thanks for not being a zombie

Matt K once asked "Will blogs kill listserv"?

As with blogs, academics have been using listservs for many years to exchange ideas, argue, rant, ask and answer questions. Would any hiring committee in their right mind look upon a job candidate's use of a listserv as a reason not to hire them? Hopefully not; the electronic exchange of ideas is one of the best features of academic life on the Internet.

Yet in a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Bloggers need not apply," the pseudonymous "Ivan Tribble" writes of those foolish, foolish academic bloggers who shoot themselves in the foot by putting their thoughts online.

The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.

Let's do a bit of cut and paste, shall we?

The pertinent question for [users of academic listservs] is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.

Interesting, no?

Are listservs somehow exempt from the worst excesses of blogs? Hardly. Take a look at the July 2005 archives of C18-L (a listserv ostensibly devoted to all things eighteenth century) for discussions of this week's bombings in London.

I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, and to be understanding of one's need to vent from time to time. If hiring committees think that weeding out all the bloggers is going to keep the hard-to-handle folks out of their candidate pool, they are being hopelessly naive.

Attention world: I use my blogging powers for good.

But come to think of it, I need to start working on some sort of "Blogging statement of purpose" so that new readers coming to my blog can get a sense of why I do what I do...you know, I'll work on that in all my free time.

(via Bitch PhD. See also The Little Professor, Planned Obsolescence, and Acephalous, who links to many other bloggers' observations.)

Update: Here is what Technorati says about links to the essay.

Update 2: For an alternative take on academic blogging (i.e. informed and non-technophobic), check out Ralph Luker's "Were There Blog Enough and Time." (via ScribblingWoman)