How far is it from "always link" to "only connect?" 

This session continues a thread begun here by Michael Watkins and crowd.  We will be about blogging and academic life, but in between those two terms I have placed a third one-- "the disciplines."  Otherwise known as your department.

Everyone who understands the modern university, anyone who has been immersed in an academic field, is familiar with these terms.  A discipline is an organized area of study.  It's also the people who study in that area, those who are said to be "in" the discipline.  To know your discipline is the first requirement for membership in the academic community at its advanced levels.

And if you want to get an ID card, you better know what department and school you belong to.  The disciplines rule the unversity because people in the university belong to them. 

But also because they "form" people in their image. Political science begets political scientists.  Then the scientists raise little ones.  They publish journals, of course.  They form assocations, and those associations endure.  They meet annually in New York,  Las Vegas, Atlanta.  The disciplines, some have argued, even sink deeply into the self.  For sure they perpetuate themselves across generations.  They permit the mind to specialize and build up advanced knowledge.  They also orient scholars to each other to create a sense of "belonging," even though some of the most talented people have always had an urge to rebel against the boundaries and other conceits of a discipline.

We believe in the disciplines-- that is, the institution does and we accept that.  And we rebel against them because they are silos too.  We know that university life is dominated by the disciplines because universities and the people at them are forever struggling with how to create "inter-disciplinary" experiences and "cross-disciplinary" course work.  How to bust out: no one's ever really solved that problem.

Well, here comes blogging.  And not to get too cute about it, but blogging has a discipline to it, too.  How far is it, really, from "always link" to "only connect?"  What do the big disciplines think about blogging and the Internet?   Should we tell them what's happening?  Do the disciplines care if some stray academics are blogging up a storm?  (And why are some disciplines so over-represented?  I bet you have your theories about that!)

Suffering from their own link death for a long time

We know there are all kinds of academics doing it.  (Just look at Crooked Timber's List, organized by--well, what else?--discipline.) But we don't know what it means that academics can now blog-- especially, what it means for work in the academic disciplines, which have been suffering their own link death for a long time.  Students of the modern research university--and Stanford, the host campus, is one of those--sometimes call it "the iron law of the disciplines."  It's a way of saying they always win out, in the end, no matter what comes along.

So along come the bloggers, and the new Republic of Letters they call the blogosphere.  Does it even make sense to blog within a discipline?  Does disciplinary training help you blog?  Or is the discipline what you overcome in order to blog and blog well?   Is there something in the act of blogging that forces the blogger to address a broader public, or is that just a conceit?

Anyway, this a session about blogging and academic life with a third term, the disciplines (including your discipline) as point of departure.  And there will be more departures, more points, before BloggerCon meets and at the event.

Tell me what you think of these questions and my rough sketch of the puzzle.  We'll take it from there.  I'm Jay Rosen.  I write this weblog and I have a PhD.  Been an academic since 1980.  I'll be your moderator.  I did it once before. 

# Posted by Jay Rosen on 10/6/04; 11:19:08 PM - --