I’ve discovered an interesting comment about this blog (and an implication about blogging) at Ralph Luker’s March 17, 2004, Cliopatria group blog entry: “Dorn seems to post to his blog primarily to let his dean and his in-laws know what’s going on. (I do my dean and in-law communicating separately and a little more privately.)” Hmmn… I’m delighted someone’s reading this occasionally, but it’s not for my dean (and my mother-in-law has been without a computer for some months).
Some people use blogs as places for public pronouncements, rhetoric, etc. That’s fine. But if I spent most of my blog writing on stuff meant to be read by millions, I’d be ignoring some higher priorities for me in terms of teaching, research, and other matters. My hat is off to all those who write incredibly pithy items for most of their blog entries. But that’s just not me.
More importantly, why is an historian assuming that there’s only one purpose to blogging, and if it doesn’t fit her or his box, it’s ripe for ridicule? So much for the historical uses of diaries and journals, I suppose.
No offense intended, but why wouldn’t one keep a private journal private?
I’ll skip the disquisition on the fuzziness of a public-private boundary (see my article in the Fall 2002 History of Education Quarterly if anyone’s curious) and just say that many of my entries are thoughts that are public comments (if not formed exactly as essays), others provide information I can link to for other reasons, and others are admittedly ambiguous thoughts-of-the-moment that I want to put down and clarify later. In other words, I’m like many bloggers who mix various purposes of blogging.
In terms of the public purposes, I’ve posted at least one working paper here and expect to continue that practice. And if my readership miraculously balloons up into the hundreds of thousands, I probably will be tempted to turn this into a public-rant forum. But if I really wanted to do that regularly, I’d look to another, better-trafficked site.