Banal Bohemia: Blogging from the Ivory Tower Hot-Desk more

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies http://con.sagepub.com/ Banal Bohemia : Blogging from the Ivory Tower Hot-Desk Melissa Gregg Convergence 2009 15: 470 DOI: 10.1177/1354856509342345 The online version of this article can be found at: http://con.sagepub.com/content/15/4/470 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://con.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://con.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://con.sagepub.com/content/15/4/470.refs.html Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies Copyright © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Singapore, and Washington DC Vol 15(4): 470–483 DOI: 10.1177/1354856509342345 http://con.sagepub.com FEATURE REPORT Banal Bohemia Blogging from the Ivory Tower Hot-Desk Melissa Gregg University of Sydney, Australia Abstract / While academic blogging has emerged as a distinct genre in the past few years (Walker, 2006), a notable gap exists between those who blog from secure positions within the profession and PhD and junior faculty bloggers whose employment status is more marginal. This article draws on subcultural theory to discuss the unique features of these two latter types and the functions they serve for their authors. The analysis demonstrates that blogs are important sites of support for those who aspire to and currently work in academia at the same time as they are a powerful indictment of the job conditions experienced therein. The article therefore concludes by suggesting that the positive aspects of collegiality and solace taking place online for a new generation of scholars risk remaining disconnected from an effective labour politics – one that could change the very nature of the grievances blogs appear so well designed to express. Key Words / academic labour / blogging / class / labour / subculture / weblogs To provide an overview of academic blogging requires a consideration of at least two wider trends affecting information work in the global economy. Firstly, the gradual erosion of stable employment conditions, including in many university settings the traditional tenure track for teaching and research positions. This situation differs from country to country, but it is clear that the structural regularity of shorter contracts and casual employment now means that a sense of employee insecurity is a deeply ingrained feature of the early stages of a career. It is a major part of the experience of becoming professional for junior academics. Secondly, the sense of information overload brought about by webbased delivery platforms and the devices that allow access to them. We are yet to decide even which discipline best suits the various manifestations of this always-on sensibility – organizational psychology, self-help, industrial relations, marriage counselling, ‘netiquette’ – but in sharing the affective immediacy of these communications technologies, blogs have served an important mediating role for the state of (sometimes enforced, sometimes compulsive) over-stimulation they encourage.1 It is blogging’s relation to the first trend that has yet to be adequately recognized, even though it is almost a defining characteristic of academic blogs that they reveal a Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 GREGG: BANAL BOHEMIA 471 degree of scepticism towards, if not mourning for, the very careers that are in progress for their authors. Blogs serve as a sort of short-term ideological resolution to the contradictions of the contemporary university workplace, a safe space to share the disappointment arising from the end of guaranteed ongoing employment, the growth of casualization and the lack of agency that persists in large organizations of the knowledge economy. While they may not resolve these problems, bloggers voice the grievances and tensions experienced in their work lives at a time of significant structural change for the industry. Discussing these difficulties with others helps bloggers develop strategies to cope with the atomization of the workplace. At a time when traditional versions of labourrelated union-led activity appear in decline, blogs are an interesting instance of emergent co-worker solidarity amassed in virtual space. Whether it is in the way that posting itself fluctuates in line with seasonal variability and bursts of motivation or the way that they reflect emotional factors usually subject to embargo in the workplace, academic blogs display a number of features of creative labour. But perhaps more importantly, they gauge the anxieties of a new generation of would-be academics who can be excused for wondering if the career they thought they were training for has somehow slipped from reach. The rise of the ‘produser’ (Bruns, 2007) and the democratic tenets of Web 2.0 each trouble the very status and privilege of cultural capital and pedagogy that higher education once bestowed. Blogging is therefore an important prism through which the shifting nature of academic labour can be understood. Of course, blogs have themselves grown in tandem with the apparently unfailing optimism of dotcom discourse that forever heralds the better workplace of the future. But universities, in many ways positioned between the bureaucracy and the corporation, have a specific status that is far removed from the no-strings entrepreneurial ethic of Silicon Valley. In academia, every idea has to be sent to an ethics committee before a pilot study can take place, while its youngest stars live out their best years in prolonged, underpaid apprenticeships. If they survive, they can look forward to a procession of bingeseasons of teaching, or a developing variety of postdoctoral positions that involve anything from picking up interstate guests or dry-cleaning for their superiors to writing the next grant application that might keep them employed. Even if these aspiring academic bloggers appear to benefit from the ‘digital divide’, enjoying highly developed cultural literacies in combination with sophisticated technological nous, they are far from being winners in the context of the ‘new economy’ of knowledge work. As Andrew Ross (2000: 22) has argued, they are part of ‘a volunteer low-wage army’ for whom ‘low compensation for a high workload’ has become ‘a rationalized feature of the job’. Hence the thoughts scholars share through blogging often reflect the treachery felt when loyalty to the university brand can no longer be maintained. In a global economy, any job is subject to replacement and all workplaces are under pressure to maintain an oversupply of non-continuing, flexible positions (Ross, 2004). Blogs offer insight into the affective responses this condition engenders for a class demographic previously protected from such vulnerability, at the same time as they are indicative of the tactics used to negotiate this changing landscape for labour. Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 472 CONVERGENCE VOL. 15 NO. 4 Initial Moves, Tentative Taxonomies Such issues of labour and class mobility have tended to stay beyond the radar of Internet Studies accounts of blogging, which have largely concentrated on measures that instrumentalize or quantify blogging’s usefulness in politics, business or pedagogy.2 Despite being among the early adopters of blogging technologies, academics have been reluctant – in their scholarly writing at least – to consider how blogs relate to their own working lives.3 In the USA in particular, studies of blogging by bloggers have no doubt been affected by very public discussions of job discrimination against those with online identities, in industry organs like The Chronicle of Higher Education (see Tribble, 2005a, 2005b). That said, attitudes have been contingent on discipline.4 With major media studies scholars now blogging5 and a growing number of refereed publications documenting the practice, academics are becoming more confident discussing and promoting its benefits. The spiralling uptake of social networking websites has perhaps put to rest some of the more negative perceptions of maintaining an online presence: the impulse to ‘broadcast oneself’ is spreading. These developments conspire to make this an opportune moment for a retrospective of the genre of academic blogging that has developed over the past few years. As other platforms take on the responsibility of representing the zeitgeist, academic blogging seems equally poised to either disappear or gain renewed significance. In an article my title purposefully echoes, Jill Walker (2006) distinguishes three types of academic blogging. Firstly, there are public intellectuals with large audiences whose blogs are a defining feature of their reputation or notoriety. Walker cites Bitch PhD as the exemplar of this type, a blog which tends to avoid overt discussion of scholarly life to focus on political and/or personal issues from a feminist perspective.6 Next is the research log, an online version of the traditional notebook or record-book, which keeps track of relevant references as well as thoughts or experiments in progress. Walker notes that the dissertation blog is a distinct sub-genre of this, and these vary in audience from interested supporters or colleagues to the more pragmatic monitoring of the supervisor (see also Ward and West, 2008). Finally, she identifies the number of pseudonymous blogs about academic life – those that demystify the life of the scholar, often with ‘tongue-in-cheek refusal to the ivory tower experience’ (Walker, 2006: 130). Depending on the rank and location of the blogger, these will be more or less ‘anonymous’, as I will discuss shortly. Their content covers ‘issues more likely to be discussed in the coffee breaks than the presentation sessions of a conference: how to find the time to do research, how to behave at a conference, the process of earning a PhD or tenure, and so on’ (2006: 131). We can summarize Walker’s three types as those that (a) emphasize the identity of the blogger; (b) emphasize research; and (c) emphasize workplace culture, although there is a degree of overlap between these. As an early adopter, Walker’s own blog emerged at a period when these divisions were more stark, and she admits her own transition from PhD to faculty member influences how she blogs now.7 What this taxonomy leaves open for investigation is the generation gap in scholarly blogging. There are clear differences in audience and ambition between established academics in secure employment and those at an earlier stage in their career. The first group tend to blog because of beliefs about the necessary transparency of academic work and accountability to the public (e.g. Quiggin, 2007). The second, whether as PhD students or junior faculty members, have Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 GREGG: BANAL BOHEMIA 473 developed blogging communities to keep them company as they move along their career paths. It is this particular niche genre, and its role in sustaining motivation, easing loneliness and marking time, that bears further consideration. Performing Proficiency: PhD Bloggers Adopting a discursive analysis of PhD students’ blogs, for instance, reveals a number of recurring themes. Notable features of these blogs are the regularity of posts that are dedicated to: • List-making: on a number of blogs a list of works-in-progress or tasks to be completed (this week, this month, this semester) is a permanent sidebar feature; for others, listing just how many projects are on the go forms part of an ongoing metacommentary of busy-ness and implied productivity/proficiency. • Anxiety about PhD supervision meetings: entries that describe the lead-up to the meeting tend to share fears and anecdotes about previous meetings, followed by the most recent encounter and the advice received. The summary post of relief and renewal after the meeting is one of the PhD blog’s neatest narrative arcs. • Marking small achievements: whether this is having work published, being accepted to present at conferences, or receiving invitations based on one’s research, these are significant features that combine with the next point. • Peer validation: the primary function of the comments section for a PhD blog. Unlike the junior faculty blog to be described shortly, there is much more emphasis on support at this stage in the blogger’s career, especially early on in candidature where confidence may be lower and competitiveness for future opportunities less acute. • Heroic sacrificial moments of virtuousness: these can range from expressing one’s commitment to the thesis (e.g. by working on weekends) to more sustained writing binges that are described in real-time. On these occasions, the blog can serve as an outlet justifying this expenditure of time when friends or family do not understand.8 • Thesis progress (including word count updates and add-on graphics reflecting these): as deadlines ensue, what may have been a longer and more expansive blogging style often becomes curtailed to simple updates of this type, or sometimes a ‘hiatus’ is called to tell the audience that regular posting has been temporarily suspended.9 • Teaching-related concerns: for those experiencing the time demands involved in teaching and/or are close to finishing their dissertation, the tone of these posts can resemble those of the ‘heroic sacrifice’ (see earlier point) given that it is time away from the main priority, the thesis. The tension between teaching and writing is itself a regular mode of reflection, but teaching is generally deemed an important reciprocal obligation of their privileged position as graduate students.10 • Developing a position with regard to job opportunities: particularly among bloggers whose site has gained them some public recognition, it is common practice to indicate what kind of employment would be desirable and when, as submission deadlines approach. danah boyd’s ‘Why I am not going on the academic job market’ of 2007 is probably the most explicit example of this, and because of the coincidental collision of her research expertise on social networking websites with mass media interest, is likely to remain the high watermark (boyd, 2007). Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 474 CONVERGENCE VOL. 15 NO. 4 In keeping to these key areas, bloggers’ concerns pivot around a self-imposed regime of hard work, accounting for time and staying focused on the job. It is striking how these themes suggest bloggers are actually representative of the ideal postgraduate candidate – earnest, diligent, conscious of deadline constraints and obligations – rather than the lazy time-wasters that stereotypical depictions have tended to imply. For many it seems the public nature of the blog generates a sense of an audience for the research and hence the impetus to stay motivated. As I have written elsewhere (Gregg, 2006), this is a particularly effective use of blogging for those who may suffer from inadequate supervision at their institution of enrolment. At the same time, the added benefit bloggers enjoy is that their research can be discovered more easily with a web presence. The rate of reciprocal linking between blogs and blogrolls helps to boost Google rank when inquiring scholars or media outlets come looking, and bloggers who tag their posts with keywords are additionally aware of this. The point to highlight is that discernible tendencies have emerged within this subgenre of academic blogging as a result of the interplay between a regular readership and the writer’s personal satisfaction with the kind of material deemed ‘bloggable’. The notion that PhD bloggers write unstructured rants or musings, for an unknown audience, for self-aggrandising (or alternatively self-delusional) reasons, are unsustainable based on regular reading of just a sample of the masses of blogs online. Becoming Part Of The System: Junior Faculty Bloggers Conscious that many post-PhD positions have quite ambiguous relationships to faculty (and, as we will see, dubious claims to any forms of consequential institutional clout as a result) I use the term ‘junior faculty blogger’ to indicate several differences from the PhD blogger. Of course, the distinction between junior faculty and PhD student is itself admittedly hazy, precisely because of the employment conditions I am emphasizing. But if the grad student can be seen to be carving out a community of support to sustain them through the isolation of a long and necessarily independent project, junior faculty are often blogging because of a different kind of isolation. For them, loneliness comes in the form of a new city that is the location of their first full-time job, or perhaps being the first of their cohort to graduate and move up the university hierarchy. Slaves of Academe blogger ‘Oso Raro’ described the Invisible Adjunct blog as a ‘lifeline’ for newcomers negotiating the academic career path,11 and sites like Adjunct Whore, Ferule and Fescule, New Kid on the Hallway, Professorial Confessions and Profgrrrl are just a few that follow in its wake. These blogs give voice to a range of personal and workrelated issues that arise for their authors as the reality of professional identity sets in. The various grievances endemic to the industry that feature in discussion include teaching loads, unmotivated students and intimidating senior colleagues. But the blogs also offer plenty of advice and suggestions about developing a research profile, coping with living away from loved ones for work, even riding out bouts of jealousy or bitterness at others’ success. The experiences recounted in these typically North American blogs are also steeped in the tenure-track ordeal. Indeed, those that have blogged for a number of years have left a significant and rich archive of their job applications and attempts to gain tenure, only to find themselves still blogging from the other side of the fence, part of the system and assessing others.12 Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 GREGG: BANAL BOHEMIA 475 For these bloggers, conference blogging is a narrative arc or story that compares with ‘meeting the supervisor’ for PhD students. Conference blogging can range from quite instrumental live note-taking during sessions (which has the benefit of sharing the conference material with others unable to attend) to a more elaborate audit of the conference over a series of posts. Details might range from preparing for and announcing when one is going to a conference to revealing the panel session one is assigned, the job interviews lined up in the tea-breaks (and attendant reflections on the brutal practice of hiring at conferences), stellar papers, keynote presentations, hallway encounters, thoughts on the catering, extra-curricular activities and other general gossip. After the event the trip home and reacquainting oneself with normal routine is often tempered with recollections of the various academic celebrities, former colleagues or indeed fellow bloggers encountered while away. In this sense, junior faculty bloggers reflect a stage slightly beyond their PhD counterparts in that they have reached the point of being fully invested in the profession – at least in so far as this manifests in feeling part of its common rituals and activities.13 The level of detail involved in the descriptions indicates the strength of affection and commitment to a vocation that public service, white collar labour relies on for its regeneration, and that these bloggers seek to impart and maintain through their writing. What it also reveals, as I will expand upon in conclusion, is the current lack of capacity amongst scholars to relate the outrage of workplace injustices to any recognizable form of labour politics. One that, far from romanticizing the actions of their superiors by writing about budget cuts in terms of love and mourning, would actually mobilize academics to properly fight the forces of neoliberal accounting as these impinge on their everyday lives. Workstyle Over time, PhD and junior faculty bloggers in conjunction with their readerships have developed clear themes and activities deemed suitable for blog discussion. In the process, their practices engender some of the functions of a subculture in the sense articulated in early cultural studies theory. While subcultural studies have been significantly developed and critiqued since the collaborative working project Resistance Through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 1976), the definition of subculture as ‘doubly articulated’ is useful in understanding how these blogs work. To the Birmingham CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) writers, a subculture fashioned an identity that made it ‘distinct from, but in relationship to’ firstly a parent culture (the working class) and a wider culture (at the time, the post-Second World War milieux, and the growing consumption of popular culture from the USA). This ‘double articulation’ of youth subcultures was the key intermediary level of analysis they thought revealed not only the ‘relatively autonomous’ function of the subcultures themselves, but any sense of how the subculture related to the ‘socio-cultural formation as a whole’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976: 15). The subcultures of blogging outlined earlier appear to fulfil these twinned objectives, firstly by marking out space distinct from but in relation to the parent culture of institutionalized academia; secondly, achieving this same ideal in reaction to the wider culture (for the advanced economies these bloggers write from, the various local invocations of neoliberalism). The blog community is an intermediary space allowing a temporary Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 476 CONVERGENCE VOL. 15 NO. 4 reprieve from the expectations of both of these wider conditions, an outlet for the frustrations felt in coming to terms with their differently pressing demands. Of course, these early theorizations of subcultures were important for identifying how group solidarity, formed through shared disaffection, could enact a temporary resolution of a (predestined) class trajectory. As Cohen put it: ‘The latent function of subculture is this – to express and resolve, albeit ‘magically’, the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture’ (in Hall and Jefferson, 1976: 30). The subcultures the CCCS studied pivoted on style, on display; particularly when this involved reappropriating objects that were purposefully useless (the punk rocker’s safety-pin). The superficiality of the act was thought to reflect the general malaise of the group, its shared sense of pointlessness and despair. As Graham Murdock argued, the context of the subculture provided the means to create ‘meaningful styles of leisure’ in an ‘attempt to resolve the contradictions contained in the work situation’. Subcultures were the ‘collective solution to the problems posed by shared contradictions in the work situation’, providing ‘a social and symbolic context for the development and reinforcement of collective identity and individual self esteem’ (in Hall and Jefferson, 1976: 29). Instead of expressing style through leisure practices, as was the case with the disaffected youth of the CCCS-era subcultures, bloggers indicate the ways in which work has become an expression of identity and self esteem for today’s young middle class. In the case of junior faculty bloggers, the sheer workload pressure constitutive of their condition means that it cannot be the practices outside of work that express identity. Rather it is the choice to work and commitment to the onerous demands of the profession that is the badge of membership of the subculture. Bloggers’ public performance of class transition and internal class conflict takes a textual form, and gains further signifying properties for this reason. The subculture of academic blogging is certainly a public performance and display, but it is one of meaningfulness, not malaise. The recurring affects of commitment, investment, sacrifice and virtue are residues of an apparently outdated bourgeois ethic of service and vocation. For each blogger, the idea that is still meaningful – the ideal that originally motivated them towards the ‘scholarly pursuit’ – will differ. In each case though, the subculture expresses a shared sense of investment: the financial investment of losing years of wageearning capacity to gain credentials and hopefully an ongoing salary, as well as the emotional investment in the idea of the university, the implicit good of education and the gratitude felt in having it. (This explains the teaching commitment amongst the graduate students, and the reason that the US bloggers will put themselves through the admitted agony of the tenure track.) In these ways, scholarly blogging can be understood as a subculture for the highly educated: ‘lifestyle’ has been replaced with a ‘workstyle’ (Liu, 2004).14 Keeping a Low Profile These subcultural dimensions to blogging take on further specification when cultural context is taken into account. While certain generic features are shared across nationalities, the different labour market of each audience affects the material deemed ‘bloggable’ in each case. Taking the tagline for Slaves of Academe, for instance (‘Academia, labour, society, and culture from a tenure-track perch in a cold place’) the title is Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 GREGG: BANAL BOHEMIA 477 representative of a trend amongst US bloggers in its use of pseudonymity. Oso Raro’s locations have included Cold City U, Prestigious Lil’ College (PLC) and Sadistic College; while other bloggers hail from a Liberal Arts College (LAC), Scary City with Potential, MidWestern Landgrant U, or simply ‘North East’. In Walker’s (2006: 134) account, bloggers choose pseudonymity because of their preference for honesty – they want to share those parts of the job ‘that are too bodily (sex! mess! clothes! hunger!) or emotional (performance anxiety, depression, love, doubt) to fit into a traditional academic image’. To her reckoning, ‘professors seem to blog either pseudonymously, rarely, or relatively impersonally, in almost all cases sticking to blog topics that have little to do with their own research practice’ (2006: 135). These pseudonymous gestures can also be read as a response to the particular structure of North American academia. The rhetorically weighted title and blog identity have evolved to become a knowing, in-group, subcultural commentary on the exploitative reality behind an ostensibly elite and privileged tradition. To remain anonymous is far more common in the USA than in smaller countries like my own (or Jill Walker’s Norway), and this is precisely because university employment is such a valuable career option in comparison. In the USA the vast amount of capital that is part of the business of academe means that the stakes are higher. These are key structural reasons which lead bloggers to use their websites to ‘bitch’, just as others clearly use their blogs to ‘badge’ their identity in the hope of boosting career prospects. Made for Mentoring The same professional conditions in the USA have also led to the development of new styles of mentoring and job-seeking support through blogging. Confessions of a Community College Dean (Dean Dad, to 2009) not only demonstrates how senior academics are generously providing career advice to aspiring colleagues, but that new forms of dialogue, even empathy can transpire between academic staff and the ‘dark side’ of administration. Mentoring on a peer-to-peer basis is also common, with PhD and junior faculty bloggers often posting tips for fellow job-searchers. Clancy Rantliff’s frank advice to aspiring academics in 2007 gives intricate details of the internal hierarchies faced by job candidates vying for employment (Rantliff, 2007). Her post not only assists local colleagues but provides valuable insight for those readers outside the USA who may be considering their own employment prospects without the same inside knowledge of the system. In this sensitive scenario bloggers who have been through the hiring experience so recently become preferable to more traditional mentoring gestures of the kind where senior academics attempt to explain to current graduate students how to succeed in a very different job market to the one they themselves encountered. PhD bloggers who have ‘grown up’ in the public eye take this mentoring obligation seriously. But as the following account conveys, the act of mentoring can also lead in other directions. Reflecting ‘on how my expectations for this profession differ from my lived reality of it’, this professor seems to grapple with a sense of loss, that a certain idealized notion of academic life has disappeared in spite of her employment: This loneliness is at the heart of academic life in a way I never quite imagined it would be. Even now teaching at a liberal arts school – where we do operate as a community of learners, have intensely personal interactions with our students, and know each other quite well inside and outside of work – our intellectual work is often lonely work: preparing & teaching our individual classes, writing our Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 478 CONVERGENCE VOL. 15 NO. 4 individual manuscripts. More often than not our shared concerns are about teaching or college politics, not about Ideas or Books or Music. In fact, the conversations I have about Ideas now are comparatively rare; they occur weekly or monthly rather than daily. I don’t have the kind of intellectual community I’d imagined, or that I experienced as an undergrad or grad student . . . All of that sounds horribly depressing. You should understand that I love my work, and – if anything – it has proven to be even more gratifying than I thought it could be. But, it is also lonelier. The last time I met my advisor for coffee (about a year ago), I talked about this with her . . . She told me that I should focus my energies on participating in The Larger Conversation, rather than seeking out personal intellectual connections. And, in a way, I’ve done that; hence the conference papers, publications, being a panel discussant and a manuscript reviewer and all that other good stuff. But The Larger Conversation doesn’t quite cut it for me, I guess. It might be tempting to read this blog, Professorial Confessions, and the post, titled ‘Lonely Hearts (or Minds)’,15 as typifying the self-help motive often attributed to blogging, particularly in relation to the personal diary format made popular by LiveJournal and MySpace. In terms of academic referents, however, the loneliness and alienation is more than reminiscent of the isolation Richard Hoggart (1958 [1957]) expressed way back in the late 1950s, in his account of the ‘Scholarship Boy’. Wrenched from a rich workingclass community to pursue a bookish life, Hoggart wrote on behalf of a generation of British students who were the first in their family to enter universities. Junior faculty bloggers continue this tradition for another time, expressing their impressions of an unfamiliar world to an international audience. By contrast, in Australia the far smaller population and tertiary education system and a chronic lack of government funding combine with popular attitudes toward intellectuals to create a quite different blogging scene. In Australia, it is almost impossible to remain anonymous as a widely read blogger with an academic affiliation.16 Further, the limited number of jobs available to locals makes what is an identifiable trend of giving career advice on US blogs distinctly out of place. Those who follow the model of career progression normal in the USA often stand accused of being too entrepreneurial, too self-serving, superficial, even pathological.17 When career advice is offered in public settings, bloggers have been known to dismiss such gestures as cynical exercises in corporate-style networking.18 In a smaller culture, with a different set of behavioural norms, not having a life outside of work is viewed negatively, showing that subcultural capital is not always transferable across cultures. Save as Draft? Save and Continue Editing? Publish? Returning to the BCCCS definition of subcultures, academic blogging has itself enjoyed the classic trajectory of a subculture in the sense that its true nature and function is only becoming visible at a particular moment. We are now past the stage of initial hype, the ultimate gesture of 2004, ‘The Year of The Blog’. Still, anxieties about the ongoing impact of blogging on academic culture remain, as recent email list discussions indicate.19 In these debates, the charge of ‘careerist blogging’ is beginning to emerge, with concerns that online networking is nothing less than an exercise in self-promotion. There is an Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 GREGG: BANAL BOHEMIA 479 obvious class difference in comparing a literate and educated subculture to the workingclass youth of the Birmingham period. The further problem in applying subcultural theory to the present generation of scholarly bloggers is that, according to some commentators at least, their allotted class destiny – secure, white-collar labour – may not be available for much longer. For those entering the academy today, the natural order of succession and class reproduction that once applied to their vocation is changing at a macro level. Diminished opportunities for tenure and casualization of the academic workforce pose fundamental problems for the model of patronage and initiation that earlier typified the profession. This model may continue to secure positions at the elite end of the spectrum, but this only serves as a foil to the many complex and different employment options now available in this global industry (Ross, 2007). For Cohen, writing in the 1970s, there was no ‘subcultural solution’ to the ‘unemployment, educational disadvantage, compulsory miseducation, dead-end jobs, the routinization and specialization of labour, low pay and the loss of skills’ affecting workingclass lads in post-Second World War Britain: ‘Sub-cultural strategies cannot match, meet or answer the structuring dimensions emerging in this period for the class as a whole’ (Cohen in Hall and Jefferson, 1976: 47). In the information society, Cohen’s cautionary remarks have ongoing and extended relevance. Just as the Mods and Teddy Boys destined for dead-end manual labour jobs would later contend with the reality of off-shore outsourcing and competitors migrating within Europe, the globetrotting remit of university branding initiatives means the same prospect now haunts those who hitched their hopes on the protection and esteem of mental labour. Today even those who enjoy the privilege of higher education are subject to the structuring dimensions of capital, which ‘may have found the makings of a ‘self-justifying, low-wage workforce, at the very heart of the knowledge industries so crucial to its growth and development’ (Ross, 2000: 24). That those in tenured positions did little to resist casualization in academia or the increasingly gruelling requirements for tenure are simmering tensions on many junior faculty blogs. However accurate, this is a genuinely felt generational grievance that spreads beyond the blogosphere. It is directed towards senior scholars who are perceived to have had a less brutal experience of professional advancement and failed to protect this possibility for others. Another reflection on the importance of the Invisible Adjunct blog explains the intricacies of this position, suggesting that while those writing on the site ‘find fault with the institution and the blindness of the established to the struggles of the part-timer, they are not opposed to the larger goals of academic endeavour’: Indeed, one of the things that made IA’s site so powerful was that it – and many of the posters – acknowledged that real pain comes from feeling denied a place within a vocation, from being excluded from or to the margins of a world oft longed for. Even now being ‘free’ from academia is bittersweet. (Many of us, including myself, are still suffering from ‘post-academic stress syndrome’ even though the healing has begun.)20 Such reflections echo Andrew Ross’s take on the politics of mental labour, particularly his argument that ‘the comfort offered by job security in the form of tenure’ was a ‘recipe for complacency on the part of those who should have resisted the corporate measures much earlier and more vigorously’. In Ross’s view, ‘submission to the selfless, disinterested devotions of the scholar’s calling inevitably led to the sacrifice of younger ‘apprentices’ on the altar of an anachronistic faith’ (2000: 23). Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 480 CONVERGENCE VOL. 15 NO. 4 Through blogging, early career academics are making this unpalatable condition public. They reveal a fast receding loyalty to the promise that the university life was supposed to offer but does not deliver. Having grown up unable to ignore the realities of economic rationalism on their employment fortunes, these bloggers’ experiences of becoming professional differ from their predecessors. As the foregoing example shows, these blogs also confirm the number of researchers whose dreams of scholarly life have been chastened and who continue to mourn a lost ideal. This newly marginalized middleclass professoriat use blogs to gain support for work and life choices that they feel have been constrained by wider social pressures; they write to retain a degree of credibility from a sympathetic audience. Though their character is different, social networking sites are similarly symptomatic of the dwindling horizon for secure middle-class employment: you just never know when someone from your past may need to be drawn upon to help assure your future. An online presence is certainly one way to gain inside information about work opportunities, to gain name-recognition and hence a competitive advantage among the many others vying for head-hunting or grant-funding in the current job market. In both cases, online platforms allow for the fashioning of a bankable subjectivity that can be displayed and consumed, if not exactly commodified and exchanged (although more articles on blogging might help to demonstrate their use value, see Dean, 2007). Taken together, the outpouring of emotion and personal information on new media platforms is not only an important dimension of contemporary professional working life, especially now that the performance of connectedness is taken as an indication of employability. The platforms themselves seem to be taking on the role of an embryonic site for labour politics. By virtue of their positions, junior faculty and PhD bloggers are structurally prevented from influencing many of the decisions immediately affecting their work lives. In this situation, their readership communities offer a form of solace and support as they struggle up the career ladder, while the blogs themselves provide resources for others considering a similar move. This collegiality and solidarity that exists in virtual space may yet translate offline to form the basis for real institutional pressure, to create better working conditions for junior faculty. But we would be wise to avoid being too optimistic. If the history of subcultural theory is any guide, participation in ritualized styles of identity performance, however meaningful at the time, cannot substitute for tried and tested methods of resistance. As I have suggested in the case of academic bloggers, their evident investment in a sacrificial work ethic and an aestheticized long hours culture combine to make such action unlikely precisely because the ultimate act of refusal – the withdrawal of labour – immediately contradicts the very factors that are crucial to the authors’ identity and self-esteem. Nevertheless such action, targeted at the senior colleagues and faculty administrators whose actions have apparently encouraged an oversupply of discounted labour, is the only reliable historical measure that conditions might improve. Bloggers who are content to leave their work-related complaints in a virtual realm, disconnected from the agents responsible for their plight, only have themselves to blame for a lack of structural change. Academic blogging is significant less because it heralds the end of some previously untarnished notion of a university system that was more valuable, egalitarian or protected from popular scrutiny. Rather it is because it is a banal and powerful daily indictment of an industry that can no longer afford to misrecognize itself. Until we can create a much Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 GREGG: BANAL BOHEMIA 481 larger conversation about the significant changes to employment practice that are under way across a range of sectors, blogs offer parables of these wider shifts, a suite of ideological narratives for explaining and understanding what is happening. As we continue to write, read, comment and lurk on these online fora in future it is also important that we do not mistake the conditions they describe as evidence of some long-desired fidelity with the proletariat that continues to exist largely outside the field of vision of information workers. It is not as if by embracing such exploitation ‘an underpaid intelligentsia can identify more readily with those living in low-wage conditions or real poverty’ (Ross, 2000: 15). The decision to work long hours in a job with significant meritocratic benefits and wider cultural cache is still a choice that is unavailable to those without access to quality education. Indeed, blogging subcultures are one of the strongest signs available that the confluence of employment practices, friendship networks and new media platforms conspire to mean there is even less chance for those offline and outside existing circuits of privileged information to get a seat at the table. Even if it is a hot-desk. Notes 1 My ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2007–2009), ‘Working From Home: New media technology, workplace culture and the changing nature of domesticity’ studied the impact of new media technologies on workers in information jobs in Brisbane, Australia over a three-year period. This article was written during the fellowship at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. 2 For an introduction to current blogging scholarship, see Bruns and Jacobs (2006). 3 Scholars who do relate blogging to earlier forms of intellectual endeavour include Cohen (2006), Gregg (2006), Halavais (2006) and Walker (2006). 4 The extraordinary impact of Larry Lessig’s blog in spreading the Creative Commons message has helped maintain the legal profession at the cutting edge of developments in new media technology (see Lessig to 2009). 5 Henry Jenkins is the most recognized example, see: Jenkins (to 2009). 6 See bitchphd (to 2009) blogspot. 7 Walker’s own book on blogging, the first sole-author scholarly account of blogging to date, was in press at the time of writing. 8 Glen Fuller’s Event Mechanics blog even came up with a pep-talk/catch-cry to sign off posts – ‘Accelerate!’ – as thesis submission drew near. As a philosophy enthusiast, Fuller often noted how his education placed him at a distance from family, friends and the subjects of his studies. In a poignant twist, towards the final stages of his thesis Fuller’s mother began leaving regular comments on blogposts. See ‘Pruning the Rose Bush’ (Fuller, 2007). 9 Pioneering PhD blogger Anne Galloway of Purse Lip Square Jaw even started a separate blog, Lost in Dissertation, to document her finishing stages. See Galloway, 2006. 10 This was evident in the development of a regular ‘Carnival of Teaching’: a bi-monthly round-up of blogposts dedicated to teaching-related anecdotes, resources and tips to sustain others during semester. Although this venture appears to have wound up for the time being (perhaps because the main protagonists have moved into positions with higher demands) the archive is available at the teachingcarnival.blogspot (to 2009). 11 The Slaves of Academe homage was precipitated by the closure of the Invisible Adjunct blog. It is available at the slavesofacademe blogspot (see Oso Raro, 2006). 12 Walker (2006: 128) openly wrestles with this transition when she writes: ‘Why was blogging so immensely liberating when I was a PhD student, and yet so complicated now? What happens when research blogs – and their authors – become part of the academic system rather than being outsiders trying to get in?’ 13 A representative post is the description of inter-departmental politics at the Lumpen Professoriat blog (Lumpenprof, 2007). 14 Alan Liu’s Laws of Cool describes how ‘workstyles’ develop in professions which have ‘no true Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 482 CONVERGENCE VOL. 15 NO. 4 15 16 17 18 19 20 recreational outside . . . Cool is an attitude of pose from within the belly of the beast, an effort to make one’s very mode of inhabiting a cubicle express what in the 1960s would have been an ‘alternative lifestyle’ but in the postindustrial 2000s is an alternative workstyle’ (2004: 77–8). In Liu’s framework, blogging can be seen as one of the ways knowledge workers ‘“gesture” toward an identity recompensing them for work in the age of identity management’. This blog has now been removed from the internet, URL (accessed 23 June 2008): http:// muserant.blogspot.com/2006/06/lonely-hearts-or-minds.html In an earlier version of this article I drew attention to this point by comparing Slaves of Academe with a relatively popular Australian academic blog, Sorrow at Sills Bend. From the post ‘My Day! Starring Cat! + Many Foods!’ it is possible to deduce that the author of the latter lives in inner-city Melbourne and is employed as a literary studies tutor at a remote Victorian campus. Both of these details make her identity relatively easy to establish (and her efforts at pseudonymity somewhat superficial). The post itself, complete with its regional airline commute, solitary lunch routine and late return home to her cat, shows the dedication of sessional staff and a very different version of academic life than one might glean from Oso Raro’s descriptions of ‘Prestigious Little U’. See: (Tartan, 2006). These are accusations I encountered with regard to my own blog, www.homecookedtheory.com (accessed July 2009), from colleagues in my own faculty and further afield: http://www. craigbellamy.net/2006/10/25/3-morning-coffee-with-craig-what-is-a-publically-articulated-career-blogger/ (accessed July 2009). Both antipopper.com/blog/affable (Antipopper, 2005) and goingsomewhere.blogsome.com (Going somewhere, 2005) respond to a professional development day held by the Australian Cultural Research Network in Sydney in 2005. Facebook’s popularity was the focus of a persistent thread on the CULTSTUD-L email list in September 2007, following earlier debates on Fibreculture in August. See: http://fibreculture.org/ pipermail/list_fibreculture.org/ and http://lists.comm.umn.edu/mailman/listinfo/cultstud-l respectively (archives for the latter are only available to members. Accessed November 2007). Cited in Rantliff (2004). References Antipopper (2005) URL (accessed July 2009): http://antipopper.com/blog/affable Bellamy, C. (to 2009) URL (accessed July 2009): http://www.craigbellamy.net/2006/10/25/3-morningcoffee-with-craig-what-is-a-publically-articulated-career-blogger/bitchphd (to 2009) URL (accessed July 2009): http://bitchphd.blogspot.com boyd, d. (2007) ‘Why I am not going on the academic job market’ apophenia blog 22 September 2007, URL (accessed 23 November 2007): http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/09/22/why_ i_am_not_go.html Bruns, A. (2007) ‘Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation’, paper presented at Creativity & Cognition Conference, Washington DC, USA, 13–15 June. URL (accessed 20 November 2007): http://snurb.info/publications Bruns, A. and Jacobs, J., ed. (2006) Uses of Blogs. New York: Peter Lang. Cohen, K. (2006) ‘A Welcome for Blogs’, in M. Gregg, M. and J. Burgess (eds) ‘Counter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20(2): 161–73. Dean Dad (to 2009) Confessions of a Community College Dean, URL (accessed July 2009): http://suburb dad.blogspot.com/ Dean, J. (2007) ‘Productive Labor’, URL (accessed 22 November 2007): http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/ i_cite/2007/05/productive_labo.html Fuller, G. (2007) ‘Pruning the Rose Bush’, URL (accessed 23 November 2007): http://eventmechanics. net.au/?p=995 Galloway, A. (2006) Lost in Dissertation, URL (accessed July 2009): http://lostindissertation.blog spot.com/2006/06/its-okay.html Going somewhere (2005) ‘Commentary on Affable Personas’, URL (accessed July 2009): http://goingsome where.blogsome.com/2005/11/29/commentary-on-affable-personas/ Gregg, M. (2006) ‘Feeling Ordinary: Blogging as Conversational Scholarship’, in M. Gregg and J. Burgess Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010 GREGG: BANAL BOHEMIA 483 (eds) ‘Counter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies’ (special issue) Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20(2): 147–60. Gregg, M. (to 2009) URL (accessed July 2009): www.homecookedtheory.com Halavais, A. (2006) ‘Scholarly Blogging: Moving Toward the Visible College’, in A. Bruns and J. Jacobs (eds) Uses of Blogs. New York: Peter Lang. Hall, S. and Jefferson, T., eds, (1976) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson. Hoggart, R. (1958 [1957]) The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jenkins, H. (to 2009) Confessions of an ACA-Fan, URL (accessed July 2009): http://www.henry jenkins.org/ Lessig, L. (to 2009) URL (accessed July 2009): http://www.lessig.org/blog/ Liu, A. (2004) The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Lumpenprof (2007) URL (accessed July 2009): http://lumpenprofessoriat.blogspot.com/2007/04/academiclove.html Oso Raro (2006) ‘The Invisible Adjunct: An Appreciation’, Slaves of Academe 17 May, URL (accessed July 2009): http://slavesofacademe.blogspot.com/2006/05/invisible-adjunct-appreciation.html Quiggin, J. (2007) ‘Self-Branding’, Address to Monthly Media and Cultural Studies Group, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, October. Rantliff, C. 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(2007) ‘The Rise of the Global University’, Post to edu.factory Email List, May 29, URL (accessed 22 November 2007): http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id= 41&Itemid=39 Tartan, L. – pseudonym (2006) Sorrow at Sills Bend, URL (accessed July 2009): http://allordinary2.blogspot. com/2006/03/my-day-starring-cat-many-foods.html Teachingcarnival.blogspot (to 2009) URL (accessed 23 November 2007): http://teachingcarnival. blogspot.com/ Tribble, I. – pseudonym (2005a) ‘Bloggers need not apply’, Chronicle of Higher Education 8 July, URL (accessed 23 November 2007): http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/07/2005070801c.htm Tribble, I. – pseudonym (2005b) ‘They shoot messengers, don’t they?’, Chronicle of Higher Education 2 September, URL (accessed 23 November 2007): http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/09/2005090201c.htm Walker, J. (2006) ‘Blogging From Inside the Ivory Tower’, in A. Bruns and J. Jacobs (eds) Uses of Blogs. New York: Peter Lang. Ward, M.-H. and West, S. (2008) ‘Blogging PhD Candidature: Revealing the pedagogy’, International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society 6(1) URL (accessed 23 June 2008): http://www.swin.edu. au/ijets Melissa Gregg works in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her books include Work’s Intimacy (Polity, 2010), Broadcast Yourself: Presence, Intimacy and Community Online (with Catherine Driscoll, forthcoming) and The Affect Theory Reader (edited with Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke UP, 2010). She blogs at homecookedtheory.com Address Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, Quadrangle Building A14, University of Sydney, NSW Australia 2006. [email: mgregg@usyd.edu.au] Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on September 28, 2010