Way back in April 2006, I launched The Splintered Mind. Happy 20th birthday, blog of mine!
In 2006, academic blogs were cool. After the rise of Facebook and Twitter, most died. Recently, there's been something of a revival on Substack (where I now mirror this blog), but it's nothing like the old days, when checking the blogs was a favorite procrastination technique of graduate students everywhere.
I'm inspired to think about why I've kept at it for twenty years.
Some thoughts:
(1.) Fecundity. Pulling together a philosophical idea into about a thousand written words once a week has proven to be great way to keep me thinking and writing about new things -- extending my ideas, testing their boundaries, opening up new exploratory paths. A new academic paper is too much of a commitment and too narrowly focused. A conversation is too ephemeral and too dependent on both the availability and particular interests of the other person. Writing something brief every week keeps me actively thinking and growing.
(2.) Feedback. Most of us receive very limited feedback on our ideas, from students and collaborators, and eventually (for submitted articles) from referees and editors. I treasure the diversity of feedback I receive on my posts, through comments on Blogspot, Substack, Facebook, Twitter, and Bluesky. I hear from experts and non-experts, people with a broad range of backgrounds and worldviews. My ideas are better tested, they are influenced, expanded, and sometimes reconsidered, and I hear about relevant work I would otherwise have missed.
(3.) Writing for Clarity. The journal article is written for fellow experts. Blog posts -- at least my blog posts -- are written, well, not for a broad audience exactly, but for a broader audience: fellow philosophers, graduate students, advanced undergrads, and non-academics who appreciate academically rigorous but accessible work by scholars such as Paul Bloom, Dan Dennett, and Steve Pinker. Writing for this readership not only is a skill worth cultivating for its own sake, but also, I think, strengthens my research. Writing only for experts, it's easy to get lost in the weeds, losing track of what is important in the big picture and failing to notice one's shared presuppositions. Needing to express myself clearly to interested nonexperts forces me to poke my head out of the underbrush for that broader view.
(4.) Getting It Out There. Whenever I read and think about philosophy (which is a large portion of my time), I find myself bursting with new ideas, and objections, and extensions. I suppose this is why I love philosophy so much! Most of these thoughts could never become journal articles. Most of them could never even become blog posts -- but certainly more of them can become posts than can become articles. Publishing the idea on my blog permits me to send a thought out into the world without needing to do everything necessary to turn it into a proper published article. I thus avoid the dilemma of either going all-in or letting the ideas fall completely away. Some of my partly-baked ideas can find a little home cyberspace, with the chance to ignite some further ideas in some readers.
If these all sound like good things to you... well, maybe you should start a blog (or Substack) too!
See also my thoughts on "Blogging and Philosophical Cognition" (freely available, I think) from my 2019 book A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures.
1 comment:
Congrats on keeping it going for 20 years! Like you, I keep blogging because it's a great way to develop ideas that requires less commitment than a paper. I also explain a lot of known stuff that I'm learning, and find that writing about it is a way to make sure I understand it: when I write, lots of logical gaps appear that weren't visible when I was merely thinking.
Post a Comment