In September of this year, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University held an on-campus panel event with four women professors who have widely followed and respected blogs (easternblot.net, Bitch Ph.D, Tenured Radical, and Oh! Industry).  The blog topics range from science to pop culture to politics and feminism. 

            The panel, entitled “A Blog of her Own,” was advertised as a dialogue about what it’s like to be and how to become a feminist blogger.  It seemed, then, natural to expect that the event would relay the key challenges and lessons learned when blogging about feminist causes.  The reality, however, was that the audience clearly had markedly different anxieties and they were eager to have their questions answered.

            After brief presentations from the bloggers, the question and answer session began.  As more and more questions were asked, I soon realized that the students in attendance were not at all concerned about the panel’s original subject.   Rather, they were very curious to know whether blogging has made it more difficult for professors to obtain tenure at their respective universities or not.  Over and over again the students asked if remaining anonymous on one’s blog is the best way to go about it if you want tenure.            

          Margaret Soltan, a professor at George Washington University and respected blogger (University Diaries) who was not on that day’s panel says that, when asked, “I generally discourage junior faculty from blogging if they feel at all uncertain about their tenure prospects…basically I’d say the thing to do is wait until you get tenure and then let it rip.”  Accordingly, it seems like blogging does have the potential to negatively impact your future in academia.

            The writer of Bitch Ph.D. explained that she had been anonymous for three years before revealing her identity to the public.  She still did not overtly reveal it on the site itself (which is why I will respect her privacy here) because she believes that the woman on the blog has her own persona.  Yet, even though she was relieved to have made her identity public, Bitch Ph.D. claimed that she has been more careful about writing about her private life since doing it, but that it was because she did not want to hurt people.  She also said that keeping the blog has had no negative repercussions on her personal life.

            Professor Claire Potter of Wesleyan University, who already has tenure and is the author of the three-year old blog Tenured Radical, said that she came out of the closet six months into blogging because “remaining anonymous led me to make unwanted ethical compromises.”  At the panel, she described herself as a contemporary historian without rules, which she claimed threatened the university.  However, the sentiments of the university, said Potter, were not a serious professional concern of hers.   Of course Potter’s contrarian sentiments make perfect sense coming from someone who already had tenure before she began her blog.  

            Some professors, however, like Alexandra Vasquez, an associate professor at Princeton University and co-author of Oh! Industry, do not have to rebel against the university system because their blogs are openly supported by their institutions.  Due to this, Vasquez, who has yet to obtain tenure, does not let her pursuit of it bar her from expressing her opinions about academia.  Vasquez believes that her blog is “a necessary outside” from matters like promotions and career.

            Another concern non-tenured bloggers may have is that their non-academic blogs will be perceived as trivial and unsuitable for a person trying to make their career in academia.  According to Soltan, “there will always be faculty who – even with the enormous success and even prestige of many blogs these days – see blogging as trivial, dumb, self-indulgent, non-serious, non-scholarly, a waste of time, weird, etc.”  She says that “some faculty, in other words, will just be hostile,” no matter what the blog is about or how it is presented.

            So what is the answer for blogging professors? All in all, the event panelists, each of whom had different blogging stories when it came to revealing their identities, all agreed that revealing themselves to the public has actually made things easier for them in the end.  They women agreed that each blogger must make their own decision as to how their relationship will be between their blog and their career. 

            The situation for bloggers in academia is only one example of the complex challenges we all face in today’s world, with our personal lives becoming increasingly exposed to the general public online.  And while we don’t want to constantly be monitoring our online profiles because our future employers might opt to check us out on there, we also don’t want to end up jobless for that reason either.  There is no real answer for any of us, academic or not.  The only truth is that we’re all still learning about the Internet’s power on our daily lives and we’ll just have to keep playing the cards until we get it right.

This year NGOs campaigning for action against poverty and climate change watched in awe as developed world governments mobilized over $8.43 trillion to bail out financial institutions and stabilize their economies.

According to Oxfam, this would be ‘enough to end global extreme poverty for 50 years and a massive step towards ending it forever’.

“Developing economies have been left reeling from a crisis they had no responsibility in causing. The actions of the G20 so far have been like rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic, and now they are running for the lifeboats leaving the rest of us to drown. The biggest problem is a lack of accountability at these meetings. Peoples voices are totally excluded.”  (Dr. Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director, Greenpeace)

After years of traditional advocacy at international summits and limited traction, Oxfam and other NGOs are now looking to the online world as a way of bringing voice, transparency and accountability to global forums to help mobilize political will and action.

‘Voice’, an initiative lead by Oxfam, and hosted on ‘writespeakact.org’, seeks to connect bloggers to important political events, where they can gain unprecedented access to policy makers and world leaders.

‘We assist bloggers with gaining accreditation to international summits, arrange briefings, interviews and press conferences. We want to amplify existing voices and support new ones in order to build greater participation and representation“(Jason Wojciechowski, Voice Project lead)

The project launched with “G20 Voice” in April 2009 at the G20’s London Summit, an online election was organized for 50 blogger spaces; ‘widgets’ were placed across partners’ websites.  The ‘Voice’ project team invited people to nominate and vote for their ‘Voice at the G20’.

Blog writers hailing from “bitchbuzz.com” and ‘jackandjillpolitics.com’ to “saudijeans.org’ and ‘oneworldsouthasia.net’ were accredited and brought to the summit to cover proceedings and share their analysis with the world.  The hope was that blog coverage of these events would generate greater awareness of the issues discussed and increase public pressure on world leaders to act against poverty and climate change.

“This was the first time bloggers were able to gain access to the G20, we received a huge amount of media coverage and interest in our bloggers perspectives on the issues being discussed. We set up meetings between the bloggers and lead G20 negotiators for the US and UK and one of the bloggers even asked a question at the closing summit press conference.” (Jason Wojciehowski)

In September 2009, the project evolved further, and ‘ClimateVoice’ was born along with ‘HerVoice’ as a way of bringing bloggers into UN Meetings on Climate Change and amplifying the voices of women at the UN. Bloggers were able to register at ‘writespeakact.org’ where they could sign up for specific events, see their custom schedule along with schedules of other bloggers, whom they could then communicate and connect with. The new format enabled greater collaboration and coordination amongst the bloggers who could discuss which events they would like to attend, request more information and post links to their content. Partner organizations were able to invite bloggers to come and cover their events and organise ‘blogger briefings’ on key development issues.

Bloggers would tag all of their content with either ‘ClimateVoice’ or ‘HerVoice’ which allowed the project team to aggregate all the blogs and   link to them using twitter and facebook. The initiative provided over 100 bloggers with access to a range of events including round table meetings of world leaders, press conferences, film screenings, debates and panel discussions.

“However we still haven’t managed to build a large enough blogging community that can continually follow these summits and generate enough chatter to make a significant media impact.”

The next phase for the voice team, 9 months into the project, will come next month in Copenhagen, where Oxfam is partnering with members of the ‘tcktcktck’ campaign to launch a blog space at the Cop15 climate summit which will be called the ‘Fresh Air Center”. The plan is to create a digital space for accredited bloggers within the summit to use for rapid response press conferences, interviews and meetings with brought-in experts, whilst also attracting the interest of Cop15 delegates. In order to reach a wider audience, digital campaigners from the following organisation will support the Fresh Air center and ensure bloggers are connected to developments as they occur:

• Avaaz
• Greenpeace
• Oxfam
• CAN
• IndyAct
• NRDC
• 1Sky
• UN Foundation
• 350.org

Bloggers form the following organizations have agreed to join the initiative:

• Huffington Post
• Treehugger
• OneWorld
• CampusProgress
• GlobalVoices
• TheUptake
• ClimateProgress
• Adopt-a-Netogiator

In a short period of time, the ‘Voice’ project has become a standard feature of international summits on poverty and climate change, it has empowered bloggers from over 50 countries and reached thousands of people across the world with diverse perspectives of what is happening in the worlds most powerful forums. While this initiative is still in its infancy, it represents a growing trend, an online revolution, which is now spreading offline, and affecting the way people participate in fundamental ways. Voice at global summits which once belonged to invited elites, is now available to thousands of people, following the actions of world leaders, sharing their perspectives and increasing accountability by one more notch. What comes next? Governments: Watch this space!