historying

“Why I Blog” by Andrew Sullivan is a great overview of one blogger’s story. I think he articulates a lot of viewpoints that I share. For one, he talks about the inherent risk of blogging, with the lack of a safety net and vulnerability that comes with voluntarily making your thoughts and words open to the world: “But blogging requires an embrace of such hazards, a willingness to fall off the trapeze rather than fail to make the leap.” I occasionally wonder whether mentioning my blog in grad school applications would be seen as a positive or a negative. Like it or not, there are still a lot of academics who mistrust blogging.

Happy two-year blogiversary to Claire Potter at Tenured Radical. In another “Why I Blog,” she recently posted a wonderful piece about the rewards and challenges of academic writing. One of my favorite excerpts:” Blogging also allows me to write short pieces, work on form, voice, and getting complex ideas across to an audience that I need to entice in order to keep them reading. I sometimes compare it to a pianist playing scales: to the extent that blogging is not, perhaps, the most serious scholarly form, to take it seriously is to become a better writer.” Although comparing blogging to playing scales certainly dampens the enjoyment of the process, it’s certainly encouraging to think that it’s actually good for me as well.

Ian Kershaw wrote a breezy article in the Washington Post musing about how he approaches writing history. He follows a very meticulous routine, which apparently allows him to produce around 2,000 words a day. Impressive stuff. The article also makes me wonder what percentage of academics are regular coffee drinkers. 90%? More than the population at large? Less? Coffee seems to be the true backbone of American higher education.

At Edge of the American West, Scott Kaufman has a great post detailing a talk he gave on a “Blogging and the Academy” panel. The post is noteworthy for both its strong content, but also his choice of posting the paper as he used it to give the talk. As such, it does not read as a typical academic paper: “when I write a talk, I write a talk. I don’t write an essay that just so happens to be read aloud.” Great words of advice, and ones that I wish more academics would take to heart.

Finally, at the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Thomas H. Benton’s “Yearning After Books” discusses academics’ increasing anxiety over the supposed disappearance of the written book. Benton articulates a common nostalgia for the tactility and tradition of a book, especially compared to increasing digitization efforts. At first I rolled my eyes at this antiquated notion, but then realized (after stopping at a used book sale and giddily leaving with four of them) that despite my best efforts, I haven’t yet eradicated the snobbish academic reverence for the bound volume.

Warning: This post is a blatant attempt to justify the imminent decline in my postings over the next month and a half.

I am now officially in the thick of the graduate school application process. Some observations:

- While not as stressful, per se, as I thought it was going to be, the busywork involved is much, much more time-consuming. As a digital enthusiast, I’m all for online applications. However, even with using the Quicksilver clipboard to copy and paste common fields, if I have to enter “Pomona College” and “History” into one more text box I’m going to lose it. Cough, need for a common app, cough.

- Many thanks to Jeremy Young for offering up his kind advice for graduate school, and then going ahead and writing a lengthy and quite comprehensive posting at Progressive Historians on the process of applying to graduate schools in history. For a similar, albeit dated, post, see John King and Andrew McMichael’s article at AHA.

- The more and more time I spend dealing with the GRE (test date: October 30th), the more and more I loathe the test and everything it stands for. It costs $140 for the very privilege of taking the test. From there, ETS will send your scores to the first four schools absolutely free (doesn’t this sound like an infomercial?), and at the low, low cost of only $20 a school after that. In all, I’ll be paying a little less than $300 to this company in order to show schools that I remember have no idea what cosine is, know the meaning of recognize the word “consanguinity,” and can write a coherent series of sentences so that a machine grader can read it. I’m not kidding, they have a machine analyze your writing section and compare it to a human grader to maintain fairness. Which is actually kind of cool, I’d love to see the algorithms behind it…

- Finally, since this is quite evidently not a serious posting, The Onion’s Historical Archive last week was amazing.

In conclusion, I will be in blogging semi-hibernation for the near future due to writing personal statements, remembering what cosine is, and anxiously following the most historically monumental presidential election of my young lifetime.

Siva Vaidhyanathan recently wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Generational Myth.” In it, Vaidhyanathan makes the blunt statement, “There is no such thing as a ‘digital generation.’” He goes on to debunk the idea of a generation of “born digital” or “digital natives” who are fundamentally skilled at operating digital technology. Meanwhile, Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt offered up their slightly differing perspectives on the issue on Digital Campus #32.

I found Vaidhyanathan’s article fascinating, and made me think quite a bit about the issue. I agree with his premise, that it is preposterous to think that your age somehow makes you either inherently competent or incompetent at using technology. I hate the term digital “native” or “immigrant,” as they carry a phenomenal amount of baggage, and there are far too many exceptions to the rule to make it worthwhile. It’s a simple generalization that people latch onto because it is such an attractive analogy at first glance. But unfortunately, a closer examination causes the analogy to break down.

Having said this, it is useless to simply dismiss any talk of a generational divide. While there are plenty of 60 year-olds out there who know more about computers than I do, and plenty of college students who can barely send an email, there is oftentimes an overarching difference between the two. Someone who has grown up with regular access to the internet, cell phones, and portable music players, generally has an attitude or perspective on technology that reflects this experience. For one, they might have fewer reservations about personal privacy, and be more willing to post information or pictures about themselves online. Some may not be able to remember the time they opened up a phone book or an encyclopedia. Many expect songs, movies, and TV shows to be freely (or at least readily) accessible over the internet. Does every person under the age of 20 share these views? No. Do a greater percentage of young people share these views than their parents? Probably.

Much of the discussion of a generational divide views the issue entirely through the lens of a privileged socioeconomic class. As many people have pointed out, there are a lot of 18 year-olds who don’t have regular access to a computer or the internet. Henry Jenkins has written about this extensively, and also presented a talk at UC Berkley titled “Combating the Participation Gap.” To assume that every young person is tech-savvy is a mistake. To assume that every young person even has the resources or ability to be tech-savvy is an even graver mistake. The churning wave of technological trends and forces are not only seen as intimidatingly complex, but is more importantly seen as irrelevant and inaccessible to a significant portion of the American (much less the world) population. The teenager whose family is struggling to put food on the table is probably just hoping to someday get a computer with high-speed internet, much less understand what the “long tail” is.

Examining the field of digital history requires a strong understanding of these issues of participation. Who’s currently at the party? Who’s been invited to the party? Who doesn’t even know the party is going on? Of course, digital history is compounded even further by the demographics of its umbrella discipline: by sheer numbers, the majority of history PhD’s are white and/or male. And that, in and of itself, deserves a separate, more thorough discussion…