[-empyre-] subversive?

[Jill Walker <jill.walker@uib.no>]

Brandon wrote:
> I've suggested elsewhere that blogs could offer a different sort of
> paradigm of measurement of the effectiveness of research--instead of
> peer-review, for instance.  Jill, I'd like to know whether you think
> blogging is as subversive as all that, or simply supplements the
> current research process.

I love the idea of making an academically acknowlegded kind of 
Slashdot where peer-review was instant and... but I've wondered, too, 
whether that might increase the popularity contest aspect of academia.

I find those automatic content management systems which are based on 
users rating items or essays (slashdot, amazon), and on things like 
the epinions.com "web of trust" where you say "i trust so and so's 
reviews, so show them higher up on my screen, and show people she 
trusts' reviews higher too" - um, I love it, and at the same time I 
worry about the perception of objectivity that lies in the automation 
of it all. If we had one big system with algorithms to determine how 
peer-reviews and ratings push an article up in the system, and others 
down, well, it might increase the gap between rich and poor - ok, I'm 
shifting metaphors there aren't I. For instance, after Blogdex 
(http://blogdex.media.mit.edu) started indexing links from blogs and 
showing a list of today's most-linked-to-sites the difference between 
the number of links the most-linked-to-sites got and the sites that 
weren't that linked to increased. People see that oh, that site got 
30 links, so they look at it, and link to it too, so now it has 31 
links. I'm worried that could happen with academic research too.

On the other hand, the present situation has plenty of downsides and 
in reality the peer-review system can be arbitrary or unfair, since 
reviewers often recognise the author even if it's "blind" review and 
so on...

So. Subversive?

I prefer lots of individual blogs to the big ones, like 
http://kur05hin.org or slashdot.org etc, because I like the 
*differences* between them, and I prefer the sense of an emergent 
discussion and a loosely clustered group to the top-down systematic 
algorithm-driven approach, even though those communities can have 
great qualities.

I used to think the nature of blogs made them open and generous. An 
optimistic form of technodeterminism. Then I discovered there are 
hate blogs, white power blogs, blogs devoted to ridiculing an 
individual, etc.

So I think they're as subversive as we want them to be.

Jill