Over at Inside Higher Ed, Matt “The Artist Formerly Known as ‘Dean Dad'” Reed has a piece about why he blogs and what influence it’s had on his career. As someone who’s been blogging from academia even longer than he has (I think, anyway; I don’t recall exactly when he started), I like a lot of what he has to say. I was particularly struck by this question:

Or, put differently, why don’t my administrative colleagues elsewhere do something similar. After all these years, where is everybody?

That really resonated for me, because I can still remember the early days of blogging as a Thing, when there was a lot of talk about how it was going to Change Everything. While I would agree that Everything has unquestionably Changed, it’s not clear that blogs had all that much lasting influence; they certainly never got adopted as widely as many people hoped, and it’s interesting to poke a bit at why that is.

One of the bigger factors is a sort of professionalization of blogging as a form of communication. Way back in 2002 when I started, blogging was very much a thing that people who primarily did something else would pick up as a hobby. That was the glorious thing about it, in my view– what you got from blogs wasn’t stories from writers who dabbled in other things, it was professionals from other areas dabbling in writing.

At some point in the latter part of that decade, things turned a bit. The best writers from the hobby blogger era got book deals and jobs in media, and “run a successful blog” became an accepted stepping-stone on the path to a writing career. You started to see more blogs that were clearly from future journalists specializing in some area, and they kind of crowded out hobby blogs. The quality of the writing almost certainly improved, but there was a certain homogenization of the style, and a kind of loss of authenticity.

Another major factor limiting blogging is that, as the social-media universe got bigger (both with blogs growing and becoming more mainstream, and the beginnings of Twitter and expansion of Facebook), the stakes started to get higher. When I started in 2002, I relied on security through obscurity to protect my academic career: I always wrote under my own name, but trusted that the people I worked with were highly unlikely to stumble across my blog. Near the peak of the blog era, a few years after the launch of ScienceBlogs, academics were advised to blog peseudonymously because if a tenure committee noticed your blog, they might think you were wasting time and hold that against you. These days, the danger of being active on social media (blogs included) is that somebody’s going to find something you wrote offensive and whip up a mob that will ruin your reputation, try to get you fired, and even send you death threats.

That’s made a lot of people who might’ve blogged much more gun-shy than they might’ve been back when “Dean Dad” and I were starting out. This is particularly true for people on the administrative side of academia, who face a far greater risk of being read as speaking for the institution, and often don’t have the security of tenure. Even as a tenured professor, I’ve become much more circumspect, particularly since I wound up being a department chair– there’s a weight of responsibility that comes with those roles that makes it risky to speak too freely. The less they speak, particularly in a form that will be Google-able for years to come, the lower the risk.

In the end, though, I think the biggest factor is that it takes a certain type of personality to make it as a blogger. You have to enjoy communicating through the written word in a way that isn’t all that common. Even in academia, where people’s careers are built on the production of text, you don’t see many people who are actually good at the sort of communication needed for blogging. That’s part of why there are so many tedious meetings that could’ve been emails, and so many stupid faculty-email-list fights: a large fraction of the population, including most professional academics, find it a distasteful chore to type words into a computer and share them with other people.

That’s not a problem I’ve ever had– I discovered Usenet in my senior year at Williams and immediately embraced the idea. I spent a lot of my grad school years making friends and socializing with people on Usenet, some of whom I still haven’t met in person all these years later. The move to blogging was a natural and fairly smooth transition for me, and these days I get a little twitchy if I go too long without being able to type words into a computer and share them.

But where many of us thought, back in 2002, that this was the Hot New Thing and lots of people would discover how wonderful it was, the last decade-and-a-half has made clear that it’s actually a very unusual thing to enjoy. There’s a reason why the vast majority of blogs have a dozen or two posts with the time between them increasing until they just sort of… stop. It’s the same reason why most Twitter and Facebook feeds are dominated by reshared memes and thoughts from others. The weird thing isn’t that more academics don’t blog, it’s that people like me and Matt Reed keep blogging over the span of so many years.