I want to return to this post on intellectual blogging in the light of these talks on the subject at a panel session of the MLA Convention.

Bitch PhD usefully links current academic blogging to the little magazines of the 18th century. The argument is this:

In effect, my blog was doing more or less the same thing that 18th-century periodical essayists were doing: writing more-or-less personal essays on a regular schedule, using a consistent eponymous pseudonym, about topics from politics to the latest news to what the author dreamt last night or where he or she had dinner, and what the company talked about. And, more specifically, just as the Female Tatler consciously courted an audience by explicitly presenting an "alternative" viewpoint, "Bitch Ph.D." was a title chosen--however casually--in order to represent a kind of paradox, an "alternative" point of view on the ostensible success of having finished the degree, landed a good tenure-track job, and embarked on an academic career that I felt I was kind of faking (and blogging itself magnifies that feeling--after all, as I said in the beginning, Bitch is a far more successful academic than [swmnbn]).

As is well known, Habermas argued that the public sphere can be most effectively constituted and maintained through dialogue, acts of speech, through debate and discussion. there was a deformation of the public sphere through the advance of social welfare, the growth of culture industries, and the evolution of large private interests. Large newspapers devoted to profit, for example, turned the press into an agent of manipulation, attempts to manipulate and create a public where none exists, and manufactures consensus. Marshall Soules states that in "Further Reflections," Habermas claims that public debate can be animated by "opinion-forming associations"-voluntary associations, social organizations, churches, sports clubs, groups of concerned citizens, grassroots movements, trade unions-to counter or refashion the messages of authority.

However, the techniques of advertising and publicity have invaded and corrupted the public sphere ,whilst image management (and image substitution) combines with a style of authoritative discourse to constrain the possibilities of dialogue. Intellectual blogs open up the possibilities. Habermas moves the locus of rationality from the autonomous subject to subjects in interaction. Rationality is a property not of individuals per se, but rather of structures of undistorted communication.

Bitch PhD draws two implications from blogging being similar to 18th-century periodical publication .The first is:

the “enabling fiction” of the public sphere: that is, the idea (which even Habermas’ critics invoke more or less self-consciously) that we should work towards such a thing, and that (though this is somewhat more debatable) that we’re all more or less in agreement about what such a thing would involve. Second, along the same lines, that we really don’t know how unrealized the imperfect textual public sphere really was (then) or is (now)....makes me want to hypothesize that the content of public writing is determined less by gender per se than by issues of property and authorship.