Tuesday, June 28, 2005

 

This (this) is a meta-blog.

I've been "bad" about blogging, lately, but it's actually a conscious thing. When I began blogging, I didn't give much thought to maintaining anonymity; I've long tried to live my life as an open book, and blogging seemed like a good way to capture that spirit. Why try to be anonymous? I've never been too worried about stalkers, and really, who would care, if they didn't know I was me?

I started worrying, a little, about my lack of anonymity, when I published a paper, and around the same time realized I'll be looking for a job in a couple years. There is a reason people project different images professionally & among friends; neither image is a false representation, each is just incomplete, and each serves a different purpose. It makes me happy to revel in immaturity, sometimes; I talk to the dog in baby-talk, I get drunk & dance while standing on the couch, I rev my engine & accelerate to 60 in second gear (caveat: never while drunk!), I goof around and talk like I'm Ice Cube, amongst friends. Am I ashamed of any of this? No. Hell no. But I wouldn't do any of it while on a job interview, either, and that's the thing . . . without anonymity, this blog can be printed out and distributed, stapled to my vita, if whoever is considering hiring me is sufficiently inquisitive.

I think that if I could balance things out, so that the blog gave a full reflection of both my professional & personal life, that would be a little more okay, and I might say "fuck it, let them judge me as a whole." However, there impediments to that in some (perhaps unfortunate) realities of how science works. If I have a study I'm preparing to publish, I can't blog about it in any substantial way, without jeopardizing its publication; you can't have published work anywhere else, first, if you want a decent journal to publish it. If I have an experiment I'm beginning work on, I can't blog about it without risking someone scooping me; the reality is that there's "intellectual property" in science. In an ideal world, science is an ego-less search for truth, and there is a free & flowing exchange of information, and I honestly try to promote that as much as possible, offering my thoughts freely, trying to build collaborative, cooperative relationships . . . but the truth is that I will fail as a research academic if I don't carve out an intellectual space to call my own.

So, those are my thoughts for today. I can't say what I'll do going forward . . . I'll have to give it more thought. Maybe there's a balance that can be reached. If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear 'em. Yes, they may include "You're lame! Stop taking yourself so seriously and just write!". :-)

posted by Miles 12:42 PM