Generous Thinking by Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Author:Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

3

Working in Public

If democracy is to mean anything at all, then experts and laypeople have to solve complicated problems together. First, however, they have to overcome the widening gulf between them.

—TOM NICHOLS, THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

I started blogging in 2002, fairly early in the academic scheme of things. I’d just finished the long process of rewriting the thing that had been my dissertation, turning it into my first book, and I was feeling a little stifled: all that work, years of work, were encapsulated in a Word document that existed on my hard disk, in several backups, and nowhere else, and there seemed the very real possibility that no one might ever read it. And then I stumbled across the blog of a friend from grad school who had moved out of a teaching position to work for a web-based company. His blog was funny and erudite, exploring recent books and culture and bits of anecdote. And it had an audience. People read it, and I knew they read it because they left brief comments responding to and interacting with the author, offering their own thoughts and amplifying his. And I thought, wow, that’s it.

My blog, Planned Obsolescence, which I started out of the baldest desire to get someone somewhere to read something I wrote, wound up doing something more interesting than I expected: it didn’t just build an audience—it built a community. I found a number of other early academic bloggers, all of whom linked to one another, commented on each other’s posts, and responded at greater length with posts of their own. Among those bloggers was a small cluster of folks who came out of literary studies—the Wordherders, a blogging collective whose platform was provided by a grad student at the University of Maryland, who worked at the Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities: Jason Rhody. Jason and the other Wordherders (including Lisa Rhody, George Williams, Chuck Tryon, Kari Kraus, Matt Kirschenbaum, and Vika Zafrin, among others) became my first real online colleagues, and we remain connected today.

Those relationships, which opened out into a growing network of scholars working online, were crucial to me as an assistant professor at a small liberal arts college on the far end of the country. I had spent the previous few years feeling isolated, my work by and large unknown, and I could not figure out how to make the intellectual and professional connections that might help my writing develop and find an audience. Planned Obsolescence helped build those connections—and it appears that posts I published there were the first pieces of my writing to be cited in formal academic settings. The blog was read, by people in my field, and by people in other fields altogether.

Fast-forward to the moment in 2009 when I’d just finished the draft of my second book, not-so-coincidentally entitled Planned Obsolescence. The thing I was supposed to do—the thing our usual processes provide for—was to send it off to the press, which would commission two or three experts to review it and suggest improvements before publication.

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