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September 1, 2007
Margaret A. Schilt, a faculty services librarian at the D'Angelo Law Library for the University of Chicago, in Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere? addresses some of the conflicts between academia and blogging in Australia that result in academia versus blogging. Referring to the American context she asks:
Who are the bloggers? The uninitiated might think they would be young professors, those who have grown up with the Internet and are comfortable with self-publication in that format. While there are some of those, the legal blogosphere tends to be populated by midcareer professors who have tenure, are intimately familiar with traditional legal scholarship and see the Internet as a way to reach more readers in a less ritualized format. Younger scholars, in contrast, debate whether blogging is worth the time taken away from traditional legal scholarship, still necessary for achieving tenure.....You may inadvertently offend someone important, you may be -- gasp! -- wrong or you may simply be lured into spending too much time blogging and not enough time creating scholarship and knowledge in the more traditional forms. Blogging, in short, can be addictive. Regular posting to maintain the dialogue and interchange that leads to readership drains time from other pursuits.
This is how the situation is understood in Australia. Academics are not rewarded in terms of their career by blogging.
Schilt asks: "Can blogging be viewed as service?" Her answer is that:
Instead of scholars focusing inward, writing for and expecting to be read only by other academics, legal academics blog with the desire and the expectation that they will be read by the public. Law-related blogs such as the University of Chicago Faculty Blog bring the perspective of the academy to the attention of anyone interested in the issue under discussion, educating both sides of the dialogue. The Internet functions as a public square, where Main Street, Wall Street and the ivory tower meet. Bloggers haven't abandoned law review articles and other scholarship, but even there, blogging has its effect. Law reviews may be the tortoise to the blogging hare, secure in the prestige that tenure requirements confer on the traditional law review article, but they are not immune to the siren call for more casual prose, shorter paragraphs and fewer footnotes. No one thinks the law review article is going away, but it is undergoing its own more or less painful transformations.
Blogs are where the scholarly dialogue increasingly takes place.So different to Australia isn't it
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