AggAcad: Saving decentralization, fighting diffusion and common clutter, cat pictures and obscurity

I agree with Henry that Scott McLemee's latest column at Inside Higher Ed is well worth a look, and perhaps readers here–if they haven't done so yet–may have further comments or suggestions to make.  Scott makes a modest and sensitive proposal for an "aggregation hub" of "academic blogs," in part to link more visibly and usefully the publishing world with the more serious and focused (not to say ponderous) discussions or "symposia" taking place in blogland.  This seems to me as though it can only be a good thing, as Scott proposes it:

Over the past few columns, I’ve pointed to some opportunities and difficulties created by emerging forms of digital publishing. In particular, the item from last week – the one suggesting that university presses might benefit from working out a modus vivendi with academic bloggers — has generated interest and discussion. The space available online for the discussion of new books is, for all practical purposes, boundless. Meanwhile, the traditional forms of mass media place pay ever less attention to books. The avenues for making a new title known to the public get slimmer all the time. Literally slimmer, in some cases. Recently the San Francisco Chronicle cut its review section from eight pages to four, hardly an unusual development nowadays.

But will urging university presses to think more seriously about blogs (and other new media forms) really offer a solution? Or does it just compound the problem? Hearing from readers over the past week, I’ve started to wonder.

Many presses have very compact publicity departments – often enough, a single person. The work includes preparing each season’s catalog, sending out review copies, and working the display booth at conferences.

“So now,” the weary cry goes up, “we have to look at blogs too? Just how are we supposed to find the right one for a given book? There seem to be thousands of them. And that’s just counting the ones with pictures of the professors’ cats.”

Fair enough. Life is too short, and bloggers too numerous. And let’s not even get into podcasting or digital video....

The great strength of emergent media forms is also their great weakness. I mean, of course, the extreme decentralization that now characterizes “the broadband flatland.” It is now relatively easy to produce and distribute content. But it also proves a challenge to find one’s way around in a zone that is somehow expanding, crowded, and borderless, all at once.

With such difficulties in mind, then, I want to propose a kind of public-works project. The time has come to create a map. In fact, it is hard to imagine things can continue much longer without one.

At very least, we need a Web site giving users some idea what landmarks already exist in the digital space of academe. This would take time to create, of course. More than that, it would require a lot of good will.

But the benefits would be immediate — not just for university presses and academic bloggers, but for librarians, students, and researcher within academe and without.

 

As they say, read the whole thing, and the comments.

My own inititial three cents (speaking, of course, from the lowly fringe):  that ideally (to second Laura Carroll) this should strive to be a truly world-wide effort, conscious and proactively contentious of the escalating digital divide; that the blogroll at Political Theory Daily Review may be another useful starting point; and finally, albeit perhaps a bit whimsically, that until the walls of prejudice are torn down or tides begin to turn, there be either separate but equal representation (or uncomfortably assimilated groupings) of so-called "continental" and "analytic" philosophy websites.  This latter, I imagine, will take some hard collective lobbying and genuine cooperation, at least on the part of the underdogs (fortunately there are every day (and for every random blowhard) more signs of hope).  But that is a tired hobbyhorse, and needn't prove divisive.  Really.  More generally, with the dangers of merely recreating something already foreclosed either within or alongside the pedigrees of "higher learning" well in mind, I prefer like Scott to remain more optimistic, and open.  Anyway all comments, technical or otherwise, are more than welcome.