With the rise of social software, will the established rules of academia need to be revised? Or is the institution itself facing obsolescence?

The phrase “publish or perish” is well known to members of the academic community, novice and veteran alike. Research and scholarship are the rasions d’etre for life in academe, and publishing is the yardstick by which one’s research, scholarship and career is measured. Yet, how does the academic publishing tradition fare in a new era where members of the academic community routinely use social software networks to communicate not only their research findings, but also their opinions, reflections, comments and critiques? Will academe update its rules and allow blog posts, trackback metrics, and comment counters to enter into tenure decisions? Or if tenure no longer carries with it a lifetime employment guarantee, and a blog site has more impact than any published journal could hope for, will the younger generation of academics forsake the “publish or perish” game altogether? Will blogs support the re-emergence of “true” intellectual, whose demise was chronicled 16 yeas ago by Russell Jacoby in “The Last Intellectuals?”

I highly doubt that, with their entrenched attitudes and behaviors, today’s faculty senates would ever re-consider how they maintain their electorate. Indeed, they remind me of the mid-80’s Soviet Politburo and their (ultimately failed) attempts of Peristroika. Then, efforts to restructure and improve the Soviet system without building a new one ultimately proved futile — any “reform” that moved the government in the direction away from its iron-fisted centralization only further served to seal its eventual fate. Academia faces the same paradox: as a historically closed community, any moves it makes to officially recognize communication (and publication) outside of its highly controlled and established lines will only serve to make its existence irrelevant.

And this is why social software (blogs, wikis, social networks and the like) is a valid threat to the institution of sanctioned academia. But beyond the theoretical argument, I can look to my own professional work for proof.

Like many other junior academics, I began my professional life actively acculturating into those professional groups needed to establish my academic career. I joined organizations, attended conferences religiously, subscribed to journals, and made every attempt to connect to and garner the attention of those in the “inner circle” — the members of steering committees, working groups, and editorial boards, as well as the chairs of leading University departments. But, while I still maintain those ties, I now find that I learn much more about “what’s going on” in my discipline from reading a growing collection of daily personal and professional weblogs than I ever did from the seven papers that would be published once a month in my favorite journal. And, the information currency of these two sources is vastly different. By the time an interesting finding or report makes its way through the critiquing, revision-ing, and publishing process, it’s no longer current — especially when I’ve read about that idea four months earlier in a weblog.

But beyond simply doing a better job of making information more pervasive and timely than refereed journals, Weblogs and social software also do something that journals simply can’t: include a social dimension along with (and even instead of!) the information itself. Thus, the life of an idea doesn’t stop with its twelve pages in a journal, or its 45 minutes at the podium during a yearly conference. Instead, the individual’s or research group’s idea enters into a social tapestry of ongoing comments, discussion, rebuttals, and debate. And because the new wave of social software application allows active participants and casual observers to easily move throughout the dialogue tapestry, I believe the very quality of the ideas, the research, even the researcher, improves. And perhaps most importantly, the “glue” holding together the academic community of practice no longer resides solely within the academic departments and professional organizations that sponsor the community: it is owned by the community itself.

Thus, we will see academia take on an “emergent social organization” like that described by such recent books as “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software,” “Linked: The New Science of Networks,” and “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age” (as well as my favorite from my own discipline, “Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems)”). Of course, as traditional publications, these works are already dated. In addition to studying these books, readers would do better to participate in such weblogs as Many-to-Many, Autounfocus, or Shirky.com (actually, as a casual look at the blogroll of any of these sights will show, the relevant blogsphere is much larger than this!).

If you’re reading this from the comfort of a book-lined and manuscript-ridden office in a named-building of one of the country’s elite Universities, I can already guess the list of objections and retorts you have ready to throw my way (“But wait, academic publication and the tenure process accomplish critical objectives that can’t be guaranteed in a free-for-all blog world!”). However, thanks to the free-for-all blog world in which I live, I’ll leave addressing that list to Part-Two. Besides, like an old-fashioned movie serial, by promising to tie up those loose ends later, I’ll get you to come back.

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