As you can see, this is a brand-spankin new blog, and it is still figuring out what it wants to be. Being new to blogging, I thought I'd take two of my top interests, theology and Tennessee Vols' Football (in the fall anyway), and mesh them together. And yes, that will continue. But, as I've been meandering about looking at a few other blogs, I've been able to flesh out more of a vision for this page. It's still percolating, so when I get there (in about a month), you'll read about it here! I've found some pretty cool stuff and some pretty cool people in blogging communities, though. I've found some old acquaintences from my HDS days, Philocrates and Randall,and I've been lurking on a number of interesting blog sites, including these in Ktown, South Knox Bubba and Knoxville's self-proclaimed Onion. Quite amusing! But, despite all the fun, I have some reservations to overcome before truly embarking on this blogging enterprise.
Because I work in the publishing business, I am reluctant to write. I see completely unnecessary words everyday, and I feel strongly that you should not waste others' time and valuable resources if you do not have something very important to say. (Of course, whether or not you have something important to say is completely subjective, and in academic publishing, authors are given this validation by their cronies at other institutions.) But, in order to even begin writing for publication, an author has to think that what s/he's saying is important enough for others to use their time to read and understand it, and OFTEN in academic publishing, that is simply not the case. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for learning for the love of it and for empirical science, but I run into authors all the time who think that they deserve readers, and that they deserve to have an entire team working to polish and publish a manuscript that they didn't have the time to read twice themselves. They feel entitled to a copyeditor who will correct the spelling of and standardize the style of their own thoughts. They feel entitled to an assistant who will try to track down permissions for their afterthought-figures. They feel entitled to a designer who will try to improve their scans, images, figures, and cater to their every typeface whim. And most of all, they feel entitled to readers who will pour over their every word and adopt their methods (don't contradict them unless you have credentials, because they "won't have time" to respond--too busy with the next book). All of this has, yes, made me very cynical about academics. I really don't think that most of the works that my massive institution publishes are worth the expense. I think that authors are often honestly surprised that their books sell only to libraries and colleagues. And I think in this "publish or perish" world, academics are encouraged to develop terminal cases of logahrrea.
But here I am, writing a weblog? Well, I've begun to rationalize this enterprise that runs counter to some strongly held opinions in two major ways. First of all, a weblog is electronic, which makes it in a certain sense, ephemeral. I'm not here for posterity, trying to get my name into Harvard's Library catalog. My 1997 webpage is no longer around, and I don't expect this blog to last much longer than the present stage of my life, either. Second, I don't use a great deal of resources to put this out there. There's no team of individuals that I expect to respond to my thoughts. In fact, I'd bet that less than a dozen people will ever really read it. I am participating in the weblog phenomenon because I think that it is democratic. Everyone who has enough money to have access to a web connection regularly can have one. It is, to me, the equivalent of taping journal entries to a busstop--just for the fun of it. Hence, I can't help but try it.
Just heaven help me if I get addicted and decide one day that my thoughts are worth formal publishing. :)
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