Marginal Notes Triggered by the U.C. Davis Seminar on Historical Scholarship and New Media

The U.C. Davis history department says that it is going to turn our panel from yesterday into a podcast. The URL is going to be somewhere...

Sitting there, I began thinking about the uses and abuses of pseudonymity. It allows you to:

• Pollute the stream of discourse by plopping an idea into it that you would rightfully be ashamed to say in your own voice.
• Clarify the stream of discourse by getting an idea into it that would normally be suppressed because of the social sanctions that would be applied to you if you said it in your own voice.
• Allow you to speak not as your idiosyncratic self but as the reprsentative of some larger class or interest: "A Lady of Quality"; "A Concerned Citizen of California."
• To distance yourself from what you are saying: to put forward a point of view that you believe ought to be considered in the discourse but that you do not want to completely support.
• To provide others with a little breathing space by allowing them to pretend that it was not you who said it.

It made me wonder about the Federalist: why do Madison and Hamilton (and Jay) think that their prose will have more weight as the considered opinion of a thoughtful public citizen than as the view of one of Virginia's and one of New York's leading politicians?

Other notes:

• Some history graduate students seem unduly alarmed--that people will steal their ideas, that people will hold what they write online against them, and more generally that participating in freewheeling intellectual exchanges in a forum in which nobody knows that you are a dog (or a graduate student) will cause them to be classified as insufficiently deferential to established hierarchies, inclined to rock the boat, and hence not worth hiring.
• Or are they unduly alarmed? Jobs are scarce and criteria of excellence are in dispute, so one black mark assessed by one member of a hiring committee may be deadly.
• Ari Kelman claimed that the misspellings in his comments were an hommage to Matthew Yglesias.
• People assure me that I should not be scared of meeting Ogged in person. Online he may be pure unshackled id, but in person he is polite and charming--a veritable baa lamb.
• Given all the other things that were on Scott Eric Kaufman's calendar for yesterday, we are very grateful that he showed up at our panel.
• Scott Eric Kaufman has had great success in thirty-person classes by using class weblogs as warmup exercises for the seminars.
• A cryptic note: "Josh Micah Marshall--blogging too much like a late 20th C. cable channel?" I presume this means that somebody (Ari Kelman?) said that Josh Micah Marshall wishes for a medium in which he could be more thoughtful and yet keep his audience. But it may not. My problem is that when the adrenaline is flowing long-term memory formation stops...
• "I don't remember whether this quote is from a post or a paper." "Given the language and the sentence structure, it's definitely from a paper."
• Tedra Osell: Habermasian enabling fictions as noble lies...
• Scott Eric Kaufman: graduate student research life as very poor preparation for scholarly discourse; weblogging as far superior in a number of ways.
• Memo to self: have to figure out how to tag ideas with "Scott Eric Kaufman" or "Adam Kotsko"; current mental tagging system of "something said online by a really smart and thoughtful humanities graduate student" not sufficient.
• Impact of The Valve
• Tedra Osell: Everything pisses me off, but I am very optimistic...
• Ari Kelman: "I suppose it is fitting for this venue that I announce that I have no qualifications to be a discussant save a willingness to open my mouth..."

Comments

[M. Carey]

Regarding concerned graduate students:
I found out during my undergrad experience at Davis, that graduate study is the last vestige of feudalism. Graduate students work in a non-market (or pre-market) economy; their meager stipends are not really payment for services, but a “right of position” much as the Christmas goose (or the right to shoot the King’s deer) must have been in the 13th century.

Graduate students are the last remaining serfs, and senior professors are the last real barons. They are sovereign in their bailiwick, because NOBODY knows more than they do.

(This does not say that there is no value in graduate study, only that I am glad that I was able to survive without it.) I hope this fits into the discussion, such as it is.

[Kate G.]

Brad, that sounds like a fascinating set of talks. Wish I'd been there. The internet and pseudonymity have certainly changed my relationship with political information--I definitely get more and better information in a more timely manner. I don't find that my (minor) pseudnoymity affects what I write under my (other) internet name. (well, maybe I'm cruder in print than I am in person but actually, as I think of it, not much. But the varius pseudonymous and anonymous blogs I read have definitely offered me better political information than any giant branded source such as Time, Newsweek, The NYT, The Globe, etc...etc...

M. Carey's point about grad students is excellent. I would also put foreign born babysitters into a semi feudal position. I've had the asme babysitter for eight years because we both understand the semi feudal nature of the relationship. I pay her on an hourly basis but I'm also expected to serve as an all purpose patron for educational, political, and civil issues--for her and her extended family.

Kate G.

[MattF]

I think that internet pseudonimity is more a mask that an actor assuming a role wears than just a false name. The reason, e.g., that 'Fake Steve Jobs' doesn't reveal his identity is that it would spoil the willing suspension of disbelief.

[fab]

the relation of grad students to the professoriate varies immensely between disciplines. What M. Carey describes may be true in Chemistry or Econ or History, but it is certainly not true in the humanistic disciplines I am familiar with.

Yeah, I'll grant that grad students are chronically underpaid. But profs have nothing--*nada*--to do with their pay. And profs have no "baronial" privileges of any sort--again, at least in the disciplines I'm familiar with.

Look, profs and grad students alike: we're both wage-slaves for very large corporations masquerading as universities. We are both kept down by the man, in the person of provosts, deans, trustees, and so on.

Yeah, if you are lucky as a prof you will start making a living wage. But the days of the 'baronial' professoriate are long gone.

(Again, at least in the few humanities disciplines I am familiar with. How it goes in Materials Sciences I do not know.)

[thag]

on pseudonymity:

it's really the 4th of your 5, in my case: not wanting to have to support my comments.

Look, making responsible arguments is a very slow process. It involves responding to objections, gathering and deploying supplementary evidence, shoring up disputed premises, and retrenching where you realize you over-stepped.

I just don't have the time.

I read and comment in snatches throughout the day. I cannot always get back to a post to see who has taken issue with what I have said earlier, or how what I said needs to be nuanced, refined, or retracted. If I wanted to be responsible, and keep my blog-writing to the standards of my scholarly writing, I would have to tend and shepherd eight different blog-conversations non-stop throughout the day, to make sure that I was keeping up with the shifting positions.

I used to do that sometimes when I posted with my real name--it was exhausting, like running multiple seminars without getting to choose the students.

If I were leaving my full name all over the internet in the form of half-finished conversations, it would inevitably make me look irresponsible as a scholar, even if I scrupulously avoided foul language and inflammatory positions. It would look as though I never back up my assertions, or am unable to provide evidence for my views.

Whereas it is primarily a matter of time--I ain't got it.

[Charles Utwater]

Here's two more reasons for using a pseudonym:

6. To force the reader to address the quality of the thought rather than the resume of the writer, and

7. To discover exactly how intellectually lazy, arrogant, and poorly-informed those who post under their names are when they don't know that the anonymous poster they are disparaging is their boss, their editor, or the reviewer of their grants.

The destructive uses of pseudonyms are generally from those who post purely anonymously or use multiple pseudonyms in the same forum: the Mary Rosh crowd. But those who use a stable pseudonym are usually-- like Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Ann Landers, George Sand, and countless others-- perfectly honorable.

[pant-pant]

"People assure me that I should not be scared of meeting Ogged in person. Online he may be pure unshackled id, but in person he is polite and charming--a veritable baa lamb."

Oh, and this is all wrong. Online he is unshackled id, but in person--

he's more into shackled id. Also handcuffed id.

[Jon Fernquest]

"Look, making responsible arguments is a very slow process. It involves responding to objections, gathering and deploying supplementary evidence, shoring up disputed premises, and retrenching where you realize you over-stepped."

Well, the productivity of argumentation in blogs could be enhanced, with software.

Instead of linear unrevisable comments, Toulmin's argumentation model could be embedded in the very fiber of the blog somehow. Maybe, like Wikipedia, you should be able to revise your argument/comment and have multiple comment-strands, one for each commenter, also when technology gets sophisticated, bot commenters like ELiza.

Also the functionality of (privately or publicly) tagging the problematic places in the models of others with logical fallacies or cognitive distortions.

Personal interest: how a group of historians could create a repository of competing, comparable, and revisable interpretations, based on raw primary source material, for example the Ming Shi-lu, the Annals of the Ming Dynasty:
http://www.epress.nus.edu.sg/msl/

[John Emerson]

I write pseudonymously because it allows me to get away with going to Crooked Timber and making taunting, irresponsible, speculative, ungrounded accusations against whole academic disciplines.

[anne]

Yes; John, but I like you anyway :)

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=5500&u=4|5|...

House Wren Entering Nest with Spider in Beak
New York City--Central Park, Maintenance Field.

[Mario]

(Unless the title is an economics pun, it should be "Margin Notes..." not "Marginal Notes...."