Sphinx

Two things on the internet caught my fancy yesterday. The first, quite widely circulated so probably already familiar, was a story in the Grauniad: How Computer-Generated Fake Papers Are Flooding Academia. This struck me as a rather wonderful thing. Of course, the basic focus of the article and the research on which it reports is the lax standard of reviewing at certain journals and conferences, so that papers churned out by simple computer programmes which are essentially gibberish nevertheless are accepted (it wasn’t completely clear from the report whether the papers are submitted  under the names of the programmers, i.e. real people with genuine university affiliations which serve as an imprimatur so that the content is simply ignored, or under fake names as well, implying that there are no quality checks whatsoever). But it can’t be that big a step to write a programme that could generate fake papers by a specific author. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if an analysis of my own works identified clear, consistent patterns in the use of certain words and phrases, tendency to resort to a limited number of key references and to start every paper with a quote from some nineteenth-century thinker intended to unsettle current assumptions, basic structural similarities and so forth (come to think of it, I’m drawing this entirely from Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, aren’t I?) – so, why not use that to produce ersatz Morley essays, barely distinguishable from the real thing? It could be set to work on producing the sort of conventional stuff that one needs for the REF, taking ideas that I’ve played around with in more carefree articles to develop them at greater length and provide them with proper scholarly apparatus and thorough analysis of evidence, thus freeing me up for more interesting things, such as blogging…

I am well aware that, from the perspective of the university that pays my salary, such a programme ought to be employed in precisely the opposite manner: it should be churning out a couple of conference papers per year, since any subsequent publication is unlikely to rank highly enough to be counted, not to mention regular whimsy for the blog (where what matters, so far as I can gather, is its mere existence as a means of general dissemination and public engagement, with the content conceived merely as click-bait), while I focus on proper REFable work. Which brings me to the other interesting piece, a discussion by Chris Bertram (of Bristol and the Crooked Tinder blog) of an Oxford conference on academic blogging and what this suggests about the changing nature and context of the activity. Chris notes the extent to which blogging is now, at least to some extent, recognised as a valuable activity by the powers that be, but solely in terms of research dissemination and corporate outreach; the conference was full of discussion of business models, markets, budgets (you what?) and, heaven help us, reputation management (must remember to put in the disclaimer that nothing written here should be taken to bear on the general wonderfulness of the University of Bristol…). He offers an analogy with pop music; academic blogging has passed from the skiffle era, of a bunch of mates getting together with some instruments and making a joyful noise, to the Stock, Aitken and Waterman period of well-tooled but ultimately soulless mass production. How long, he wonders, before the X-Factor phase kicks in?

I’m all in favour of musical analogies, though personally I always prefer to head in a jazz direction (certainly I think of blogging as a sort of improvised jam session, picking up an idea and seeing where it leads within a very loosely pre-determined structure that’s always open to renegotiation – a primarily inward-looking activity intended to try things out free from the pressure of public performance or recording, that nevertheless – as charted in Scott DeVeaux’s brilliant The Birth of BeBop – attracts an audience and in some cases becomes the main attraction). I would venture to suggest that at least a small portion of SAW’s output was actually really great, and that they were motivated as much by a love of the throwaway pop single a la Motown as they were by the money; if I had to pick a more negative analogy it would be Landfill Indie, thoroughly corporatised and entirely profit-orientated but maintaining the edgy posture of authenticity that blogs still try to lay claim to. This may all be down to the age difference between Chris and myself – we have a different sense of the evilness of different genres and eras – but I think we certainly agree on the sheer awfulness of the X-Factor prospect.

One interesting point which came up in the subsequent discussion is the extent to which pop, sorry, blogging is largely a young person’s game. Unlike pop music, this seems to be less a matter of the desires of the audience for a conveyor belt of decorative young things, doing the academic equivalent of twerking for six months before being replaced by a new and more exciting model, as driven by the process of production. It’s true that early career academics are far more likely to have the technical skills and familiarity with online norms to be able to blog successfully, and perhaps this familiarity also means that they’re more likely to see this as a core element of their activity; but at the same time, they are far more susceptible to pressures to blog whether they like it or not, desperately trying to establish a reputation and attract an audience for their research in their struggles to gain a permanent position. Blogging becomes a chore or a necessity rather than a pleasure; a means to an end rather than an end in itself – and, I suspect, a competition with other bloggers in the same field, rather than an activity where the more voices there are the better. Meanwhile, more established acts are free to ignore the demands of their corporate masters to blog; but, when they do, they have a built-in advantage of a pre-exiting reputation and audience that younger colleagues can only dream of – blogging is one in an array of tools for further self-promotion, like Beyonce appearing on Strictly Come Dancing, rather than a means of survival. In these terms, the X-Factor era is already here.

I still think that blogging has the potential to support academic developments outside the mainstream, and to support different modes of interaction, in the same way as the internet, and my interactions with other music fans across the world, have helped me discover such wonders as Kauan (a Russian group described as atmospheric doom metal post-rock) that I would never otherwise have heard of and that I recommend to you enthusiastically. But I wonder whether this works only so long as – with the possibility here of slipping into a Greenwich Village, Inside Llewyn Davis analogy instead – everyone is just in it for the music, man, rather than eyeing one another up to see who’s going to be first to sidle off and get a record deal on the basis of appropriating the products of collective improvisation and the exchange of ideas – not least because of the pressures exerted by the corporatised university, seeking to exploit this scene for all it’s worth…