Free speech v a free press

What a depressing title to a blog. Normally there shouldn't be any dissonance between the notion of free speech and a free press.

Sadly though, I'm finding that my local paper (the one that employed racist Enoch Powell as a columnist then got more rightwing) is making it very difficult for me to say anything other than the blandest remarks about insubstantial issues.

Over the last couple of years, so-called journalists have used what I've written here on Plashing Vole to do two things: destroy my professional reputation and to find material to use against the university. Lacking any sense of irony, they see no contradiction between naming and shaming me as an exemplar of all that's wrong with academia, while diligently mining my writing to manufacture outrage against the university by distorting and selectively editing anything I write.

The latest effort hasn't yet appeared in its pages but I've been tipped off that the piece I wrote on plagiarism the other day has 'inspired' them to generate some faux-news. There are several layers of irony here. My definition of plagiarism is to pass off as your own work material written by other people. I'm sorry to say that while this newspaper is outraged at the possibility of students behaving in this way, its own staff do so with astonishing regularity. 99.6% of our students do not plagiarise. I do not believe that 99.6% of the rag's articles are free of re-processed press releases, PR material or the work of people like me. I got so used to my work reappearing under certain people's bylines that I wrote to the editor suggesting that he either stopped it, sent me a cheque, or simply hired me directly. Sadly he didn't find time to reply.

This particular instance has annoyed me more than usual because it's a subject on which the university and I are in total agreement – unlike pretty much any other one. Plagiarism is an intellectual and moral problem, though not a huge one in terms of numbers. We try to eradicate it through education, good task design and ultimately by applying sanctions. That I feel every instance deeply is not an indication that plagiarism is rife. But thanks to the local hacks, the press office has to fire off another defensive statement and someone in a suit adds another page to my bulging personnel file

In the wider context, I'm absolutely sick of the lazy, cynical replacement of actual journalism with this brand of manufactured outrage. Local newspapers are the lifeblood of democracy and the community. They used to employ staff to get out into the streets, the courts, to public meetings and council events. Now, they'd rather pay someone to surf the web in the hope that they can turn the kind of thing I write into a cheap headline.

It's got to the stage where I'm wondering if I can every express an opinion about my job, teaching, literature, politics or public events ever again. The local (and sometimes national) press are so proficient at stripping out context and nuance that there's no chance ever of getting a fair representation or hearing.You know me: I like a rumbustious punch-up, with you, with my bosses and even with the local press. What I am heartily sick of is being used as cannon fodder or cheap filler by a paper with no respect for different perspectives or other people. There's nothing progressive or in the public interest about trying to stir up controversy for controversy's sake.

My local paper has no interest in the public sphere, in give-and-take or the exchange of ideas, hence its readiness to steal my ideas and refusal to engage in any sort of conversation. Frankly, it hasn't adapted to a world in which it is now one voice amongst many. In the days when it employed journalists and pursued stories, it performed an essential function. But now it's one of us. Like me, it monitors the internet, Twitter and other outlets for subjects on which it can generate an instant opinion. It's abandoned what made it special for a weak version of what the rest of us can do just a well now. Just as well? Better. I'm too old to be a digital native, but I understand the etiquette of digital media. Attribute sources. Link. Give credit. Don't distort: nothing can't be checked. Expect and welcome conversation, disagreement and debate, and join in.

So from now on, it's lovely kittens.

To whom it may concern

I believe in free speech, in that I think all ideas, however bad, are proven, improved or disproved by vigorous public debate. This applies, of course, to anything I say too.

However, I don't believe that anything I write here should be taken, selectively edited and retailed for profit in commercial outlets. I declined a request by BBC Countryfile magazine to use my photographs for free because it is a profit-making publication: if it was a charitable or free one, I'd have said yes. I don't take photos for monetary purposes (though if you'd like a high-resolution print of anything I've taken, I'm sure we can come to an arrangement)

I have therefore added a Creative Commons licence to Plashing Vole. Under this licence, anyone is free

to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work

as long as

you give the author credit

you do not use it for commercial purposes

you do not alter, transform or build upon this work

However, I am happy to give a waiver on request: I've contributed to a number of reputable online and offline media outlets in the past and wouldn't want to stop (fellow bloggers and The Guardian are hereby awarded a permanent waiver of all conditions of use).

The purpose of this licence is simply to stop newspaper columns being based on distorted elements of this blog and comments made on it by third parties, for the purpose of making money. As the licence puts it, 'You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You… in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation'.

This doesn't, of course, prevent the 'fair use' of Plashing Vole for the purposes of commentary. It merely stresses the legal requirement for such material to be attributed and minimal, and subject to UK law's definition of 'fair dealing' which interestingly requires 'actual discussion or assessment' to justify inclusion.

In short: anyone is still free to critique me, but not to mine Plashing Vole for material as though it's just left lying around like autumn leaves. I'd love to freely exchange ideas in the public forum, but don't see why my work and that of my contributors should be treated as fair game for lazy hacks making money from faux-outrage. They get paid for incoherent rubbish - so should I!

Keyboard warrior offers truce

It seems like every time I use this blog to think aloud, to consider the wider contexts of events in the news, or to discuss the highs and lows of my job, some weasel makes hostile hay with it, either about me, or about my job, colleagues and students. Which is a shame, because we need to be honest about these things. For instance, yesterday's lecture and seminar was really difficult because only a small number of students engaged with the material. The rest reminded me very much of this:



But going by recent experience, this will appear somewhere as either 'Students Are Morons Compared, Not Like In Our Day' or 'Subversive Lecturer Slags Off Students', whereas I'd like to exchange ideas with readers about why some classes work, and others don't, about what I might be doing wrongly and what I might do instead, about whether lectures still have a place, for instance. This rather saddens me. My experience of the internet is that despite the occasional troll, it's a place in which intelligent people can discuss ideas and situations in an informal but informed fashion. People comment on my pieces critically; they bring opposing or divergent views and I enjoy the debate. Very few people are simply abusive. This is great: I've learned from opponents and gained pleasure from the exchange of views even when I haven't been converted or converted them. It's the same on Twitter: I follow and am followed by people like @KateMaltby who describes herself as a 'Tory feminist' because she's interesting and thoughtful. I don't follow @ToryEducation (apparently run by Michael Gove's advisors) because it eschews discussion in favour of abuse.

It's just a shame that some in the media have failed to keep up with the times. The joy of new media is that we can all exchange ideas with a wider network than ever before. As you probably know, I'm a newspaper addict. I deliberately spend money on print media because they're essential to a functioning democracy, which is why David Cameron's threat to punish the Guardian is such a frightening thing. I get frustrated with my chosen papers (The Guardian, The Observer, Private Eye, the London Review of Books, New Statesman, The Sword, New Welsh Review, The Irish Times) at times, but no other organisations have the scope or the resources to conduct serious news gathering and commentary. The internet resembles Metro: cheap, simplistic, often 'human-interest' stories in bite-size chunks, derived from the wire services and PR releases. There are exceptions, of course, such as Politico (which has interestingly launched a print version) and Glenn Greenwald's new venture, but on the whole print media are still the go-to outlets for long-form investigative journalism and commentary. Andrew Rawnsley and Nick Cohen, for example, are the highlights of my week. They make me grind my teeth regularly, but their work reflects decades of expensive research, hard work and careful thought.

Yet where some outlets have failed is the reciprocal nature of new media. Rawnsley and Cohen are to varying extents responsible in the technical sense: they engage with their readers and see no contradiction between justified pride in their own expertise and the need to draw on the skills, knowledge and experience of their readers: we learn from each other. This is the utopian side of the social media revolution: billions of people in mutually enriching conversation. There are dissenters, of course. Plenty of old media figures jealously protect their occupation of the bully pulpit: like fundamentalist preachers, they see us as a barely-restrained mob of barbarians requiring their professional enlightenment and discipline, and they get very shirty when their work is critiqued or dissected in public. What could they possibly learn from us? Actually, quite a lot: while professional journalists have the funding, time and training for serious in-depth work (stop sniggering, it does happen), we keyboard warriors have the obsession to stick with particular stories, the weak social capital that comes with particular interest groups, and skills derived from our offline lives. As a trained literary critic/scholar, I bring wide reading, background knowledge, an eye for the wider context and significance of local or limited events, theoretical knowledge and critical skills to bear when I write about literature, politics, popular culture and whatever else catches my eye.

My audience is different too: a journalist has to write for a section of an idealised general public; I write for a group of people drawn to my blog voluntarily. The journalist has a captive audience of readers who may or may not care about that particular writer's views or interests (they may just want the racing tips); I have to compete with and connect to millions of other amateurs, but I don't depend on blogging to make a living. This means I'm free to some extent. I don't have to whip up outrage or air extremist views simply to sell copies (Stewart Lee describes Jeremy Clarkson as cynically 'having outrageous opinions for money'), or pretend that the world is simple and comprehensible. The worst that could happen to me is that my few readers dwindles to no readers – matching my peer-reviewed publications! I'll still have a job.

I couldn't write anything without the resources of the professional media to draw on: through them I learn new things, hear about new outrages or recent books to read: from people like me they occasionally pick up new stories and new ways of thinking outside the Westminster bubble. I think of us as complementary rather than oppositional.

In my own field, social media has widened my intellectual horizons. Before its advent, new developments in literary criticism depended on the slow process of journal and book publication, and the inherent costs thereof: some academic books now cost hundreds of pounds. There are queues to get published and impossible quantities of material to get through in the quest for useful work. Now, I can go to Academia.edu or Twitter and find an expert. And unlike the old days, I know that anyone I approach is happy to talk about their work: otherwise they wouldn't be on there. The same goes for authors, most of whom are really eager to talk rather than behave like gods passing down tablets of stone and not to be questioned: Iain Banks (as @amendlocke) was particularly enthusiastic. It's a democratic space: except for some mega-celebrities such as Fry or Gaga, you're only as good as your feed: any unknown Tweeter can be as witty or informed as a professional pundit or comic.

The professional boundaries are now porous in a good way: expertise is strengthened and disseminated more widely, at least amongst those privileged enough to have social media access. I publish work in peer-reviewed journals for one professionally-accredited audience and to further what might laughably call my career: I write Vole to air ideas I'm not ready to publish, and to apply things I've learned professionally to different contexts. I'm also on here to engage with people I wouldn't ever meet: fellow professionals in my field, but also anyone with an interest in the same sort of thing: I don't see the point of doing all that research and cogitation simply to talk to the three people who'll read my journal articles.

My attitude in lectures is that I'm no brighter than my students (sometimes much less bright) but that I've had a head start in years and resources on which I can draw to help them: it's a way of recognising and countering the inherent power imbalances encountered in education. My online existence is hopefully an extension of this – a way to engage and be engaged by the outside world, to demonstrate the relevance of my niche to the wider culture, to learn new stuff and to have some fun along the way. There's also a therapeutic aspect to it: I find academic writing difficult intellectually and psychologically, and thinking aloud in this way is helpful. I also passionately feel that academics, particularly in the humanities, get a raw deal in public discourse: there's always some blowhard politician or commentator slagging off medieval history or media studies, and the more of us who engage in public debate, the better. In fact, looking at Inger and Thomson's recent paper 'Why Do Academics Blog?', my motives are pretty much exactly those of my peers. Plus, it's a way to show off, not something I do 'IRL'.

Having been through the mill a bit recently, what with the Sun on Sunday trying to get me sacked, I'm conscious of having internalised a little of the hegemonic structures' disciplinary power. Should I talk about difficult teaching sessions? Am I allowed to have political opinions, or make tasteless jokes? How far off-piste can I go without my writing sounding like a drunk know-all with the in-depth knowledge of a pub-quiz champion? It's hard to honestly and openly discuss things - which for me is the essence of social media culture - if I'm aware that anything I say is likely to be used to attack me, my peers, my institution (which has been unfailingly kind to me) and my profession.

Answers in the comments box please!

A blogger yearns to care about banal junk once more

Hi everybody, new readers and old. It's been a weird few days. I'm snowed under by work, but kept getting distracted by the antics of Michael Gove and the popular response to the piece I wrote about him yesterday. I normally get around 200 readers daily: yesterday that one piece attracted nearly 4000 of you, for which you have my thanks and apologies. The driver of all this traffic was Twitter, particularly the Re-Tweets of two of my favourite people, Graham Linehan (the TV writer) and Cory Doctorow, hero of the Utopian Techno-age.

I'm heartened to learn that a) a lot of people feel the same way as I do and b) that my jokes occasionally hit the target: the people I interact with in meatspace usually respond to my humorous forays with groans, grimaces and occasionally sharp objects delivered at considerable velocity. Perhaps Blogger is the new Reader's Digest funnies page. I also want to thank those of you who commented. I really care about blogging as a way of extending a conversation: I link as much as possible and I take comments seriously, learning a lot from support and criticism alike. Apologies too for the length of the post: I kept thinking about more stuff to put in - I'd be an editor's nightmare. Another joy of blogging: no editors.

Against my higher instincts, it was also fascinating and gratifying to sit watching the readership increase, minute by minute. Despite cherishing you all for your unique characteristics and abilities, there's something ego-fuelling about watching numbers tick upwards on a screen. I know really that these figures are arbitrary and in isolation meaningless, but I now also fully understand why they call it 'stat porn'.

However, it's back to normality today. My 15 minutes are over and despite the gratification, I'm also relieved. My regular readers will know how inconsequential my writing usually is, and you new folks will soon pick it up (or leave). That said, I gather that my piece about the university's uncritical promotion of entrepreneurial discourse, and its links to frankly unimpressive salesmen, has attracted a complaint to my superiors. I will of course, keep you posted. I see this as a matter of free speech and academic freedom. I made justifiable intellectual points: the disciplinary process is not the appropriate forum to explore them. That's what the comments box is for!

And so to today's duties. You know when I said I'd be an editor's nightmare? Well I've just submitted a grossly extended review of RS Thomas: Uncollected Poems and RS Thomas's Poems to Elsi to Poetry Wales. In my defence, they approached me to do it, and they're paying me, so I reckon they're getting value for money, at least in terms of volume: my work comes out at 2p per word. Let's not talk about quality: I've told the editors to be as blunt as they need.

Poetry's Marvin the Paranoid Android greets the day with his customary good cheer

I won't repeat my review here, but I'll say this: buy the books unless you've never read any of his work, in which case you should started with the Collected Poems. They're great works of scholarship and they deepened my understanding of RS Thomas's work and method. Thomas was a fierce Welsh nationalist, a campaigner for the language who learned Welsh late and wrote poetry only in English. He was an agnostic vicar and a hater of technology who remained fascinated by quantum physics, through which he detected a space for the God he hoped existed. He was cold, rude, searching, misanthropic and also (I think) loving and very funny. One of things I say in the review is that lines like 'the incorrigibly human / with their dogs and their fags and children… the smut and the crap re-begin' ('Thoughts by the Sea') and 'Went to the sea; stared / at the birds. Did they / stare back?' (Excursion) surely deliberately play up grumpy Thomas's reputation to comic effect.

Anyway, if you want to read more, you'll have to buy Poetry Wales. It's a great and beautifully-designed magazine, so buy it anyway.

So it's back to marking and the quiet life. Lots of dissertations and essays to read, but some fun stuff too. I'm going to a recording of Radio 4's Any Questions tonight. Not as brutally unintelligent as Question Time, but still potentially infuriating. I lead a sedentary existence, so cold fury is the only cardio-vascular exercise I get. After that, I'm off to see the Star Trek film – I've never warmed to Star Wars, and on Sunday, I've been put on the guest list for Athlete, which should be a lot of fun.

It's not all work work work. See you next week, if I haven't been sacked.

Blogging, medieval style

I've been presented with a book by a comrade returning in triumph from Japan, carefully chosen with me in mind. It's Essays in Idleness: the Tsurezuregusa of Kenko. Kenko was a 14th century monk with – as he put it – 'nothing better to do' than jot down his thoughts, observations, opinions, anecdotes, accounts of customs and ceremonies. 

But the boy Kenko isn't simply a cultural magpie. He's an artist. These short essays (like Montaigne's without the enormous self-confidence?) are jewels. Some are tiny, no more than a sentence or two. He understands the central notion of Japanese philosophy: that transience (our own and that of things he observes) confers beauty and significance. 

The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known. 

Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth.

I particularly like Essay 75:

I wonder what feelings inspire a man to complain of "having nothing to do." I am happiest when I have nothing to distract me and I am completely alone.
If a man conforms to society, his mind will be captured by the filth of the outside world, and he is easily led astray; if he mingles in society, he must be careful that his words do not offend others, and what he says will not at all be what he feels in his heart. He will joke with others only to quarrel with them, now resentful, now happy, his feelings in constant turmoil. Calculations of advantage will wantonly intrude, and not a moment will be free from considerations of profit and loss. Intoxication is added to delusion, and in a state of inebriation the man dreams. People are all alike: they spend their days running about frantically, oblivious to their insanity. 

Even if a man has not yet discovered the path of enlightenment, as long as he removes himself from his worldly ties, leads a quiet life, and maintains his peace of mind by avoiding entanglements, he may be said to be happy, at least for the time being.

It is written in Maka Shikan, " Break your ties with your daily activities, with personal affairs, with your arts, and with learning."

His essays are beautifully, elegantly simple, even in translation. He has charm, tact and style, and he's not always consistent in his opinions. Oh, and he's convinced that the world is going to hell in a hand-cart.

In short, he is or should be the patron saint of bloggers. 

Vole: Superachiever

As you may know, I'm a keen reader of Boing Boing, the essential repository of all things simultaneously geeky, nerdy, creative, intellectual, left-liberal and cool. Indeed, Boing Boing is a kind of forerunner of Plashing Vole in this regard, though I fear it lacks the mass appeal I've so carefully crafted. 

However, as an arbiter of taste, Boing Boing takes itself seriously, and its founder has kindly published '10 Tips For Building An Addictive, Compelling Website', excerpted from a modest book called The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do And How They Do It So Well. Let's see how Plashing Vole shapes up amongst the Superachievers, shall we?

1. Tap into the Zeitgeist.

I think can modestly claim to have fulfilled that condition admirably. The world has come round to wearing Doctor Martens and corduroy once more. Plashing Vole extols the joys of equal marriage, Welsh-language literary science fiction (here's a story about an armadillo having sex with an hotelier), apostrophe preservation, teasing no-hope small town journalism, posting pictures of birds or my friend Dan scowling at Nature, and bigging-up bands like Ectogram. I bought a history of street-lighting yesterday. Zeitgeist: I am in you. (Alernatively, you might believe that one can never willingly choose to be 'in the Zeitgeist': if you try, you're not there).

2. Be original. If you try to emulate a successful blog, you’ll just be a second-rate version of something already out there, and who needs that? Make the blog that doesn’t exist yet, but that you’d want to read.

As long as 'original' means cracking horse jokes with 36 hours of the story breaking, hounding my local MP for his obvious failings and moaning about my students – as well as the occasional obituary – then it's another big fecking tick for the Volester. God, this social media stuff's easy. 

3. Make the connection.

I've got readers. The stats are astonishing. Readers from several hundred yards away. And not all Googling for unmentionable sexual practices. There's a market out there for What I Reckon About Paul Uppal and the various books I've compulsively bought today. But let's not be hasty. I like knowing you're out there… rather than in here. Keep a respectable distance please. 

4. Get an attitude. Without a point of view, your blog is unfiltered mush. 

Manufactured outrage? One lump or two? I've got loads of the stuff round the back. Nobody disdains the Daily Mail with quite the hauteur, nay, froideur, of Plashing Vole. 

5. Don’t waste people’s time. People are busy. 

No they're not. I've got the site visitor stats to prove it. Anyone who comes here twice either has very low standards or an awful lot of time on their hands. (Or in the cases of Peter Rhodes and Paul Uppal, to prove to themselves that at least someone's paying attention to them). 

6. Mix it up. Posts that are easy to grasp in a couple of seconds--a bit of shopping news, helpful tips or gossip--get lots of hits and move fast. 

That's right, sheeple! You're all consumerist dummies who need your goldfish brains pandered to now and then with some patronising 'and finally' stuff because you can't cope with raw unadulterated screeds of My Genius. Here's a picture of a cat with some bad typography for you link-bait meatbags:

Happy now? Good. Now get back to Mail Online where you belong. 

7. Appeal to the novelty gene. It’s good to blog frequently, but the stuff you blog about has to be unexpected or people will lose interest.

Yeah? You reckon great works of literature, political affairs and pictures of Dan scowling at nature get boring after a while? Perhaps I should perpetrate some novelty crimes to blog about solely to keep this imaginary audience of adulterous blog-whores coming to my yard? Or replace a limb with a 3D printer for sheer futurist-comedy LOLZ. You'd like that, Boing Boing readers, wouldn't you? Yeah, everything's better with a 3D printer for all your role-playing needs. Oh, and endless stuff about Minecraft. Or, for maximum Boing Boing orgasm, a Minecraft 3D Printer. 

8. Let feedback change you. The community feedback has made me more aware of my insensitivities and the blog has evolved because of it.

Sadly, my commenters all slavishly agree with me, except the ones who don't, and who needs them? It's a mutually reinforcing circle. I read people who agree with me, nick their ideas, they read me, then we're all surprised when it turns out that meatspace where you lot live is actually dominated by horrible horrible people who wear jeggings and vote Tory. (Actually, I love getting comments and quite often find myself re-thinking my perspective). This is a good tip. Now we just need Guido Fawkes to learn from it. 

9. Think of a friend. To get over blog stage fright, when I post something I’ll often have a friend in mind who has the same sense of humor as me.

To my friend with the same sense of 'humor' as me: get help. You sick, sick puppy. And stop sending me those emails. I'll get the sack if IT ever find those pictures. Or the authorities find the grave. 

10. Keep it real. 

Keep it real? I live in a town which thinks cuisine is a pig's hide attacked with an oxy-acetylene torch and that peas should be grey. People vomit on my doorstep. Staples are a black-market commodity where I work. I agonise over fabric softener choices, enjoy ironing and bought slippers last year. I'm losing teeth, hair and keys. I had to email my landlord about a door handle yesterday. The other day, I told the students about talented typographer Eric Gill and beautiful Gill Sans. Then I told them that he had sex with sister. And his children. And his dog. Another student misread 'deserts' for 'desserts' and wrote about Shakespeare and Pudding, while another one thought David Cameron is a Labour PM. 

Keep it real? Are you mad? I'm on here to get away from all that stuff, not inflict it on you poor blighters. 

Thanks Boing Boing. I love you but I don't think we should move in together. We wouldn't last a week. 

Your daily reckon…

Hi everybody. Judging by the flood of complaints I'm not receiving, my reduced rate of blogging suits everybody just fine. The readerships stats imply that if I give up writing completely, my readership will expand exponentially. And yet I find the fortitude to carry on. Far better that I cast my Reckons on a sea of mute indifference than I expound them to my captive colleagues. What's that I hear? 'Just don't share your opinions with anyone in any format?' Preposterous!

What has mostly been detaining me today is teaching: several hours of Ben Jonson's Volpone (like Ben Johnson the athlete, Ben Jonson the playwright saw everybody as a cheat), followed by a long session on ethics and advertising. They worked very well: Volpone tries to 'gull' everyone, and so do advertisers. In fact there's a comic scene in which Volpone dresses up as Scoto the Mountebank to sell the gullible his cure-all Elixir. Most of them won't buy because they think he's a charlatan - but none of them realise that they've already fallen for his tricks.

I think the students came to enjoy Volpone. They found it hard to get into his frame of mind after studying Lear most recently, and the comic dialogue doesn't work too well on the page, but they rapidly got to grips with structure, allusion and the like. It's rare to have a seminar in which people interrupt each other, sadly, but today was one of them. The advertising session was good too - team teaching with a great colleague. The hours went far too quickly and it was harder to get the students to grasp the thematic and ethical concerns, but they're good at analysis.

The other thing that's kept me from blogging much is a severe shortage of opinions. By now, you could all pretty much construct my thoughts on anything from what I've written before. Newsnight, Savile, benefit cuts, Tories cheating in elections… you know how I feel. Need I make things explicit? Perhaps if the work ever slackens I'll widen the scope to provide ready-made opinions on a range of things. Like my friend Ben, who when challenged once had an opinion on the question 'sandstone or limestone'.

Anyway, I'm off fencing tonight for the first time in a couple of weeks, so that's bound to be painful and humiliating. Only two books in today: the Library of Wales edition of Dorothy Edwards' lost modernist masterpiece Rhapsody and Daniel Rodgers' provocative but interesting intellectual history Age of Fracture. It turns out that not only do I have four editions of Rhapsody, I already own this new edition, so if anyone wants it, say so in the comments box. First come, first served.

Et tu, Trudeau?

Humph. One of Doonesbury's long-running character arcs is the decline of print journalism and the ongoing search for a viable alternative, personified by Rick Redfern. Once a crack investigative journalist, he's been 'liberated' from print media to become a freelance blogger, to his own disgust and the mockery of pretty much everybody else. It's a tale of deprofessionalisation, proletarianisation and the decline of the public sphere - and I speak as a person who blogs rather than writes professionally. We have a credibility gap for the very good reason that we lack the time and resources required for investigative journalism.

Doonesbury nails it in today's strip: you may need to click on it to enlarge.

'…mend your speech a little, lest it may mar your fortunes''

I was thinking just now about why my blogging output has declined in recent months. There have been peaks and troughs before of course, matching my moods or my activity. Sometimes I bore myself, and resolve not to bore you into the bargain. At other times I'm simply too busy, or my head's too full of things I guess you lot wouldn't be that interested in. On the rare occasions I find time to do some research, it's in a field which is too small even to form much of a community, let alone a readership. Perhaps, too, Twitter has soaked up too many of the passing thoughts that might once have formed the kernel of a Blogging Disquisition. And there's only so much Uppal-baiting a vole can manage before anomie sets in.

But one thing I don't think I've done is fall for King Lear's line here. Cordelia listens to her sisters construct beautiful flights of dishonest rhetoric when their father asks them to enunciate their love for him in return for large tracts of his kingdom. Realising - hundreds of years before the structuralists and post-structuralists that language is a bar to communication rather than a tool - Shakespeare has her reply that she can say 'nothing', to Lear's horror: for him, love and words of love are transactional.

It's a good lesson. I shouldn't blog simply because the performance of blogging is important to me. 'I blog, therefore I am' is a fast route to becoming a bloviating bore, a disease widely known in the old media as Clarksonia Majora. In fact, I've found myself blogging less because my opinions are becoming calmer and rarer. Perhaps it's because I'm happy (happier) at work: the top level of management is no longer hostile to the values the teaching staff hold dear. There's a new sense that though we still have all sorts of problems, management and staff perceive them in similar ways. The office of the Vice-Chancellor is no longer occupied by an Emmanuel Goldstein. In short, I have been defanged: firstly by the fear of persecution under the old regime and now by kindness under the new one. It's weird not existing in a state of mutual antipathy - at least then we all knew where we stood. I bumped into the VC in the canteen the other day: not something that would ever happen under the old regime. He asked me if my employment status had been resolved. Formerly, that would have been a veiled threat (who's been reading dossiers then?), but these days it's at least possible that it indicates attention to detail and actual human interest. I can't deal with it! At this rate I'll have to hand in my Impossibilist membership card and take the walk of shame towards my very own Executive office. Oh god… the Syndicalists were right.

Even when writing about the wider world, I'm flagging. It's hard work remaining this angry about the government and its individual sleazebags: there are so many of them and there's no chance they'll ever repent. It's even harder to retain readers and communicate the righteous zeal for reform I feel when the same sickening ills repeat themselves day after day: after four years of blogging, I feel I'm becoming repetitive and monotonous. Just like my lectures… I've certainly become aware of a certain nagging predictability in my writing. Reading Simmonds' comic strip about the Weber family, I'm conscious that I've become a stock character: the frustrated bourgeois lefty Guardian reader adrift in a sea of consumerism and aggression when I'm fairly sure that there is (or used to be) more to me than that.

Perhaps blogging's a young person's game.

Anyway, enough of this moaning. What consumer goods have temporarily distracted me from the existential gloom this week? Well, I've received Phillip Pullman's new versions of Grimm Tales, C. J Sansom's Dominion. I'm vaguely planning a paper on invasion novels and the Celtic nations - see also Sheers' Resistance and Jan Morris's wonderful Our First Leader because the intersection of Celtic nationalism and imperialist German and British nationalism is always interesting: Sansom sees the Scottish Nationalists as homegrown Nazis, while the founders of Plaid Cymru were certainly close to the ultra-reactionary Catholic blood-and-soil French fascists, though the party is now a post-1968 socialist anti-colonialist body these days. Sheers' book is interesting because its tale of Welsh farmers quietly disappearing into the hills to resist echoes Owain Glyndwr's revolt: he too survived to disappear into the population and was never heard of again.

I also got Kevin Jackson's day-by-day history of modernism, Constellations of Genius, which Zoot Horn informs me is seriously good. I've been listening to the alienated machine noise of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (the ! changes place with every album release) and I've been hard at work on a lecture about Ben Jonson's Volpone.

I'm resistant to the usual blatherings about dumbing down, but looking at my old student notes, I can't work out how we managed to cover Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, Dekker, Haywood, Chapman, Wycherley, Tourneur, Kyd, Middleton, Marlowe, Webster and a whole load of other playwrights in the Drama stream, while going into similar breadth in all the other genres. Weeks of lectures about the Edinburgh Review, Steele and Addison! Now I'm teaching a module called Shakespeare, Milton and the English Renaissance: it's thoughtful and detailed, and yet we seem to cover so few texts. We haven't dumbed down, but the space seems to be shrinking. Still, one of the things I'm really determined to do is set Shakespeare's work in a literary and cultural context, rather than leaving him on a pedestal - which is why we've discussed the 'happy ending' versions more commonly performed in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example. At least a blast of Jonson will help them understand that there's more to the Jacobean stage than Shakespeare.

Anyway, back to my lecture-writing…

Superman and me

You might think I have little in common with Superman. And you'd be right. I used to have a skinny-fit Superman t-shirt (worn with a degree of irony, I should add), but I rapidly stopped being skinny and unlike Comic-Book Guy, I surmised that this wasn't a good look.

Now, however, Superman and I are colleagues. He's quit his job on the Daily Planet and become a blogger, after becoming frustrated by the limitations of print media. In particular, according to this report, the authors see Clark Kent as a man alienated from his profession by the relentless cheapening of newspaper journalism. Ironically (that word again), this occurs in the pages of a comic book. Actually, it's not ironic at all: comics have been addressing the big issues, including the erosion of the public sphere, for years.

It's a sad moment: newspapers made comic strips, and now comic strips have cast off newspapers, even though we're only talking about fiction. The point about Clark Kent being a journalist was that he was fighting for Truth and Justice in his suit and day job just as much as his alter ego was in external underpants and cape. He, Lois and Jimmy were heroes of a relatable sort, fulfilling the professional demands of their vocation. But when we think of journalism now, we don't associate it with the investigative derring-do of the Guardian or the Sunday Times Insight team (RIP): we see a bunch of sleazy blokes hacking into phones in pursuit of seedy sex scandals. We imagine Daily Mail drones putting together another set of prurient, skin-crawling euphemisms which make it OK to leer over an underage girl or a celebrity doing something outrageous like not wearing mascara. Clark's an old-fashioned guy in the best sense: he sees newspapers as part of the public sphere, holding power to account - something American and British newspapers have singularly failed to do in recent years.

I hope Clark Kent's wrong. But he's not the first fictional journalist to move into the blogosphere: Doonesbury's Rick  Redfern is finding it hard going: the Huffington Post and such sites are notoriously exploitative and still don't have the credibility associated with a newspaper (click to enlarge)

Mind you, if you think it's hard for the dispossessed journalist, what about the effect on us? I certainly wouldn't want any of you to depend either on partisan news channels or even my efforts in the field for enlightenment. (Click to enlarge). 

Blogging is important: I've pursued the egregious Grant Shapps and my local excuse for an MP, Paul Uppal, because I don't have institutional responsibilities - I'm not spending anyone's money and I don't have a deadline, but it's no substitute for a press card, an editor and a budget. Despite the heroic work of Eoin Clarke et al., we don't have the mass reach, access or credibility a decent newspaper still possesses. 

Blink and miss me

Morning everyone. As you may have noticed, my blogging schedule has slipped from the old - probably excessive - four a day to a mere couple a day. It's a combination of mental exhaustion and business. And perhaps I just don't have as many Reckons on subjects as I did when I was young. What a dreadful prospect: perhaps one day I'll wake up indifferent to everything from bad books to local Tories. On that day, I shall walk into the river with stones in my cardigan pockets like Virginia. If I can be bothered.

Today is hectic: chairing my union branch meeting, seeing students individually, writing lectures, giving lectures, hopefully managing to fit in a dutiful swim so that one day my arms reach the desk… As usual when it's like this, I fill the room with choral music. Being a Philistine of the first order, I use it functionally as an aesthetic and emotional sedative. If it's in Latin, so much the better: I can ignore the religious content and context. I can get by in Latin but only if I concentrate, which I don't intend to do.

Currently listening to Gabriel Jackson's new collection, Beyond the Stars - not quite as good as I expected it to be. Some pretty bits, some powerful bits, but fairly standard, all told. His O Sacrum Convivium setting is rather special though:

The ghost of Vole Future

To justify my reduced but still prodigious blogging output, I drank from the well of Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson, doyens of politics and social science academic blogging. Apparently I'm not wasting my time at all: I'm on the cutting edge of the public's thirst for enlightenment (though they're probably thinking about more serious academic blogging than Vole Towers).

Highlights:

One of the recurring themes (from many different contributors) on the Impact of Social Science blog is that a new paradigm of research communications has grown up – one that de-emphasizes the traditional journals route, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time academic communication in which blogs play a critical intermediate role. They link to research reports and articles on the one hand, and they are linked to from Twitter, Facebook and Google+ news-streams and communities.  So in research terms blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now.

Yeah.
Actually, over the past couple of weeks I've assisted an historian at Manchester University and discussed some joint writing with an academic at Salford, and directed someone whose name I don't even know towards some obscure German masculinity theory - all via Twitter.

This is one of the key points for me:

But in addition, social scientists have an obligation to society to contribute their observations to the wider world – and at the moment that’s often being done in ramshackle and impoverished ways, in pointlessly obscure or charged-for forums, in language where you need to look up every second word in Wikipedia, with acres of ‘dead-on-arrival’ data in unreadable tables, and all delivered over bizarrely long-winded timescales. So the public pay for all our research, and then we shunt back to them a few press releases and a lot of out-of-date academic junk.
Blogging (supported by academic tweeting) helps academics break out of all these loops. It’s quick to do in real time. It taps academic expertise when it’s relevant, and so lets academics look forward and speculate in evidence-based ways. It communicates bottom-line results and ‘take aways’ in clear language, yet with due regard to methods issues and quality of evidence. (Twitter is a huge supplementary help, in forcing academics to communicate key messages in 140 characters!)

Or it would be if I had a journal publication history to boast about and then reject. Peer-review is really important still, and speed is less of the essence in literary studies than social sciences, but I'm very conscious that my time is paid for by trash collectors (ironically), nurses and data entry clerks via their taxes, so the least I can do is show them what I'm up to, rather than hide it away in a low-print run, expensive journal. They've already paid for it.

Although I'm firmly convinced that my research interests excite precisely 1 person, with perhaps 5-6 who'd be vaguely interested, it's an academic's duty to behave as though the entire world wants to know.

The only point at which we part company is this: they think the future's in multi-author blogging.

According to some good estimates, perhaps 80 per cent or more of the single-author blogs on the web are currently inactive, or are ‘desert blogs’ that very rarely updated. And this is because people start them with high hopes, in determinedly individualistic mode, but find that hard to sustain after a while. Coming up with fresh content, day after day or week after week, is hard work for any academic, especially in the current climate where there are so many other demands on people’s time. But if you don’t post regularly, in a rhythm that is clear to readers so they know when to come back, then it can be hard to keep things going.

I agree to some extent: if there was a circle of people into the same thing as me, we could get it going, but online social networks are extensions of offline ones. There's one in my field - the CREW blog - but it's geographically determined and not updated very often. I also quite like running my Blog of Random Stuff, though it's a bit rubbish compared with the ferociously intellectual and single-minded ones written by many of the Serious Academics I follow.

So anyway, whenever you groan at my puns or moan about my attitude, remember this: you're looking at the future, pal. Say thank you.

Anyway, despite the essential nature of academic blogging, I'm having a day off tomorrow: going to That London for Olympic meetings. Deep joy.

The Great Education Blogging Survey

Alice Rose Bell is doing some interesting education research, and is collecting data about education bloggers. I'm not sure I count as one - I work in education and talk about life in an institution (or Institution) - but I'm not a dedicated 'education blogger' unlike Music for Deckchairs, Ms E-Mentor or many of the people whose work I admire. Though I am very didactic, I suppose. 

Anyway, she asks us to complete this questionnaire and pass it on. So here goes.

Blog URL: 

http://www.plashingvole.blogspot.com

What do you blog about?

Work, teaching, marking, politics, music, books, reading, politics, more politics, fencing, things that make me angry. 

Are you paid to blog? 

No. Though I like to think that it's part of my professional duty. And I certainly blog during working hours. That sticks it to the Man. 

What do you do professionally (other than blog)?

I'm a university lecturer. 

How long have you been blogging at this site?

Since October 2008. I was asked to give an MA class on new media so set up a blog and asked the participants to do the same. They refused. I carried on, partly because it saves my friends' ears and partly because I can't help lecturing people. I'll stop when you all agree with me. 

Do you write in other platforms? (e.g. in a print magazine?)

Not habitually, though I've contributed the occasional piece to journals, education newspapers and elsewhere. I tweet and get letters in the Guardian too, sometimes. 

Can you remember why you started blogging?

I was asked to give an MA class on new media so set up a blog and asked the participants to do the same. They refused. I carried on, partly because it saves my friends' ears and partly because I can't help lecturing people. I'll stop when you all agree with me. 

What keeps you blogging?

Many things make me angry. Some things make me enthusiastic. I'm a bit didactic and I like to have my say, even though I have only a small audience. I'd like to think I'm entertaining (and/or annoying). Some of my tastes and interests are quite marginal, and a blog lets me communicate with people who share them. 

Do you have any idea of the size or character if your audience? How?

I've a basic metrics analysis link: I get between 150-200 hits per day, depending on what I've written and what time of year it is (academic holidays are a low point, so many of my readers are colleagues or students of mine). Some pieces get tweeted round and views rocket. Other days the tumbleweed rolls round. My readers are mostly in the UK, with a strong minority in the US and then a regular group from the rest of the world. 

What’s your attitude to/ relationship with people who comment on your blog?

Most commenters seem to be regular readers. I'd like more comments actually - it implies engagement and interest. I usually respond to comments and frequently alter posts in the light of them. I can never tell what's going to attract a lot of comments - it's never the ones I think should get people going. 

Do you feel as if you fit into any particular community, network or genre of blogging? (e.g. schools, science, education, museums, technology)

Education and humanities. But I'm really a generalist - I admire those bloggers who've built an audience by single-minded devotion to a particular field or subject. 

If so, what does that community give you?

Developing links with other academics has given me plenty to read, and occasional publication on other sites and in the press. I haven't collaborated with anyone yet, but I'm hopeful. There's always a lot of support - emotional and professional - available. .

What do you think are the advantages of blogging? What are its disadvantages/ limitations?

It's addictive and easy - I find myself rushing to blog rather than embarking on a lecture or a paper. It's hard to know whether you're actually contributing to the sum of human knowledge or pleasure. I do like the communal aspects, and think there is a degree of social capital accruing to blogging. Negotiating the personal/professional boundaries is a bit tricky too. Then there's the matter of performative identities - I was amused and intrigued to find that some of my readership believed that I am female. Getting tone of voice right is also trickier online, partly because we read and write differently online: I'm not sure people know where it fits generically yet. 

I like the speed of blogging: perhaps it fosters off-the-cuff thinking, but in many ways, intelligent commentators reacting quickly is necessary in the current political and cultural environment. The public sphere has been widened from a tight circle of professional commentators to a wider sphere of (mostly white, educated, western, anglophone but often contradictory) commentators who can at least provide instant feedback with alternative perspectives to that of the élites.

Do you tell people you know offline that you’re a blogger? (e.g. your grandmother, your boss)

A lot of people do, though I've tried my best to keep my meatspace name off the site, though not entirely successfully. I used to be more explicit about my workplace and its tensions, but I've rowed back from that rather.