Deep breaths
Out of idle curiosity (which I have a lot of at the moment, as it’s a lazy Sunday and there’s hardly any furniture in the house—it’s the Internet or nothing!), I surfed about for other reactions to the pseudonymous Chronk article on Why Blogging Torpedoes Academic Careers.
Most of the reactions are what you’d expect (at least, if you’re a CavLec reader); I won’t even bother summarizing them. You can get started with the update at the bottom of Ancrene Wiseass’s post if you wish. (Oh, and may I say that that blog name thrills me right to the core of my little ex-medievalist soul. Brilliant.)
I want to offer a little counter-paranoia, if I may. I’m a blogger. I just went on a job search. I found a really terrific job. In rather less than the usual amount of time, if what I heard at ACRL is true. My job-search stats: five-month search, six or seven phone interviews, three in-person interviews, two offers. I mean, no matter how you slice it, that ain’t too bad. (Felt horrid at the time, but that’s the Buddha-nature of job-seeking, I fear.)
And if you think librarianship is any less suspicious of bloggery and the larger communicative tendencies that bloggery represents than academia, I got news for you. A name prominently featured in said news: “Michael Gorman.”
The blog, I hasten to add, wasn’t responsible for any of my job-search successes that I’m aware, nor did I feature it as part of my employment applications (though I certainly made no secret of it). It may have tilted the scales against an offer from Ruritania, in fact. I’m still employed. And that despite a high level of personal and professional openness (as bloggers go), an embarrassingly high level of snark, and the use of my Real Name ™. If any blog were ever going to torpedo a career, CavLec is that blog. And yet it didn’t.
It’s easy to imagine the world full of nastiness. It’s easy to be afraid, especially in the horrifyingly powerless situation of job-seeking. I prefer to have a little faith in the world, myself. Somebody out there will read CavLec and like me anyway. Somebody out there will read CavLec and employ me anyway. As has, in fact, happened.
Sure, there are creeps like this “Ivan Tribble” (why am I envisioning a boyar with a fuzzball on his head? bad, bad pun, Chronk) character kicking around academia; they featured prominently in the Department from Hell, long before I or anybody else had a blog. My second adviser, I may have mentioned before, got viciously abusive on a regular basis about Ph.D graduates of the department who didn’t teach at Research Is. That, to me, is vastly more unprofessional than being interested in computers or the occasional bit of workplace snark. But that’s officially sanctioned bad attitude, so what can one do? (Oh, and one-on-one to Ancrene Wiseass: You don’t want to. Start forming Plan B now. Trust me on this one.)
But the world isn’t all creeps. Even tenured academia, which in my jaundiced opinion tends toward a higher creep-to-non-creep ratio than the rest of the work world (for reasons substantially systemic), isn’t all creeps. Librarianship certainly isn’t. So why let the creeps have it all their own way? It’s okay not to. Truly. Deep breaths, folks. Deep breaths.
Anyway, the most productive reaction I found to the teapot-tempest came from Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, who asks for anecdotes in which a blog proved professionally helpful.
Well, here’s mine. A large portion of the duties of my new job revolve around attracting faculty members to deposit their work in the institutional repository. Thanks to Caveat Lector, I have a jumpstart on that: standing invitations to lunch-or-coffee with three people on campus, one of whom is obviously a major mover-and-shaker in an important department.
You better believe I’ll be following up once I hit campus. And you better believe I’m grateful to Caveat Lector for a chance to hit the ground running.