Open Source Academics…

I’m grateful to my friend and fellow blogger, Peter (The Other) Kaye of Loose Poodle, for directing my attention to Phil Ford’s blog and to his blog posted essay/address to the American Musicological Society Annual Meeting held this week in Quebec City. Dial “M” for Musicology is an academic group blog, but Ford seems to do a lot of the heavy lifting, water carrying… choose your metaphor for assumption of burdens.

I love Phil Ford’s essay because it refreshes the conversation about the value of the interactivity associated with web publishing. It reminds me that though the meta-conversation around blogging technology may have been diluted by a recent broadening of social software platforms (Facebook, twitter, etc.) and a general disgust with the players in the silly valley blog settings, the creative potential of our medium has only an upside.

Dial “M” has a blogroll that promises to expand access in interesting ways. A recent affectation on the part of a few bloggers who have found their blogrolls to be burdensome in terms of the maintenance they require and the relationships they reflect (Doc!!!) is not imitated here. Indeed, one is hard pressed to imagine any blog with academic intentions that wouldn’t provide sidebar referential information of the type commonly known as “blogroll” (and yes, you can be forgiven for confusing that with some kind of sushi).

The essay emerges from the world of academic musicology, a bubble in the blog foam that has points of tangency with popular culture and the academic treatment of “content creation,” social software, and web publishing. Yochai Benkler gets his links. Here are a couple of passages that may want to make you read the whole thing:

The natural state of the blogosphere is anarchy. The essence of the medium is the reciprocal and nonhierarchical relationship between bloggers and their audiences. In fact, writing about “bloggers and their audiences” is misleading, because it implies that this is a clear distinction of roles, like the distinction between those who read a newspaper and those who write it.

And…

People who complain about blogs, like those who complain about Wikipedia, ask why a medium that puts any random crank on the same footing as an expert should be taken seriously. Defenders of Wikipedia always point out that it’s self-correcting: the damage that malicious and incompetent people cause is quickly undone by dedicated Wikipedians. Now, you can’t quite say this about blogs. A stupid blog post stays stupid. But there is a kind of self-correction at work — call it peer review. The freak who writes ihatealexross.com may get links, but this won’t earn him a place in the minisphere of classical music bloggers. A geek show may get the same pull as a poetry reading, but it’s not as if they have the same clientele: poets don’t have to start biting the heads off chickens. And while one of the charms of blogging is that it allows you to post a long piece of serious writing one day and pictures of your cats the next, a clarinetist who only posts pictures of her cats isn’t going to get any play, except from the crazy cat people. (And that’s a whole different scene.)

…even more…

However, the problem with understanding the musicoloblogosphere as commons-based peer production is that the musicological commons is still very small: for reasons I’ve described, there just aren’t a lot of music-academic blogs yet. But perhaps this is also a secret strength. There aren’t enough music academics to sustain a conversation, but this means that those of us who are in the blogosphere end up spending a lot of time conversing with music people who aren’t academics, or academics who aren’t music people. And the best of them are brilliant: aforementioned critic Alex Ross, pianist Jeremy Denk, composer Matthew Guerrieri, and intellectual critic Scott McLemee, to name only four. And what happens when you spend a lot of time sharing space with these people is that you start to develop a lingua franca, a border language synthesized from the things you have in common. And as I’ve argued elsewhere, that common tongue has its own special characteristics. It is “cool,” in the McLuhanesque sense: readers can profitably interact with it in a wider variety of ways than they can with more traditional forms of academic communication. Blog writing tends to be “porous,” filled with open spaces that readers can fill with their own contributions.

I hope I can be forgiven for pulling so extensively from Ford’s piece. There is plenty more where that came from, juicy prose larded with bons mots and wry observations. If you care about the art of blogging as it applies in any specialized community, take a chance and read the whole thing.