Portrait of the Sociologist as Blogger

Footnotes interviewed four sociologists in the continually expanding blogosphere population (Jeremy Freese, Eszter Hargittai, Rebecca Hensley, and C.N. Le) willing to share their experiences blogging as sociologists and their ideas about the sociology of blogging. Read about this evolving online social phenomenon.

by LaVon Rice, Freelance Journalist

A blog, short for weblog, is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. In the last couple of years the number of blogs has grown exponentially. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the website, and their purposes range from news sources or updates on current research to quirky musings or news on celebrity gossip. For the sociologists below, the purpose and content of their blog is as varied as their personalities.

For Jeremy Freese, it was boredom that catapulted him into the blogosphere. “I started my blog on a whim because it was the summer, I was working hard but also a little bored, and it looked fun,” recalls Freese, University of Wisconsin- Madison. “I figured when I started my blog that I would probably do it for two weeks, get bored and stop.” Now three and a half years later, the self-described “boy detective” is still investigating topics as diverse as his heating bill, over-pampered pets, and the logic of sending a mannequin thief to prison for life.

For Rebecca Hensley, a visiting sociology professor at St. Leo University who specializes in power and race relations, starting her blog was a way to supplement classroom teaching. “When I would teach about race, my students would often urge me to meet with them for continued discussion on the topic outside of class periods,” she explains. “Blogging offered me a mechanism with which I could say, ‘If you want to know more about this, you can visit my blog on race.’” Its popularity did not end with students as other academics expanded the scope of the audience, which led to intense exchanges at times. “Readers range widely, some are highly educated, and since it’s on a blog, they can be bold in their critiques—in the broadest possible public setting. It’s heady business,” she adds.

Social Implications

Why academics blog has not yet been “explored systematically,” maintains Eszter Hargittai, although she does have a graduate student pursuing such research. According to Hargittai, Northwestern University, sociologists are less likely to blog than legal scholars, economists, and political scientists, although the reason for that is unclear. Blogging, she said, is useful for connecting to other scholars within the discipline. “Blogging can be a great way to connect with people from other sub-fields of sociology,” Hargittai asserts. “It’s a great way to hear about other people’s work and what other people are thinking about.” As the director of Northwestern’s Web-Use Project, having a blog is aligned with Hargittai’s research concerns. She believes that, for her personally, not having a blog would be “problematic,” as her research focuses on the social implications and social aspects of informational technology uses.

C.N. Le, University of Massachusetts- Amherst, believes that sociologists have a responsibility to enlarge the blogosphere with their expertise. “Sociologists have the opportunity to be at the forefront of this social phenomenon and to apply our collective knowledge to help society understand its inner workings and social ramifications,” he explains. “If our discipline claims to analyze and understand social dynamics and relationships, blogging is definitely at the forefront of such trends and that’s [where] sociologists need to be.”

A Hobby with Academic Relevance

So what about perceptions that blogging has a detrimental effect on “legitimate” scholarship? All four blogger- sociologists agree that it is unfair to assume that they are not as committed to their profession because their hobby is within public view. “I understand that there are sociologists who have monomaniacal devotion to their craft to the exclusion of all else. However, many sociologists pursue hobbies, watch television, practice religion, engage in extensive personal grooming rituals, or have kids they refuse to neglect,” argues Freese, currently a health policy research scholar at Harvard. “I have little patience for anyone who does any of these things and thinks me derelict for the time I spend blogging. I have much enthusiasm for my work and spend much time at it, but I am not going to forgo all other things I enjoy for the sake of sociology.”

“It’s not clear why people see it as a substitute for academic research as opposed to, say, a substitute for watching TV,” Hargittai, who also posts on the academic blog Crooked Timber, adds. “Now one reason why people might confuse this is because it is writing and maybe some people don’t understand why some might want to write recreationally.” She believes that some posts could be considered academic service. “Sure, if you write a piece for an ASA section newsletter, that’s not going to be a peerreviewed journal article, but one could compare some blogging to that,” she explains.

As an example of how blogging has academic relevance, last year, Hargittai was on a National Communication Association panel about how to complete a dissertation successfully. She included the highlights from the talk on a blog post, which led to more than 40 response comments posted. She also received inquiries from graduate study directors from across the country asking for permission to reprint her dissertation completion strategies. Hargittai said, “So in that sense it’s a service to the discipline or to various disciplines. And that post was valuable precisely because of the comments people left on it.”

From Hensley’s perspective, blogging provides a testing ground for further research and writing. “Blogging,” she said, “can be a way to hone ideas for more rigorous application elsewhere. Similar to hashing out a thought with colleagues over coffee or while standing in the hallway outside your office, blogging can draw energetic input quickly and from diverse sources, which can be very valuable.” Hensley is also considering parlaying her blog posts into a popular sociology book on race.

And regarding some hiring committees’ continued apprehension of the appropriateness of blogging, Freese believes that the practice should be viewed as a boon to sociology departments. “Given two candidates who seemed otherwise equal but one had a blog and one didn’t, I would go with the person with a blog. I think having a blog and reading blogs is a good indicator of being intellectually alive and wanting to remain so,” he says. “The latter is especially important in sociology, as there are so many promising sociologists whose curiosity is dead by the time they are five years out of graduate school. Blogging is also a good indicator of being able to write and being eager to share ideas, which are attributes sociology departments should value.”

Blogging as a sociological phenomenon

Freese finds the “sociological puzzle” behind why people read blogs to be more intriguing than why people write them. After all, he says, the need for attention is an obvious motivation for starting a blog. “The Internet makes it possible for anyone to enter an attention market for very low cost. Attention markets have always had a lot of entrants—many people, it seems, really like attention—and so it’s not surprising many people would start blogs. Attention markets can be brutal and cold to the casual entrant, and so it’s not that surprising many people who start blogs would stop not long afterward,” Freese asserts. But he goes on to say the “rise in occupational circumstances that give people large amounts of unstructured time in front of a computer” accounts for the popularity of blog-reading. According to Freese, blogs offer a short, fun respite from working, and is more convenient as a brief diversion than, say, a television program. Even so, he adds, “There are many different types of blog readers, and I would love it if the sociology of the blog reader was understood better than it presently is.”

C.N. Le, or Cuong Nguyen Le, notes the ways that the Internet has dramatically altered the landscape of social communication, even while he is not so enthusiastic about some of its less positive aspects. “I’m not particularly thrilled with all of its developments, in particular how anonymity now allows people to ignore conventional norms of civility toward others, but their impact is undeniable,” says Le, whose areas of interest include race and ethnicity, immigration, and Asian Americans and how those topics intersect with academics and Internet culture.