Jozef’s back too

I see that Jozef Imrich is also back and blogging after a fairly lengthy hiatus. Jozef has a mostly European focus, combining literary with political interests. Jozef picked up on the same article on academic blogging from Chronicle of Higher Education that I mentioned yesterday, but extracted a rather more positive quote:

In their skeptical moments, academic bloggers worry that the medium smells faddish, ephemeral. But they also make a strong case for blogging’s virtues, the foremost of which is freedom of tone. Blog entries can range from three-word bursts of sarcasm to carefully honed 5,000-word treatises. The sweet spot lies somewhere in between, where scholars tackle serious questions in a loose-limbed, vernacular mode. Blogging lso offers speed; the opportunity to interact with diverse audiences both inside and outside academe; and the freedom to adopt a persona more playful than those generally available to people with Ph.D.’s

I guess the combination of the two quotes captures my own current attitude to blogging: nowhere near as starry-eyed as I was in terms of blogging’s potential to engender an enhanced democratic polity through fostering broadly-based civic dialogue, but it’s still fun and a reasonably worthwhile exercise.