MESA blogging panel

I just got back from the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting.  I didn't actually see much of it, less than half of one panel (other than my own).  Our blogging panel was very well attended - thanks everyone for coming! - with a large room pretty much filled.   It ran from 5:00 to 7:00, which is very late by Aardvark Standard Time.  What's worse,  I was the last speaker, so I was pretty exhausted by the time I took the podium.  Plus, as I expected, the first five speakers used up most of the obvious points, so I ended up ditching most of my prepared remarks.    All of which is just a way of saying that I was kind of freestylin up there, on not a lot of sleep. 

I can only briefly summarize what my co-panelists said (Asad AbuKhalil, Helena Cobban, Juan Cole, and Josh Landis, along with organizer Layla Hudson). Asad remarked that blogs are essentially a narcissistic and personal exercise, and talking about them is twice as bad - I have to agree - and then went on to make some very interesting points about what blogs can and can't achieve (he's much more pessimistic than am Josh, Juan or I about the importance or influence of blogs).  Helena talked about the virtues of blogging as a form of networked communication, and pointed out some gender inequalities and status hierarchies in the blogosphere (I somewhat disagree about the latter point: while there are obvious hierarchies in the blogosphere, conventionally measured academic "status" only gets you so far in blogging compared to producing quality content on a regular basis).  Juan and Josh mostly talked about their own blogs (Josh had some particularly hilarious anecdotes, and a refeshing honesty about some of the reasons why people blog), and both did a good job of showing the routes by which blogs can become influential (through journalists, through policymakers, through particular academic or policy communities, through generous links from major "hub" bloggers).      

Me, I actually didn't talk much about Abu Aardvark at all.  Instead, I focused on two things:  why there aren't more MESA bloggers, and the relevance of Arab bloggers rather than just American academics writing about the Middle East.  At least I think I did - like I said, I was freestyling and talking real fast.  One point which I forgot to throw in was about the competing demands of different audiences:  what impresses other academics will not be the same as what impresses policy audiences or wider general blog-reading publics or readers from the countries you're writing about, and scholar-bloggers have to think carefully about who they are trying to reach and why. 

I pointed out out that all of us on the panel had started our blogs by fall 2002.  Why hadn't a new generation of Middle East studies bloggers emerged to replace join us?  Maybe because the critics of MESA are right, and Middle East studies scholars just don't have much to add to the public debate.  I don't think that's true, though - I know how much quality knowledge about the region was at the conference, and in the room, and how much they could add to the blogosphere if they chose to.   Maybe they've all just got better things to do, but - I argued - the internet is of growing importance in shaping public debate and even policy in areas we care about, and if experts don't engage then they just cede the field to others with less (or different) expertise.  Or, more bluntly, they can't cry about the state of public debate about the Middle East if they refuse to take part in that debate.   

But most of the answer, I suggested, was that the first five speakers had presented an overly rosy picture of academic blogging.   Now, I'm as big a fan of blogging as anyone, and blogging has been very good to me, but it's important to have a balanced perspective on the risks and costs, as well as benefits, of academic blogging.   I mentioned the various rounds of intense public criticism that Juan and Josh had received, and the ways in which blog-fed firestorms could threaten scholars, especially junior scholars without tenure, or at least consume huge amounts of their time and energy.    I mentioned the very real time commitments that blogging entails - no matter how many synergies you can create between your research and your blogging (and I create a lot of them), time spent on blogging is time spent not doing other potentially productive scholarly activities.  Bloggers' energies can be diverted into policy-relevant work which isn't conducive to long-term research projects.  Even the best blogging just doesn't rate compared to a peer-reviewed publication... and probably shouldn't.   Blogging often means writing fast, and that can mean making mistakes - horrors! -  especially if you venture outside your areas of expertise... and academics sometimes live in fear of making such mistakes.    Bottom line: I feel uncomfortable advising  junior scholars, who I think are probably best placed to become great bloggers, to take those risks.

That led to a little debate about psuedonymous blogging.  I pointed out that some of the best newer Middle East-focused bloggers have been pseudonymous, such as Baheyya and Badger.  So was I, pre-tenure.  While that's one way to get past the problems above, it's only temporary - at some point, pseudonymous bloggers will have to go public if they want to get past a certain threshold of getting the most out of their work.  Asad thought that bloggers should write under their own names, and be brave enough to state their opinions openly.  That's a fine sentiment, if you have tenure, and I don't feel comfortable imposing that standard on others who might pay the price.   But I did say that pseudonymity was only a thin shield.  Eventually, if you blog long enough on an area of your academic specialty, people will figure it out.  That can get you into trouble if you use the shield of anonymity to say silly things or launch wild attacks on people - so pseudonymous scholar-bloggers should always work on the assumption that their identities will eventually be revealed whether they like it or not.

Then I tried to convince people to contribute to qahwa sada under their real names, despite everything which I had just said.  I will just note that I did point out the obvious flaws in this rhetorical strategy.

The other major thrust of my talk was to point to Arab and Iranian and other bloggers from within the region.  I spent a lot of my time at the podium urging the audience to pay attention to Arab bloggers, many of whom offered sharp, savvy political analysis in both English and Arabic.  These folks can represent themselves and speak for themselves, and don't need North American based scholars to do it for them - what they need is for people to pay attention to them, which is why I try to link to them as much as I can and why I spent so much of my talk touting them.   I rattled off a bunch of names off the top of my head (Chanad Bahraini and Mahmood's Den from Bahrain, a bunch of Egyptians, Khalaf and Batir and Nas from Jordan, Ahmed from Saudi Jeans, a few others - please don't hate me if I didn't mention you, I was tired), and then suggested a few starting points: itoot, which selects what they consider to be the best blogs and top posts of the day;  Global Voices Online;  dwwen, a fairly new aggregator;  Jordan Planet and other national aggregators.

All in all, not exactly the talk I had planned to give, but perhaps people enjoyed it.  I was gratified to see such a large audience for a panel about blogs, which hopefully is a sign of positive things to come.  Hopefully I'll go back and add links to this post later...
 

Comments

[MSK]

Dear AA,

I think there are 2 reasons why young MESA scholars don't blog:

1. Blogging is mainly a kind of e-publishing, i.e. to say things in public. Many (if not most) pre-tenure scholars don't want to risk ruffling the feathers of advisors, tenure committees, or future hiring committees. Particularly the massive flak that Juan Cole is getting will discourage many from sticking their necks out.

2. Among many, blogging still has the status of "not serious" and thus is seen as a waste of time. Once having a blog or writing in an academic blog attain the status that authoring an article in IJMES has ... you'll see more young scholars blog.

As for the anonymity issue, again it's a question of how safe one wants to play it. Once you're tenured it's no big issue to blog under one's real name. Also, if you live in the U.S. or Europe it's fairly low-risk to speak your mind under your real name. It's different if you live in the MidEast or want to keep getting visas to, say, Syria or KSA or Iran etc.pp.

So it's easy for As'ad Abu Khalil to call for bravado - and if he is ready to face every and any consequences ... well, for the most part that'll be courageous but personally I don't sympathize much with becoming a matyr for one's ideals. And he has no right to ask others to do so.

Btw, it's actually fairly doable to blog anonymously.

Personally, I think that if MESA bloggers want to become successful there has to be more synergy. Nobody wants to have to track dozens of academic blogs on MidEast issues. There are already too many websites out there. Also, the examples of Juan and Josh exemplify how personal views can seriously affect an otherwise good blog. Juan was/is good where he assembles information on an area which he knows well - like Iraq - but does the stated aim of his blog ("informed comment") a grave disservice when he ventures into areas where he patently is out of his depth - like Lebanon - and/or where he goes on an ideological warpath, regardless how right he might be. Josh, on the other hand, is trying to be evenhanded and only claims a sense of authority in areas where he actually knows what he's talking about.

Ideally one would have a MENA blog aggregator. Qahwa Sada could include something like that, which would then also be a solution to the current dearth of articles. It's very, very hard to get people to write for one's site but it's easier to get bloggers to have their blogs featured on a group site.

Just a thought ...

--Matthias*

www.niqash.org
www.aqoul.com

[Anonymous]

it's funny, i was going to add a comment about the necessity of anonymity, or not, and immediately faced the question of whether to input my real name into the box above. I chose not to. Why not? Well, part of my comment is that I think Juan Cole is a vivid example of the ill effects of blogging. I agree with the commentator above on Cole -- it's absolutely wonderful to read him on topics of his expertise, and those are great examples of how scholarship can inform great blogging. In that, he's much like Josh Landis and the abu Aardvark blog, which to me are both state of the art for blogging as a place for academics to be public intellectuals, in the best sense. Unfortunately, at other times, Cole is worse than the worst caricature of Middle East academics who emotionally pontificate on subjects on which they have little expertise. Having a blog -- and the requisite attention and praise that have come Cole's way as a result -- would seem to reinforce the already strong impulse among academics to see themselves on experts on all things under the sun, and thereby lose humility and balance. (abu Khalil is neither a scholar nor a public intellectual of quality, and speaks only to how blogging aggressively can serve as a poor substitute for some in those regards.)

The point in re anonymity is that both Cole and abu Khalil are powerful in distinct ways, and it wouldn't be wise for anyone -- tenured or non-tenured -- to openly characterize them as I have above.

[SP]

Time commitment is far from the main reason why un-tenured academics are hesitant to blog - much more important is the fact that academia is based to a great extent on fairly subjective peer review and assessment standards, and whether you're writing a grant proposal or applying for a job, you have to gain the approval of established and powerful people in your field. In a field as polemical as Middle East studies, it is easy to have important political differences, and no matter what you might like to think, it can sink you.

In short, the problem lies with academia as much as the nature of blogging (quick, error-prone, opinionated, etc etc). "Academic freedom" is a pious fiction without tenure, and those with tenure sadly tend to use this freedom to haze in the way they were hazed, though they are really the ones best placed to write or blog freely. You don't see many academics writing in newspapers and magazines either, so why should blogging be different.

Most good bloggers are journalists or activists, and this is likely to remain the case. You're an exception, AA, and sadly I don't think this will change. Blogging in the MENA region itself is much more interesting than academics re-playing academic games in a different field but with the same rules.

[Tom Scudder]

I'm not an academic, but I've found my own blogging restricted in recent months by the fact that I am using my real name - there's been some interesting stuff that's happened in the media world that I know about through my work connections, and don't feel would be appropriate to mention on-line, even though the story will certainly have come out by the time the next issue hits people's mailboxes in January.

[skillipedia]

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[Brian Ulrich]

Actually I think Juan Cole knows quite a bit about Lebanon, probably more than he knew about the Kurds before he started blogging about Iraq. He lived there for a little while, and Lebanese Shi'ism has featured in his publications. He also probably knows a lot from editing IJMES all those years. The main places I disagree with him are on Israel, where I think he reduces Israeli policies to a sort of essentialized caricature, and his rare forays into Central Asia.

[The Lounsbury]

Well, on anonmymity and the like, your discussion focuses on the academics. Which I am not a fan of, in grosso modo, although Bou Arfvrk is an exception.

Obviously those of us in the professional world, where the concept of "tenure" is meaningless face rather different restrictions. My comrade Tom above makes that obvious. Myself, there is much I hesitate to comment on because of potential blow back - and I am not particularly risk averse in commentary.

Abu Khalil has an activist's point of view, and his critique I consider self indulgent bordering on idiotic.

And Tom, always thought you were a fool for using your professional identity. Secret Dubai is the model for that, she's in the business as well.

[Tom Scudder]

L: My pro identity wasn't so closely linked to my blogging interests back in the day. Been considering a pseudonymous reboot, lately.

[The Lounsbury]

Do so, Bro.