Social Media and China

I've been in China for the last week working on student and faculty exchanges with several universities in Shanghai (especially Fudan University) and Hangzhou, which meant no access to Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, and a variety of other social media. If you know what you're doing, it is apparently easy to get around the government blocks, but what I found is that everyone uses an app called WeChat (though apparently the government is cracking down on that too).

With this absence, I realized how social reading the news has become for me. I don't read anything for the simple act of knowing, but rather immediately think about sharing it and thinking aloud about it. I was still able to access Feedly, but found myself frustrated because I couldn't use Twitter to comment on them. I would see and experience things in China I found interesting, but then could share them only with the small group I was traveling with.

Frequently I hear mention of people "unplugging" from social media for some specified amount of time, which is framed as a virtue. I don't get the logic. Lacking social media doesn't mean I revert to some nostalgic past of "real" communication. Instead, it means I am less social, which is an unpleasant feeling.

Academic Blogging and Mixtapes

In response to the ISA controversy, Marc Lynch compares hip hop and mixtapes to academic blogging, an unlikely sort of endeavor that ultimately works. Here are two notable paragraphs

That's what academic bloggers have been doing for the last decade: ignoring hierarchies and traditional venues and instead hustling on our own terms. Instead of lamenting over the absence of an outlet for academics to publish high-quality work, we wrote blogs on the things we cared about and created venues like the Middle East Channel and the Monkey Cage. Academic blogs and new primarily online publications rapidly evolved into a dense, noisy, and highly competitive ecosystem where established scholars, rising young stars, and diverse voices battled and collaborated.

.... 

Blogs and other online publications should be seen as the equivalent of the mixtapes in the hip-hop world.Mixtapes emerged in hip-hop, far more than in most other musical genres, as a way for rising artists to gain attention, build a fan base, display their talents, and battle their rivals. Sometimes they would be sold at shows or on websites, but more often they would be given away for free on the Internet. Mixtapes would often feature tracks that weren't quite ready for prime time or were recorded over somebody else's beat, but demonstrated the quality and originality of the artist's vision.

This is a nice way of thinking about blogging because it captures both the nature of blogs and the periodic establishment reaction to them.

It is amazing to think about how slowly academia moves. I've been blogging for eight years, which is a pretty long time, but still I was very late to the game. Academic blogging goes back a long way, yet too many professors still view it as some newfangled and potentially dangerous activity. I've long since taken for granted what blogging is all about, which makes it easy to forget that there are plenty of others who feel it's a threat, or a waste of time, or an exercise in insulting others.

Instead, like a mixed tape, you put things in exactly the way you want them, communicating exactly as you want, which makes your own research that much more enjoyable. It's rough and people can get annoyed by it--even criticize it--but it's all yours, and you can put more polished work in other, more traditional, venues.

Tabling ISA Proposal

So the International Studies Association has tabled the ridiculous proposal to censor journal editor blogging. Something about this whole episode has been bouncing around my mind and I am trying to sort it out. Basically, there seems a disconnect between "ISA" as a big organization and actual people who write policy. As far as I know, no one has ever said anything about who wrote it, and what prompted them to do so. I don't mean this in terms of calling them out or shaming them, but rather getting at the root of why this happened in the first place.

This prompted a very quick Twitter exchange with Steve Saideman, where I asked if bureaucracy was part of the problem, and he thought no.

Perhaps "bureaucracy" isn't exactly the right word, but I feel like instead of responsibility, or open discussion, the issue takes on Robert's Rules of Order-speak: it is "tabled" and "sent to committee." It may just go die in committee. Of course that has nothing to do with Steve, who made an admirable and successful effort to draw public attention to the proposal.

I'm glad he was successful and it is going away, but a bigger question persists: what are the characteristics of academics who believe blogging is unprofessional? Why do they believe that? What type of discussion would be optimal to bridge the obvious gap? I hope those sorts of questions are addressed rather than just having it tabled and sent to committee to die.

Censoring Journal Editor Blogs

This is unbelievably stupid. And I mean unbelievably. The International Studies Association has proposed that journal editors should not be allowed to maintain their own blogs because it is unprofessional.

Proposal from the Executive Committee to the Governing Council on Changes to ISA’s code of conduct policy

Background

The Preface to the ISA Code of Conduct states: “The purpose of this document is to provide an authoritative statement regarding the expectations for professional conduct for all who participate in ISA meetings and conventions, and it will be especially useful for those who are new to the profession and/or the ISA. It is borne out of the ISA’s commitment to maintaining and promoting a professional environment at its meetings and other organized activities, and it is guided by the conviction that the advancement of knowledge flourishes most readily in an atmosphere of constructive debate in which all members treat one another with dignity and respect.”

The issue of “maintaining and promoting a professional environment” is particularly pertinent to the material that is made public through the use of blogs. It is the sense of the ISA executive committee that ISA’s Code of Conduct applies not only to individual members but also to ISA publications. The committee believes that any connection between blogs and ISA journals should be severed or separated. There should be no connection between independent/personal blogs and ISA journals.  

Proposal

The Executive Committee requests that the Governing Council of the ISA add language to ISA’s code of conduct policy that will state the following:  “No editor of any ISA journal or member of any editorial team of an ISA journal can create or actively manage a blog unless it is an official blog of the editor’s journal or the editorial team’s journal. This policy requires that all editors and members of editorial teams to apply this aspect of the Code of Conduct to their ISA journal commitments. All editorial members, both the Editor in Chief(s) and the board of editors/editorial teams, should maintain a complete separation of their journal responsibilities and their blog associations. Adoption of this policy requires either stepping down from any such editorial responsibilities, or removal of affiliation with, and any participation in, external blogs for the duration of ISA editorial duties.”

Holy crap, who wrote this nonsense?? The idea of censoring people for no good reason should not ever make it this far anywhere, but certainly not academia. This attitude toward blogging is archaic and uninformed.

Here is Steve Saideman, then again, Will Moore, and Dan Drezner.

Blogging Plagiarism

Thanks to Otto for pointing this out to me on Twitter. A History Ph.D. student at the University of Liverpool recounts how her blog was plagiarized.

In June this year I was sent a link to an article on a tabloid newspaper website titled Edwardian Rogues Gallery, by a friend and former lecturer, suggesting I might find it of interest. When I opened the article, I was surprised and horrified, to find a post I had published on my blog just weeks earlier staring back at me, with somebody else's name placed at the top. Worse still, I found the same post reproduced on other sites, under the name of more authors. 

At first, my overriding emotion was that of disbelief. Although I knew that some news organisations were far from scrupulous in their reporting, I had always assumed this would stop short of reproducing others work without permission or acknowledgement. But after taking to Twitter to get some more opinions, I was saddened to hear that, yes, this can happen, and yes, it happens all the time.

Plagiarism sucks. Period. I am glad, though, that ultimately she says she is not giving up blogging, because I definitely think the benefits outweigh the risks (though a quick Google finds her blog here and it has not been updated since July 1, 2013). This seems rare to me, but maybe it is more rampant in some fields than others. And I wonder whether it happens more to graduate students than to professors. And to women more than men.

For some reason, she does not link either to her blog or to the offending piece, which I found here, so you can see for yourself.

I am trying to think about what I would do if I were in her shoes, which is also tough because I am not a graduate student, which is obviously a much more tenuous position. But if you've developed an audience, and it certainly sounds like she has, then you make this situation as viral as possible, with as many links and named names as possible. Shame can work, and with any luck the Guardian piece contributes. I understand that is cold comfort to this graduate student, who is trying to develop an original line of work and get it disseminated without harassment. I wish there was some other way to address such problems without having to hire lawyers.