Erik Marshall

I’ve been worrying that blogging has hurt my academic writing, and twitter has hurt my blogging. All my thoughts come, I’ve been afraid, in tiny 140 character chunks, instead of complex, well-articulated arguments.  But that’s not true. It is more or less a matter of habit and attention, among other things.

This brings to mind some posts I’ve read and bookmarked over the last several months, as I struggle to maintain equilibrium. One consideration is that blogging is, in some respects, bundled together with other internet activities: facebook, twitter, RSS feeds, etc. I have found a useful way of looking at these is through Fred Stutzman’s idea of Information Budgeting.  We basically have only a certain amount of attention to give, and it is important to budget our exposure to information, which for me means tweaking whose tweets get sent to my phone, how often I check twitter and facebook, and how I organize my RSS feeds. I have a lot of work to do there. Cory Doctorow has some interesting advice on writing, the most useful of which is to turn off realtime communications such as instant messaging and RSS alerts when you work. His suggestions of short, regular work schedule seems right on, but I wonder how it works for academics. The key, I think, is regular — the short is negotiable. He also recommends “killing your word processor,” which sounds ok, but I don’t know if simpler word processors handle footnoting well. Lastly but not leastly, the always wittily contrarian R. Scott Nokes muses about how NOT blogging is hurting his career.

The trick for me with this blog is to stay closer to my research interests, instead of treating it like twitter, basically musing and pointing (although that is also okay, so long as it’s not all I am doing). If I commit to updating more regularly, and on topics I am currently working on, I suspect both my dissertation and blog writing will improve.