Found this while browsing through Chez Nadezhda's del.icio.us fresh produce, aptly billed as "news, analyses & conversations or an embarassment of niches." She has it listed as "Tony Cordesman on the problems of metanarratives in military history." I recognized it as my own entry of October 23.
With so many new readers who missed the original post and don't have time to browse through the War Historian archive, I figure it's worth calling to your attention.
The entry introduces and comments upon a lecture given on October 19 by Anthony Cordesman at the Kennedy School of Government. His title was "Iraq, Grand Strategy, and the Lessons of Military History." It could equally well have been called:
Tony Cordesman on the Military Metanarrative
Blog Them Out of the Stone Age: Toward A Broader Vision of Military History and National Security Affairs
3 comments:
Hi Nadezhda! Thanks so much for writing. I've been following some of the exchanges about the costs and benefits of academic blogging, but I haven't seen the essay you mention. I'll go take a look.
One of the things that crops up in discussion is the disconnect between those who "get it"--that blogging can be in direct support of one's professional pursuits, energizing the blogger and driving them toward their goal; and those who don't--which at this point seems to include most of the academy.
Now and again you see expressed fears about what one's colleagues may think, and of course what one's colleagues think is often enough, "This doesn't fit my understanding of what academics should be doing. Therefore it is bad and must be discouraged."
I am sure many of my colleagues will see all this blogging as a dangerous distraction from "real" academic work. It's sheer baloney. If you look around at people like Esther MacCullum-Stewart and What a Lovely War, Chris Anderson and The Long Tail, "a public diary on the way to becoming a book," and in a real sense Tom Barnett in Thomas P. M. Barnett Weblog, you see people using blogs as a kind of free-writing tool. Barnett in particular is like a monkey on crack cocaine, and I mean that in a good way! I'd love to be a fifth as productive as he is these days.
So on the one hand academe says, Produce. But on the other it implies, don't unleash your creativity in ways that make us uncomfortable. Ten years ago if you spent days surfing the web people looked at you funny. Now it's routine for academics to do that--though a surprising number can barely handle e-mail. Today blogging is considered sorta flakey. Five years from now, advisors will require their grad students to blog. Academics talk as if they're cutting edge, but man, talk about a Non-Integrating Gap.
I'm still clueless about del.icio.us, so I appreciate the heads up about its capabilities.
I have a question about the The Truth Laid Bear: The Blogosphere Ecosystem.
If, say, 2,000 of us "reptiles" and "amphibians," etc. agreed to link to an "insignificant microbe," couldn't we vault it into "higher being" status? I mean, as long as these were bona fide internal links, isn't that possible? I have a reason for asking; it has to do with the postcolonial military history post.
Oh, hey! I did see this essay by Burke. In fact I printed it out so I could read it more easily--and so I could give it to my Gap colleagues if need be.
I concur that "gaming" the blogosphere is a bad idea; I just wanted to know if I'd hit upon a workable strategy for ramping up a blog site's ranking in the The TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem. Just need it for thought experiment purposes, and was afraid the idea wouldn't "pop" if the readers instantly saw that such a strategy was impossible.
Re the rest of it, it seems to me that we're in the kind of fix these days where we as a society can use all the constructive engagement we can get. Your ideas track well with mine in that regard. And I suspect the reason we're both so intrigued by Barnett's PNM is not because we think it's correct so much as that it makes a great template for engagement. He's a genius at "branding" concepts so that you can convey them economically. I discovered this firsthand today when I showed the map to a friend of mine. He'd never heard of it before and in five minutes he had the major concepts down--functioning core, non-integrating gap, etc. PNM lays out the component issues in such a way that you can address them clearly and directly. You don't wind up talking past each other. Unless, of course, that's all you want to do. But I think enough people realize that it's time to take politics seriously. The Jon Stewart guest spot on Crossfire made such an impact, I think, because he said something many people thought was well overdue.
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