I get tremendously tired of all the self congratulatory talk about blogging that goes around on many blogs and don’t believe that I’ve ever posted anything of the sort, but there’s a first time for everything.
This column published today at the tech news and analysis site Ars Technica is a little troubling and raises some serious doubts about whether somebody who is even considering going into academia in the future should be blogging at all.
Blogging and job prospects: from the academy to the SCOTUS
Here’s the meatiest excerpt, but I would, as always, recommend reading the entire piece.
Ultimately, I think the answer to this dilemma is pretty clear: graduate students simply should not blog, and if they do blog they should never do so under their real names. As a grad student, your writing time is much better spent producing papers that will get you feedback from the folks who you’re paying to study under. Furthermore, anything that you have to say that’s even remotely interesting to anyone other than your parents and your best friend from childhood is not worth publishing online when it could easily come back to haunt you years later. And the more interesting and relevant your comments on the pressing issues of the day, the more you should keep them strictly confined to the kinds of everyday offline intellectual conversations that make academic life so rewarding.
Publishing edited content in an online venue is also very risky for graduate students, especially if you’re staking out a position on a highly charged topic. I know of at least one fellow grad student who failed the final round of a job search thanks to comments of his a on hot-button social issue that were published in the house organ of his denomination. Apparently, he came down on the opposite side of that issue from some influential faculty on the job search committee, and his candidacy was sunk.
Hence, blog anonymously!
IMHO, just keep on posting and venting and blogging – you have VALID and intelligent points of view. You don’t want do become “mainstream” and succumb to corporate or academia ‘pressure’. Be yourself – congratulations on an informative web site. The future is YOU!
I blog semi-anonymously… actually, write a web comic semi-anonymously with a hefty rant portion. I actually almost got fired from my job because of it (my boss stood up to his boss on my behalf). It annoyed me since I posted no identifying details about me, my company, or my client, and was mostly a rant about a piece of software that we use. Somebody “figured out” that it was me and that was enough to drag me into a “beg for your job” session.
Just so you know, Maddox thinks you should all die:
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=banish
The discussion around this article at arstechnica is worth a read as well, there are contributions from boards who already dealt with the issue. Although I agree that in some cases it is reasonable not to reveal your identity, basically I think if you’re not going to have the same position in your real life, public or not as in anonymity, don’t write about it.