In general, it seems the academic community is warming up to the idea of blogs as complementary to scholarship. The benefits are obvious enough -- blogs can potentially reach a wider audience and provide feedback on new ideas quicker than the traditional system of private correspondence, conferences, and peer reviewed publication.
There are certain fields -- mathematics, sociology, literature, poetry, philosophy -- for which these benefits seem decisive. Although a scholar in these fields will still want to publish in addition to blogging, once a critical mass of scholars in these fields are publishing their work online, the community within the field will increasingly find the Internet to be a more convenient medium for exchanging ideas. Each scholar has control over their own printing press. Going from expression to wide publication takes zero time rather than months or years.
There are other academic fields, however, for which the benefits seem less decisive. These fields include, for example, experimental physics, engineering, and medicine. These fields, by comparison, are driven more strongly by new empirical results. Empirical studies are time consuming, and take months or years to complete. The time scale of reporting cannot be shorter than the time scale of information gathering.
By the way, neither group of fields is entirely empirical or theoretical. It's just that, on balance, the first group is more theoretical and the second, more empirical. The two groups need each other, and the growth of both fields will be limited by how much information (both data and theory) is shared between them.
In terms of raw numbers, I think the off-line population of the second group is actually much larger than the first group because the second group is generally the group that society calls upon to assist in solving its problems. This is the academic group that has the most direct impact on the rest of society, and its number bears that out. By contrast, the first group (of theorists) probably has a more lasting impact on the way that academia evolves independent of society. The big successes in the first group percolate out of academia through the second group, and eventually change society as a whole. Marx changed the face of the world with his ideas. The Wright Brothers changed the face of transportation. Both theory and practice were necessary to both; but their day to day lives looked quite different, and their influence on society over time reflects those differences.
At the moment, it seems that the first group is going to grow much faster than the second group into the blogosphere. Over the short run, this isn't a big deal. There are still plenty of sources of data available online. The problem is that many of these sources are journalists from newspapers and magazines that are on the verge of bankruptcy. Moreover, very few of these sources of data are put together using the careful methodology that one might find in a typical empirical study by an economist or sociologist, for example. In effect, the Internet is crammed with lots of theorists analyzing a tiny amount of data that is from comparatively unreliable sources. The Internet is a bit like our consciousness in that sense.
What can we do to bring more data online, and keep it organized but accessible? The people who specialize in gathering data now have little incentive to put it onto the Internet when the existing mechanisms for sharing that information are just as good or better, and make it easier to predict whether and how recognition and reward will be distributed tot he gatherers?
People rave about the importance of openness on the Internet. But already I'm beginning to see that the evolution of property rights will be no different on the Internet than it was on any frontier of the past. To encourage people to share valuable goods with others, we have to define and enforce property rights a contracts. Attribution rights to content distributed over the Internet is going to become more and more important as larger and larger portions of the population move online. If we want to make the highest quality content available at the lowest cost to users, then exclusive rights and privately adaptable rules for allocating them are going to be necessary.
Else the owners of the most valuable content are simply going to keep it offline.
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