I know the issue of blogging by folks of more “mature” years has come up at Nature and elsewhere many times. Usually this is attributed to generation gap, lack of technology awareness, and unwillingness to share — all of which is partially true, but I’m rapidly realizing there’s a lot more to it than that.
As much as I’d like to be a frequent blogger, the demands on my time are such that it is difficult to make this a regular part of my life. As most of the readers on this site will know, the outside world has very little idea of what real professors and scientists do. I cannot tell you how often I’m asked “but what do you do during the summer” by those who assume teaching is the primary thing in my life (oh for those halcyon junior faculty days when, in fact, teaching was something I could give the attention it deserved!). Those who work in, and even more those who run, a research group know how silly this is. Our real work involves advising, publishing, funding (and funding and funding and funding), service commitments, travel and speaking (way too much) and on and on. My administrator is fond of telling people that her boss works a 60+ hour week, and that doesn’t include weekends!
And now consider the time needed to simply get something like this out — this week we have a conference deadline, so I’ve been helping edit my students’ papers, last week I was in Washington DC on a “reverse site visit” to present some proposed research to NSF, next week I’m off to give a keynote at a conference in Spain. I spend hours a day in front of a computer screen, my email alone can take a few hours a day, and to blog for fun at midnight, as I’m doing now, is not always how I want to spend my time. But it isn’t because I don’t want to do it, or don’t understand the importance, rather it’s that time management is something that has gotten more and more complicated as my lab has grown.
I’ve noticed lately that I twitter in bursts, Facebook in bursts, and yes, blog in bursts. I also write papers, grants and do most other things in bursts – I do have colleagues who manage to keep things more even, but I notice that as we all get more advanced in career, this seems to get harder and harder.
I suspect that some folks in the younger generation can do more thinking and typing faster, and understand the level of formality for blogging more than many of the folks my age. But I think there’s also a tendency to underestimate the effort that goes into producing blogs and such in general.
So there is definitely work to do — we need to help senior scientists understand the importance of blogging and informal communications in science. On the other hand, there also has to be an understanding that effort is effort, and finding time to balance all the things that must be balanced means that whatever communication mechanism we’re talking about, the senior scientist sometimes need to focus inwardly on our research groups (who do you think writes the grants), our research communities (who do you think runs the professional organizations), our research venues (who are the senior editors on the journals and conference chairs) and then to the wider community (including blogging).
So I suspect that eventually we will see that as more and more science bloggers advance career-wise, we will need to explore new models of how best to make blogging (and other social media) work without derailing so many of the other things that are making science work. Just my thought for the day as I run out for yet some more meetings, then head out to my next set of travels…
I think the “bursts” you describe, along with “continuous partial attention”, are the trends of today. I am old (perhaps not quite describing myself as in your tag ;-), but certainly old). I’m not a practicing scientist but I deal with scientists’ written output of various kinds (research papers, reviews, editorials, essays, letters to the editor, etc) so I am used to reading and engaging with rather thoughtful articles. Then came the seismic cultural shift of blogging, requiring a new form of reading (RSS/filtering/keeping calm;-) ) and writing (plus all the participatory aspects). Now, these “microblogging” services have all caught on – if I look at Twitter I see that people post in bursts of activity, as you say, then go quiescent. My teenage children both started blogs when I first did, but it did not last long for them – I think because other forms of online communication (short, sharp bursts) fit better with their and their contemporaries’ life-experience, which is in context of this “always partly on, continuous partial attention” world.
PS, also picking up on another aspect of your post – agree with you on the busy life of seniors, but not just scientists! Lots of people have jobs for which there aren’t enough hours in the day. Blogging is probably the sphere of those who have time on their hands, for whatever reason (eg retired or connected with their business, or self-promotion, or hobby — beats washing the car!). For scientists specifically, as many discussions here and elsewhere have concluded, blogging needs to have some perceived usefulness for it to be seen as anything more than trivial narcissism/moaning by the majority.
Great post, James – and interesting replies, as always, from m’esteemed colleague Dr M. C. of Kingston-upon-Thames. I think there are always hours in the day for things you want to do, if you want to do them badly enough. On the other hand there is the question of facility . As my friends and colleagues know, I write more quickly than the speed of thought and am rather careless of the consequences. The kind of writing I do (random elliptical musing) rather lends itself to blogging, so for me it’s usually something I can fit in when I have a spare twenty minutes between tasks. But lately I notice that Life™ has prevented even me from blogging, because the ideas I have will require some further thought, research and checking, and other tasks (such as Work™ ) take precedence. All the scientists I know are sticklers for accuracy and taking pains – things that tends to hinter the free consciousness stream of blogging (I have a new term for this – Bewusstseinstrahlung. Good, eh?). And sometimes it’s just easier to tweet.
Great post. I think though that the importance of having senior academic scientists blog is reinforced by the fact that it is the secnior scientists who do write the grants, help organize and run professional groups sit on committees etc. These are important parts of Science for everyone to hear about. In particular because there are skills needed to do these things and not every student has access to a mentor willing to talk about those aspects of being a scientist. Furthermore, by having dialogs about those responsibilities we (as a community) may come up with solutions to relieve the amount of time that those activities take up. Finally, when people are more aware with the time commitments that are required of senior members of academic institutions they may fully understand why summer does not equal vacation.
Nice post James. But I have to say, it’s not just “senior” scientists who might find time an issue. I have been toying with the idea of starting up a blog, but between trying to fit in lab work, writing papers/grants, and trying to be a good dad… the thought of one more thing on my to do list is exhausting.
I guess my focus is more on trying to start up my own lab (and get my family back home to some sunshine) – which coincidently is partly the subject matter of said proposed blog.
Yeah, a nice post and discussion. Over here we’re doing our bit to encourage our more senior colleagues to actively participate and contribute their experience using the available online media – our most senior contributor on record so far is 82 I think. I’m secretly rather pleased about that.
I completely concur with what Darren has to say, from experience. I particularly wanted to use my NN blog for science (and not just about being a scientist) – to improve my ability to communicate my specialised field to a non-specialised audience. Finding the time to translate technical talk to something more general has been a major problem for me, but I’m still hoping to manage eventually!
Blogging (both reading and writing) can take up a lot of time. Some strategies I see for myself to make this an efficient use of time include microblogging (Twitter, FriendFeed), blogging as part of my job (I’m thinking about starting an official blog at my institution) and blogging more about my area of research (for me Twitter currently works best for that).
@Darren: do it!
I see a lot of people apologising to their readers for long blog absences, but really, screw ‘em, write what you want to write, when you want to write it, and don’t worry if you miss a week or two. Everyone uses RSS so your readers will still be there when you come back! I’m in a reduced frequencly blogging groove right now, but next week that might change and I might write 5 posts – that’s just the way it happens for me, I don’t want to force it, so I just wait for something to pique my interest!
Besides, shorter posts get more comments!
Henry said _further thought, research and checking, _
Yes, that is the bugbear. Very occasionally I have been able to knock out a post quite quickly but more often it takes me forever. I think that’s because I like to write about things I don’t really know a lot about so have to convince myself I’m not writinf utter rubbish.
I take my cue from Peter Murray-Rust at last year’s Science Blogging conference who told us not to worry about gaps in blogging. Just do it when you can.
What they all said. And “they all” just saved me a lot of time relative to this morning, when I meant to respond as the first commenter…
I think that’s because I like to write about things I don’t really know a lot about so have to convince myself I’m not writinf utter rubbish.
Never stopped me.
Have been trying to find time all day to read this and comment. This topic has been on my mind of late but thoughts – are still ill-formed. Discipline. Discipline.
Was impressed to discover this week that an uncle of mine, who lives in the US, is a senior blogger. Not about science, though. Mostly about “interpretations of the religious provision of the First Amendment”. He’s a bishop and historian. And he seems to find the time. Damn.
Thanks all for the comments – Stephen, I think yours is a good lead in to my response to many others — I think that most people’s work lives are not as “bursty” as a scientists – that’s not to say they’re all the same, they’re not, people are incredibly busy all over, but when I teach, the hardest thing for me is to create the space to be in the same place at the same time for a number of weeks in a row (and it is hard!) – Many years ago I asked my advisor “how do I get on program committees and such” and he said “soon you’ll be asking me how to get off of them” – he was right (Eugene Charniak, a very, very smart man) — and it seems that if one is successful in science, that at each level you’re asked to start doing more, and when you learn to say “no” to one thing, the things people ask you to do tend to become things you havent learned to say no to yet (for example, I rarely give invited talks at workshops anymore, but now I get asked to keynote conferences, which is much harder to say no to)
- anyway, this isn’t to gripe – it’s more to think about how one could fit this sort of activity better into ones life – fwiw, I do twitter (@jahendler, although in bursts) and find it much easier to do that then to get my blog entries out (I also find I used to write sonnets and now I write haikus :) )cheers
JH
Stephen
Ask, and ye shall receive. Apparently his boss is more understanding than ours…
Nice description also of my decreasing blog post output. And yet again, as so often, it boils down to incentives. At the end of the day, funding, teaching and publishing are the bread-and-butter tasks and everything else comes after that without a change in our incentive structure.
Bjorn, I think you make a very important point – as the incentives for blogging start to go beyond “kudos” and into more significant “promotion and tenure” statistics (perhaps someday “blog hits” on a “significant site” will be able to be used on one’s vita like citations) we’ll certainly see more scientists blogging – hmm, I hereby claim “Hb-index” (Hendler’s blog index) as a citable statistic
- soon as I work out the details I’ll let people know :)A certain acquaintance of mine, when leaving active bench-science and moving into Information Architecture listed his Nature Network blog and it’s “stats” on his CV. I did the same thing on mine when I left the bench and moving into my current…idiom…
I’ve been blogging for 6 years now, and have noticed that output waxes and wanes. I’ve often thought about trying to track it and look for corollaries, but of course, if I was doing that I’d also blog about it.
A lot of my blog posts come when I have random thought/inspiration, like Henry said, and I can dump 1000 words out in 15 minutes at my desk. Sometimes that gets saved as a text document to be read and check, but often it goes live and will be modified as appropriate as time goes on. I love that about blogging too: I can edit and create information flow depending on feedback. The forum, Nature Network vs. other blogs sites, of course, depends on the content.
Sometimes, though, I find I actually blog more when I’m busy. not because I’m procrastinating, but because my brain is running at 110%. Times like now, when I’m between grants & manuscripts and things are ticking along for a month or two, I find it hard to get motivated to write!! Except for long and rambling blog comments…
Except your acquaintance knows how to use apostrophes correctly.
Sorry, cheap dig. :)
Björn, you’ve hit the nail on the head.
I should have added that proofing is for the birds too :)
The whole blogs vs. twitter thing is also interesting – check out Stephen’s post (hmm, that should be a trackback, but no clear way to link like that here) – I recently noticed that I tend to blog when I’m in a stable environment (and esp. when I have more important things to do qua Ian’s comment)and that I twitter when I’m on the move — hmm, since that covers a great percentage of my time, probably explains why I stopped Facebooking some number of years back (besides, Facebook is soooooo 2008!)