Right now, the scholar who is churning out publications in his or her field is typically churning them out within a tightly circumscribed loop of circulation. They have an audience whose composition is understood, who will read and use the scholar’s production in predictable and controlled ways, and will grant the publishing scholar a predictable incremental amount of reputation capital for his/her production.

Move into a blog format, and the circulations of what you’re doing change enormously, at least potentially. Those conversations (this is especially acute in the humanities) which are now confidentally sustained between two parties who control the terms of their mutual discourse and authenticate each other’s way of writing and thinking are suddenly strongly disrupted, laid open to many new voices and scrutinies.

That seems like a good thing to me, and yet, it’s not all good. Some scholarly work really does require a very high fidelity signal between two carriers which is easily disrupted by noise on the channel, does require a focused conversation between specialists. I think the problem in the humanities is that a large number of conversations that should and could be taking place in plain sight, between scholars and wider publics, are misclassified as conversations only specialists can have. But the reclassification of scholarly work through blogging should still properly leave space for conversations which are substantive, contemplative and highly specialized, with no burden to be communicative in a wider or more rapidly mobile context.