularity is fleeting). Things back to normal now. On the day directly after the link we had 7174 visitors! Yesterday we had 2000; soon I suspect we’ll be in the “normal” range of 1500. Which when I think about it, is really quite astonishing. Although I suspects it’s about 75 of you refreshing 20 times. Yet still I have noted to others that more folks will likely read my words on here than any academic article I write. Which scares me. What also scares me is that I have been told by some very senior people that I should stop blogging until I have tenure. However, a good friend of mine noted an upside.
Friend: You know, you don’t have to go to conferences anymore!
Shamus: What?
Friend: You know how everyone is always saying that you should go to conferences to make sure you meet people and network and stuff?
Shamus: Yeah.
Friend: Well, you don’t have to do that. People will know you now.
I’m not really sure how true that is. And given some of the things I have revealed on here, I’m not sure that’s a good thing. But perhaps I’ll just go with the old adage, “There’s now such thing as bad publicity”. And I need to check myself. Though some have noted that we are Sociology celebrities (self-proclaimed), in reality without Jeremy and his following, I would be nothing!
28 Comments
If you link to or post about various academic papers, I’ll definitely take a look. I think other people would too.
I am most definitely not a self-proclaimed sociology celebrity. I use that phrase to make fun of the people who get the idea that we are sociology celebrities, and refer to us explicitly as such, from reading our blogs. (I can’t link here because the blog that was most preoccupied with the matter was that kinda-cute-then-eventually-unsettling one that vanished.)
I’m not sure what % of our readers are people who read my earlier blog. I suspect that commenters are disproportionately previous readers, and even that has of course been declining since we started.
> What also scares me is that I have been told by some very senior people that I should stop blogging until I have tenure.
can you imagine how much more that’s scary to a graduate student who blog publicly? “i’m not going to get a job!” although, i guess the upside is if i don’t get a job, i can blame it on my blog, not my qualifications.
I can understand advice to be circumspect about blogging about some topics before tenure, but advice not to blog at all seems to invite a ‘total institution’ orientation toward what being an assistant professor is about.
Regardless, an important thing to keep in mind is that it doesn’t stop with tenure. After that there is the whole issue of whether you are marketable for being hired away. My experience is that people who repeatedly say “I wouldn’t do X before tenure” end up not doing it after tenure either.
I agree with Jeremy that to denounce the activity of blogging as a whole doesn’t seem helpful. That said, what one blogs about and how is another matter. I also wouldn’t generalize from one person to all. I suspect that a person who is brilliant and also super productive in the traditional academic sense can get away with more on the blogging front than others.
As to “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” - while that may be true for some things (like certain products), I am not convinced it translates equally well to academics and their reputations.
I’d be curious to know what would happen to the hit counts if the RSS feed showed the full post when the “more” tag is in operation. But I’d be surprised if a blockbuster link like that didn’t lead to some permanent increase in visitors.
Jeremy - I couldn’t think of how to write about celebrity status without (1) coming across as arrogant or (2) wrongly pointing the finger at a new blog (as the old one is gone).
Eszter - I agree. But I wonder: what shouldn’t I blog about? Obvious things I get. It would be a bad idea for me to write about, “how all the senior people in my department suck” (if you’re senior and in my department, three words: i love you). But beyond that it’s not at all clear.
Tom - I don’t know how to figure that out. But you’re right, the hit count is artificially inflated, particularly by comments. So if you look at the “question of the week” post, it has been viewed over 700 times since being posted yesterday. I don’t believe for a second that that many people have looked at it. Instead, with 49 comments people who previously commented return each time there is a new comment. It would be nice if wordpress also counted unique visits. Then again, why do I care?
TB: Incidentally, I do think that I have overused jumps in posts, partly due to the novelty of having blog stats, and am going to try to hew better to the idea of only using a jump when a standard laptop user would be required to scroll to see that the author’s name (which is Scatterplot policy because people dislike starting a post without being able to see the author at a glance).
I wish there was a way to syndicate to RSS without jumps altogether.
I have anecdotal evidence that the MR link gained you readers. (me.)
The problem with blogging for untenured people is not what you say (unless it is so egregious it makes national news or something) but that it is a recreational activity. There are a fair number of academics — in my experience, mostly but not only men — who believe that single-minded devotion to career is everything when you are young. Even though the extremists are kind of nutty on this point, even believing that family should be subordinated to job and that no non-job commitment is worth attention, you do have to realistically look at the fact that there are a finite number of hours in the day. I’m new to blogging and am learning how much time I can spend writing comments like this instead of doing anything else. When I was untenured at my first job (a low ranked school), a colleague said: you can get tenure and do one other thing, but not two other things. I.e. you can work and have a family, or work and have a time-consuming leisure activity, but you can’t do both. Obviously, no rigid rule is right, but I’ve told dissertators this (in a warm supportive way, of course, as something to think about, not a law): the dissertation is not going to get done unless it inconveniences or impacts some other part of your life. Very few dissertations get done before your spouse is furious, because what it takes to get done will impact a spouse. At some point, most dissertators have to put something they really like doing on hold to get done. Ditto getting your work done for tenure. Of course, the best thing is to construct a life of balance where you decide how to allocate time across the different things that are important to you, and blogging may be among them. (I’m observing how long it took to write this comment and thinking about whether I really should be doing it . . . )
To reassure you, people who think blogs are a waste of time are not reading them, so if you don’t say anything about it, they are unlikely to know about it. (Just as they are unlikely to know about any other private activities you spend time on.) People who read your blog probably have a more positive evaluation of blogs.
Dude, my hits went up only from 250 average to 900 in one day (petering off too 500, then 300, then back to 250, my reg) because of Marginal Revolution, which found out about Scatterplot through my linking to Jeremy’s GLFAD post (and at the same time, Tyler Cowen’s at MR). Even though I was called “another excellent blog,” your excellency is superlative by any measure!
The thing with hits is that they eventually stabilize. That you have a new blog and get so many hits per day (and only 1/3 or so are repeats, I guarantee you) is awesome. Try Google Analytics to measure individual vs. repeat hits, athough they’l only measure starting from the point at which you start feeding your site information–like today, after the MR effect.
You guys do such awesome blogging that you’ll be sure to be linked to again and again by bigger traffic blogs like Boing Boing or Volokh Conspiracy. But tha’s not the point of the blogging.
I read Scatterplot obsessively because you guys tell it like it is and give really good honest advice and perspectives. Whether under your own names or pseudonymously, I really appreciate all the information about work/life balance in the academy, how to choose an advisor, what to do on interviews, etc. etc. And I’m in a totally different field (I want to be a legal academic, doing the sociology of law w/r/t organizations and employment discrimination). My field is full of stodgy tools, old men in bow ties and suspenders (not kidding abut this) who are astonished to see the academy diversifying, much less opening up its arcana to public view.
Blogging has helped with this. I blog pseudonymously to be sure, but that’s because I want to be honest about the work paralysis I sometimes suffer under, or my anxiety about the teaching market, or my irritation with how closed the legal academic ranks seem to be to women, minorities, and non-traditional academic candidate (e.g., I didn’t go to Yale). If someone gets something through my candor, awesome. I’m pseudonymous and maximize that utility. If I were blogging under my own name, I’d probably not rail so much about the difficult path to academia when one grew up poor and in a strict Asian family where such aspirations were devalued.
But not that tons of people in my field don’t know me–it’s a great networking tool. Those who do like my blog and like me and want to read my work and want to help me along. Honesty isn’t always bad, it’s just who you are honest to. It’s just refreshing to talk honestly without going too far in the direction of airing dirty laundry, which I think Scatterplot does marvelously.
Keep blogging, everyone! Even in the stodgy legal academy, blogs are important ways of showcasing faculty at lower ranked schools, getting important ideas out, and even getting cited by the courts to affect changes in the law. Think of how this blog can change the face of sociological scholarship (who else but you guys read eh ASR or AJS?!), perspectives on your academy, and graduate students who would benefit from your helpful honesty.
if just a hundred or so of you would come over to my blog. . . .
The problem with blogging for untenured people is not what you say (unless it is so egregious it makes national news or something) but that it is a recreational activity.
I certainly agree that being viewed as a waste of time is one thing and it’s unfortunate when people don’t recognize that most people do something outside of their academic work, whether visible to others or not. I think if you manage to be very productive while you blog then it will matter less than if you’re not very productive, because then people can start blaming the blogging even if it has nothing to do with one’s academic productivity (or even if it might help on occasion!).
That wasn’t my main point though. I think what may also matter is that as a blogger, a person becomes more of a known quantity. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing, of course, but let’s consider the potential negative aspect (balanced out nicely by the positives often, fortunately, which I’m not going to talk about here right now). When committees consider candidates, it’s hard to forget what you already know about a person. You can try and some people/places are better about this than others, but if you’ve learned certain things through someone’s writing that makes the person less appealing then will you be as enthusiastic about the person as if you hadn’t known anything about him/her?
And I do think it’s a matter of both what topics one blogs about (easier to distinguish here between appropriate or inappropriate) and how one blogs about anything at all, whether having to do with research topics or not.
As a lurker and rare commenter who enjoys reading Scatterplot for the random thoughts and professional/personal discussions, I hope you all continue to blog (of course, in a way that works best for you).
Everyone tells me that it’s great that I have such a neat blog for getting my name out (albeit privately) to other academics, smart that I’m pseudonymous in case of blog-unfriendly types, but that eventually everything I write will be linked back to me anyway. Because there are just not that many young Vietnamese American women doing employment discrimination law on the legal academic market. It’ll be an even more pronounced effect if I blog under my own name eventually, which makes me not want to do that now that I really think about it.
This debate has been rehashed so many times. Just google “Ivan the Tribble” or “Daniel Drezner denied tenure.” Nowadays I think the effect of blogging is mostly positive, provided that you don’t appear too crazy. And occasonally I do appear as such. So there.
Reaching back to olderwoman’s comment, and at the risk of further re-hashing, is blogging really a recreational activity? It seems to me that in much of the academic blogosphere it is actually an extension of the professional self, which is perhaps one of the things that makes it risky, but also potentially rewarding. This is arguably true even for many of those who blog under a pseudonym. The stakes are somewhat different, perhaps, but even here the relationship to more strictly defined professional activity is often quite explicit, and important to both the authors and their readers, as Belle Lettre’s comment seems to suggest.
Agreed with Jonathan. My blog has brought me readers of my “real work,” invitations to employment law conferences, and lots of meet ups with professors and faculty chairs. It all depends on my published work and credentials, of course. But I am much better networked than I could ever be without the blog. I didn’t go to a top 5 law school, and so I’m getting a PhD to better my chances on the market. But even then it’s the contacts that are helping me get more opportunities from my niche. It’s hard or graduate students to get “out there” with so few resources and conference opportunities in the pre-market stage.
It’s hard enough for grad students in general to get “out there,” much less female candidates with other family responsibilities, and much less minorities with limited social/institutional networks. Blogging is awesome for this. It does democratize the academic playing field a little better.
I started my blog in between my last law school and my current school, during a year where I was living back with my parents being an unpaid nanny to my 8 nephews and nieces and feeling like a failure for not getting into any advanced law programs. I blogged because I was bored and feeling intellectually isolated. I blogged while the children were napping or late at night. I blogged about the projects I was researching in my own time. I got invited to conferences. I got noticed by law professors. Eventually I went back to school, but during that year, that really helped me feel connected to a larger academic community, one I wasn’t aware existed because I was so used to thinking of academia as confined to walls and towers.
I’ve always been surprised by the extent to which people in the discipline have become aware of me (and my research) through blogging. The first time I became aware of this I was walking through the hotel lobby at the ASA conferences when a well-respected faculty member (who may be reading this!) shouted out my name and said she recognized me from reading my blog. We have since become friends. At the time I was a lowly grad student with no publications and so it’s pretty clear that I never would have gotten to know this person without a blog. Whether or not the positive associations outweigh the negative images I’ve created of myself through blogging, I have no way of knowing. But I’m certainly glad I picked up the hobby early on.
Just to clarify, I’m not arguing that one shouldn’t blog. For those who don’t know me (most of you here, I suspect), I’ve been blogging for almost six years now, which would make me a veteran at this activity. (In fact, I may have been doing it the longest of anyone here.) I started in grad school and I don’t intend to stop any time soon even though how I go about it has changed and I suspect will continue to change over time.
I am super happy that some people are blogging. For example, Kieran and I went to grad school together and it’s been really fun to be able to continue to hear his perspective on things even though we haven’t been at the same institution for years now. It was also really great to reconnect with Jeremy after almost ten years of not being in touch (yup, Jeremy and I go waaaay back). Then there are people I wouldn’t know at all if it weren’t for their blogging.
So for the record: I’m all for blogging! And I agree with BL and Brayden that lots of good things can come out of it (even unexpected ones:). My point was that nothing is simply b&w and how one goes about it may relate to potential outcomes.
Apropos of everything, I was just at a social networks talk, at which I mentioned Eszter’s recent work on differences in the sociodemographic composition of users of MySpace vs. Facebook. When the speaker (Charles Kadushin, who says “hi” Eszter, and he thinks you’re “very, very smart”) asked me how I know Ezster, I found myself uncomfortable referring to the wonderful world of sociology blogs. Given the context, an also true and obvious answer - “through social networks!” - was a fine one; however, the interaction made me aware of my own shyness re: my blogging.
Sara, that is so funny you mention this, because, seriously, just a week or so ago, a colleague of mine mentioned your name to me.
Him: You should talk to this person from Brandeis. Sara, um…
Me: Shostak?
Him: Yes, you know her?
Me: um…yes…sort of.
Fortunately, the conversation changed directions before I had to explain that I had never met, emailed or spoken with you, yet I felt like I could say that I totally knew you and could get the desired information from you. Oh, wacky blogs!
Sara, thanks for that (and “hi” back:). Charles was on my mailing list (well, theoretically he’s still on it, it’s just been dormant for a long time), which preceded my blog.
Funny, I don’t think I’ve ever been shy to mention that I know someone through blogging. But perhaps people expect it more given my area of research interests.
And Tina, I should’ve mentioned that getting back in touch with you has also been a nice part of blogging!
“differences in the sociodemographic composition of users of MySpace vs. Facebook”
so, what are these differences?
I imagine that the disadvantage of a blog is that there is a written record of the stupid things I’ve said. And for non-bloggers those stupid things are simply spoken. I don’t intend to stop.
Note that Kieran has written a post here taking off on the what-academic-has-enough-time-to-blog issue. As for the two paragraphs of that post immediately following the quote from Shamus, I had an experience which is not unfamiliar to reading Kieran’s posts, which is somewhere along taking in the content I become slightly distracted by thinking “Holy [bother], is that guy an amazing writer. Can he, like, just type out a set of sentences that clever and lucidly constructed straight off the top of his head?” Which was an especially intriguing experience for this particular post because he’s writing about effortless brilliance.
Blogging, Kieran writes, “can cultivate a capacity to stay interested in things and to write about them fluently in the course of everyday life.” Blogging, to paraphrase Mills, is one way to keep your inner world awake. But there’s at least one catch to Kieran’s playful mashup of Mills on life and work: blogs are immediately public in a way that the journals Mills had in mind are not. Thoreau (and many journal keepers who have followed) may have had an eventual public in mind, but he wasn’t composing in WordPress and hitting publish at the end of each day.
Mills was interested in the relationship between (or the dissociation of) work and life, what we might call the professional and the personal. The sort of dissociation he derided was, I think, at least part of what olderwoman was getting at above. But it’s important to see that the distinction between the personal and the professional is not the same as that between the public and the private. Blogs are, for some, unprofessional (and therefore simply personal)—but they are also public, and often deal with professional interests and issues in ways that many other personal pursuits do not.
Blogging is, I think, a peculiar way of “wasting time.” While some of his nastier students may fail to appreciate Shamus’s ostensibly elitist tastes, it’s a bit more difficult to imagine one of his senior colleagues cautioning him to put aside his love of cooking until after tenure. Yet it’s less hard to imagine this sort of advice when it comes to blogging, is it not? Yes, there’s certainly—in the sociological tribe and in the wider culture—a recognizable call for single-minded focus on professional work, to the exclusion of supposedly more recreational pursuits. But what I’m trying to suggest is that (at least some forms of academic) blogging might represent a different sort of potentially unprofessional activity, in part because they occupy a somewhat fuzzy space along the uncertain borders between life and work. Blogging may be good for you, and in just the way that Kieran suggests. But not in the same way as that morning jog.
It seems to me that the difficulty with seeing blogging as, say, “a substitute for watching Law and Order,” as I’ve heard it referred is that it may reflect a double-whammy vis the professional self. As in, it might signal one is not only not working all the time, but also writing about things that one has done that are not work-related (though this only occasionally true on a self-consciously academic blog such this).
That said, I think OW is spot on in noting that many of the people who would raise their eyebrows at this activity won’t ever read it, and the people who accept it select into the readership.
And eszter’s comment about the issues of disambiguating one’s identity also is a deep one that I think gets at the fundamental risks of non-pseudonymous blogging.
“a substitute for watching Law and Order,” as I’ve heard it referred
Haha, I think I made that comment on the ASA blogging panel, which is ironic, because I actually watch plenty of Law & Order. (I watch more SVU and CI than the original, but that’s obviously beside the point.) Point being, I watch TV on occasion and I blog (although sometimes simultaneously, which would then be less “wasted” time on the aggregate). In fact, I’ve even asked senior colleagues to tape* TV shows for me so they know for a fact that I watch TV. I must be in a lot of trouble now!
* Yes, literally tape, make fun if you will.
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