Pro and cons of academic blogging

In 2016, there are problably few and few academics wondering what blogging is and why we, as educated people, we should use this medium to share our ideas to the world. Many of my academic friends already experienced at least once the bloggosphere, either as guest writers or as owners of their blog.

However, there are still a lot of misunderstandings and confusions regarding the advantages of blogging for academics and I am here to share some of them.

Let's start with the cons:

- Not every kind of scientifical domain can be easily blogged about. For instance, as a mathematician discovering new formulas, writing a blog post about this, will most probably not reach more than the usual people that are already familiar with your very niche activities. So, why to waste time setting up a couple of sentences about?

- Talking about time...one of the big arguments against blogging among academics is the waste of time. In a highly competitive academic world, where publish or die is still the motto, you better use every dime of time for forwarding your research, apply for academic conferences. If you also have a family, you practically do not have any extra time for scribbling.

- The blog post does not equal the academic article and will not (yet) be considered a reference for applying for a serious permanent academic position.

- It increases the risk of being caught in various commercial traps, especially when various companies or institutions are keen to offer sponsorship and thus, diminish the credibility and independence of the academic individual and research.

- It has the temptation of easy journalism, and may affect the hard polished academic skills which includes precaution and long preparation of the texts as well as cross-referencing.

The advantages are equally noteworthy:

- It offers visibility to ideas developed by academics, by offering a medium to share and discuss. This is particularly available for academics in the field of human sciences and politics. 

- It makes academic work transparent and relevant to the public and take back the intellectuals in the agora as parts of the public discussions. 

- It help spreading knowledge in parts of the world without a proper educational network. Wherever they are, people can read and get in touch with new ideas.

- Outside the rigid institutional settings, academics are free to express opinions not only about their daily work but on issues of public interest.

- It offers academics important opportunities to collaborate and share ideas. It also offers the chance to find people sharing common interests and researching similar topics, wherever they are. 

Probably there are many more things to outline about academic blogging and I will keep writing about this in next posts. As for me, I will always keep telling how grateful I am for being alive these times, with tremendous learning opportunities, many of them for free. 

Mental health in academia

I am not necessarily qualified to muse about academic life, but the long-term friendships and my never ending curiosity about intellectual life, often brought me in the vicinity of stories that might involve a drop of mental health. How much mental illness is part of the daily academic life all over the world might probably the topic of a big book dealing not only the statistics and social-economic information, but also the ways in which the 'normal' outside world is seeing the 'intellectual', most often as a strange, unusual, at the limit mentally ill person.

There are a lot of reasons mentioned usually as the cause of the overall alienation of academics: social pressure, the academic pressure towards productivity, sometimes the scarcity of funds or the anxiety of waiting for new sources of incomes, the lack of proper jobs and the high competitiveness of an oversaturated market. The 'illness' that can include various degrees of depression, anxiety, sleep issues and also various addictions, from alcoholism to drugs, is part of a repertoire that I assume there were always around the corner of universities. And I am relying upon not only various literary descriptions, but also various inside stories I kept hearing about academics of all colours since my early years of life. 'Date but not marry an academic' - an advise that sounds so painful when refers to women - is a kind of course that says a lot about how academics can be sometimes perceived in various societies, including in our so-called highly developed Western world. 

Is mental health a real problem in academia?

So, is mental health a real problem after all? Of course it is, and it is very important to discuss about it and find proper networks of support. Although I am a big lover of science and medicine, I am not always sure that therapy is a cure-all. Obviously the qualified help is very important when it comes to dealing with serious mental disorders - how to define them is another issue that has to do with the social perception of different maladies - but it is not enough to help, as long as the academic is going back to the same environment and unsolved problems - among others, how to pay a huge debt and how to find a good decently paid job, while trying to have a minimal social interaction. 

What I think it creates a lot of opportunities for the long-term installation of mental problems is the solitude. Intellectual work is supposed to be done alone, and the many hours spent documenting your articles request almost perfect solitude. The tight deadlines, the crazy schedule of conferences and the long hours of teaching and counselling rarely leave too much time for a normal family or relationships. The academic friendships can be problematic, as long as everyone is focused on his/her own work and competitiveness oblige, there is always a need of privacy and secrecy about what we read and write. 

Life and social challenges

As for the family, maybe they are too far away, maybe we consider ourselves too sophisticated to enjoy their simple and not intellectually challenging company. We assume that we are always in the right company, with our very interesting academic peers, but once the discussion is over, everyone is going home and not many will have too much intuition to call you when you feel sick or lonely.

Maybe such considerations put me in expectation around the real academic circle and always in between worlds. But there is always something more than that. There is something wrong with the intellectual models publicized via academic institutions and works and this should maybe explain some of the failures of intellectual involvement in the 'real life'. The sooner we open the floor to a honest discussion about such issues, the better for the sake of our academic and social sanity.