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I’ve been thinking about writing something on this for a while (I’m finding that I’m mentally writing blog posts to work out ideas, but once I write it in my head I don’t bother to write it out when I’m actually at a computer), but it took Alex Pang to actually jolt me into doing it.

Alex writes:

…will [blogging] matter in the academic job market?

At a micro-level, it might: graduate students who blog might find that they have higher professional profiles than those who don’t, and perhaps have become more fluid, faster writers. But at a macro level, I suspect it won’t.

I’ve been wondering about this quite a bit lately, and on a broader level wondering what I should do with this space once I hit the job market in earnest this fall. There aren’t really any precedents to follow here: I can think of hardly any PhD students in my field who blog, much less who have been out on the market while doing so…hell, the closest thing I can come up with are those (usually anonymous) columns that show up in the Chronicle every so often.

So, should I be keeping a low profile here? Considering the information that’s already out there, plus the links to my personal site on the right, my cover’s pretty much blown – there’s no chance of the anonymity of Invisible Adjunct, for example.

Then again, it’s not really anonymity that I’m concerned with – it’s more the management of my identity as I go through a job search. I’ve read my Goffman, and I’m well aware that the different self-presentations that I’d offer to my family, my friends, my colleagues, my advisors, and prospective employers all could come crashing together in this space. As of yet, this hasn’t been a problem, in large part because I haven’t tackled an issue in which I’ve emphasized different aspects of myself.

To be blunt: right now, I’m open to both academic and non-academic jobs. There, I’ve outed myself. Both worlds seem appealing, each for its own reason, which I’ll go into some other time. The point here is that even this simple declaration is something that could get me in trouble if some hiring committee happens to read it…I’ve seen enough job searches to realize that one person asking “Is he serious about an academic job?” or “Maybe we should focus on other candidates who’re more devoted to academia?” could mean the difference between being short-listed (or at least long-short-listed) and the circular file. There’s a part of me that feels that I’m in a precarious position, straddling multiple possible disciplines (I might apply to departments from History to Sociology, Communication to American Studies, not to mention the Writing in the Disciplines positions or the possibilities in Information Technology areas, and those are just the academic jobs!) – that part of me reasons that I’d be better off micro-managing my identity, tailoring it to each job like a cover letter.

On the other hand, there’s a small part of me that thinks, essentially, screw it. Let’s have some fun with this, and put it all out there. Let any potential employers/departments/etc. who decide to look up my website or Google my name come across all the different hats that I wear over the course of a different day, all the different projects I work on and all the different interests that I pursue. I wonder if that would make me more appealing or less so.

In the end, of course, any such move toward “openness” would just be one more attempt at identity-construction – rather than being the social historian of technology, or the web coder, I’d just be the guy who’s interdisciplinary, and who flaunts it in order to distinguish himself from the rest of the pack. Either way, this blog is another way to try and market myself to employers. No way around that…the question is how I can make it work in my favor, rather than making me seem like a dilettante.

Alex also writes:

But most of academic life proceeds on the assumption that you already DO know everyone you need to know. The indices of social and professional status are very well-understood: they’re pedigree, publications, public performance, and buzz. As a graduate student, your identity gets defined by where you’re doing your Ph.D., who you’re working with, what you’re working on, and a general sense of how good your work is.

The last sentence is definitely true – though there are several different ways I can spin myself, my committee is still made up of Ron Kline, Bruce Lewenstein and Trevor Pinch, and I’ll have the same conference papers and publications. On the other hand, it’s the quality at the tail end of the preceding sentence that seems relevant here: “buzz“. The sociology of the academic job market would be a fascinating study in its own right, and one chapter would most definitely be on “buzz”: who’s the hot candidate this year, who’s promising, who’s got the inside track on the most-coveted job (this seems particularly relevant in a field like science studies, where there are maybe a handful of jobs posted in the discipline itself any given year). So, I wonder, how might a blog be used to create buzz?

Interestingly, this is much more obvious outside the academy – my friend Kevin Smokler has talked about how one can use the web (and blogs in particular) to build and enhance one’s reputation as a writer, &tc: in short, to create buzz. While I’d agree with Alex that academics “live in a small world that’s already very efficiently sorted and classified its members,” I’d argue that one might benefit from shaking that world up by importing strategies from other cultures (in particular something like freelance writing) rather than strictly playing along with its norms. I’ve had this on the brain tonight: I’m reading Rosalind Williams’ Retooling, which deals quite a bit with issues of professional identity and technological change that seem to bear on the notion of blogs and academia.

In the end, I don’t have any answers yet, so I’ll throw the question out to any academics/postacademics/nonacademics reading this: short of getting Instapundited or Slashdotted, how do you think I should use this blog as I’m applying for jobs and figuring out what to do post-graduate school?

As for me, I’m going to go get some sleep. More on this in the next few days, as I mull it over myself…

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