Geez! I once aspired to be a professor in academia. I went so far as to get my Masters which perhaps could have been a PhD from UCSF in Sociology when I was in my twenties. Being young and idealistic, I got very disillusioned with academia then because it was so about egos and career progress.
What is the purpose of academia? I know there are all sorts of personal agendas related to job security, tenure and academic recognition (academics are human like the rest of us), but as I recall, there are overarching purposes that need to take precedence such as learning, research, teaching and sharing what one learns.
Liz Lawley has a post over at Many-to-Many called intriguingly: blogs, creativity, audiences, and academics. It's about whether academic blogging is worth the trouble. Liz sites some of the benefits she gets:
become part of an amazing, supportive “invisible college” of colleagues, from inside and outside of academia. I’ve had input into ideas that have helped me shape my research agenda before I’ve gone too far down a blind alley, I’ve found people to work with on papers and conference presentations, I’ve found encouragement when I’ve been stuck on a tough problem.
That's just part of it. What about the visibility you get? What about the personal branding you are creating? There's personal branding in academia just like everywhere else, of course.
With all these personal payoffs, to me, if you really care about the higher purposes of academic life at all, you get out there into the fray and risk a little to get a lot. But more than that, to give and share with the academic community and the world so that we all can benefit. And I hope you'll post links to the pdfs of your academic papers whenever you can too - I really love them.
All of a sudden there's this revolutionary possibility that we can get a ten-fold increase in communication around all this, and we turn it down for small-minded reasons? OK, maybe everyone isn't meant to be a blogger but academics seem like naturals.
As Liz says, there are numerous benefits to blogging that easily compensate for the risks of exposing your ideas prematurely or getting dissed for blogging sometimes half-baked ideas. It's true that us bloggers seem to be very self-expressed and will jump on tender new ideas and ferociously tear them apart at times. That's just part of the freedom in the blogging culture that may have its roots in the tradition of flaming which is part of Net culture, like it or not. We call it ranting when we blog.
I'm glad that Liz and many others do make the effort and blog. I suspect that academia might become borderline *irrelevant* or even somewhat obsolete if its academicians stay cloistered away with their academic journals. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good topic and worth further exploration of all sides of the issue. I'm just coming down hard on the side of academic blogging. We need you.