What I have been up to lately

After a long summer blogging hiatus, here’s a brief message to let you know that I have not, in spite of rumors in fact, fallen off the face of the earth.

Just in case you care (for whatever reason) to know why I took my longest break from blogging yet – as usual, the answer is a combination of factors:

• Dissertation.  I handed in the first draft of my PhD thesis last week and prior to that I was in the ‘hot phase’ of writing, which meant that I minimized all other writing activity.
• Blogging and work fatigue. After teaching, working on papers and doing a bunch of other things last semester, I essentially went into the summer and head-first into writing 7 days a week with the intense determination to finish my thesis (despite not having an official deadline) and no break whatsoever. Now, for the first time in perhaps two years, I really feel that I need a break, that I need to calm things down things a bit. It’s not even stress per se, but more the realization that my life has really been so shaped by career and work issues recently that there hasn’t been much space for anything else.
• Personal stuff. See above. Being passionate about what you do is great, but having time and room for that thing called a private life is also important. That, or maybe I’m just getting older. Hmm.

I think taking a break was good on several levels. Blogging shouldn’t become an obligation – something you do because you have to – but something that you really enjoy. I’ve also come to understand why some people don’t blog. If you define yourself primarily via the people around you (friends, family, colleagues etc), and through stable, consistent and ‘real’ (as in ‘non-virtual’) relationships, then in a sense there is no reason to take a megaphone and address a global audience of strangers. Topic bloggers (a term I use a lot in my dissertation) are to a degree attention seekers who want to gain social capital. Their goal is to appear knowledgeable and gain expert status with an unfamiliar audience. Some people don’t want that – existing relationships based on kinship, geography and familiarity are more important to them. Perhaps that is the reason why blogging is not as big in (continental) Europe as it is in the U.S. Social capital with people you don’t know is worth less in societies where relationships are less fluent, where people move less and dynamicity and change are valued less.

But there are good reasons  to blog, especially after a long hiatus. I was at a conference on Open Access publishing last week in Berlin, where I met a lot of very knowledgeable people closely involved in science communication and took part in several fascinating discussions about where scholarly publishing is headed in the digital future. I was there mainly to promote the conference on Open Access that we are doing next month here in Düsseldorf, which should also be exciting (we have poster presentations from Japan and India!).

I’m also looking forward to a class titled “The Language of Business” that I will be teaching this semester and where some of the results of my work on corporate blogging will come into play. I plan to use a wiki for the class and document our results there, so keep an eye on this space if that’s interesting to you.

Anything else? Oh yes, today is Open Access Day. Which reminds me to ask – is anyone from PLoS coming to Berlin 6?