I’m not quite keep­ing up with Colleen Morgan’s ques­tions:

In our last ques­tion, many emphas­ized the pub­lic access that blog­ging brings to archae­ology, the option to “phone a friend,” as Kristin Sewell stated. Blog­ging gives new schol­ars a chance to speak out, to debunk 2012 fool­ish­ness and to give a little bit back to the pub­lic that usu­ally signs our paychecks in one way or another. Though it is gen­er­ally embraced (says she of the Berke­ley bubble!), pub­lic out­reach can be incred­ibly dif­fi­cult, tricky, and prone to hid­den down­sides. Blog­ging archae­ology is often fraught with ten­sions that are some­times not imme­di­ately appar­ent. Bey­ond the gen­eral prob­lems that come with per­form­ing as a pub­lic intel­lec­tual, what risks do archae­olo­gists take when they make them­selves avail­able to the pub­lic via blog­ging? What (if any) are the unex­pec­ted con­sequences of blog­ging? How do you choose what to share?

This is a belated reply to the ques­tion for reas­ons too tedi­ous to be worth writ­ing about. It means I’ve changed my mind a few times, but one seems to have stuck.

Per­man­ence.

Blogs tend to be used for ideas in pro­gress, eph­em­eral thoughts and off-the-cuff obser­va­tions. If you miss a few weeks or months of archae­o­b­logs, it makes more sense to jump into now instead of catch­ing up through back posts. If a past thought is import­ant blog­gers have the sense to link back to it. It means blogs are a stream of nowcasting.

At the same time blogs have per­man­ence. There’s a mech­an­ical issue with this. There’s five years of posts here and that means that spam­mers can tar­get five years of com­ment forms to push their advert­ising mes­sages. That’s why I’ve got my blog set to auto-close com­ments after a few months. That doesn’t remove the intel­lec­tual problem.

Unless you’re dead you’ll have changed opin­ions about some things over five years. I don’t have a prob­lem with chan­ging my mind. I change my mind as I get new evid­ence, or learn more about a sub­ject. I also think I change my mind as I for­get things. I can have a poor memory some­times. I sus­pect a memory isn’t some­thing that sits in the brain to be retrieved, it’s some­thing that’s con­struc­ted in the now. Lose parts of the inform­a­tion that build the memory and you end up with some­thing dif­fer­ent. It means while I’d like to pre­tend all my changes of opin­ion are the res­ult of care­ful reasoned ana­lysis, some­time they just change. Throw into the mix the fact that you can get things wrong any­way and if you’re using your blog to build up thoughts and reflec­tions, you’ll have some­thing that con­tra­dicts what you think now in your archive. The magic of Google means that often this archive is just as easy to find as your cur­rent thoughts. It can be even more vis­ible, because how many people go back and audit their memor­ies? If it’s a change through poor memory would you even notice your opin­ion had changed?

If you’re aware of this and strive for con­sist­ency writ­ing becomes a pain.

For example, I now don’t think memes have much to offer when it comes embod­i­ment of ideas in mater­ial cul­ture. In plain Eng­lish I see lots of Greek-style temples in Sicily, but I don’t see any­thing that memes explain. Yet if you look through my archive, you might get the impres­sion that I’m taken with the culture-as-virus idea. So do I go back and delete or at least strikethrough all ideas I now dis­agee with? Do I write rebut­tals? If memes aren’t inter­est­ing and there are new ideas that are, like the Exten­ded Mind, I’d rather write about that. But I’m not going to do that till after I’ve read The Bounds of Cog­ni­tion by Adams and Aiz­awa, which is a thought­ful argu­ment against the Exten­ded Mind hypothesis.

You may vary, but my thought pro­cesses often seem to be a sys­tem­atic attempt to run out of wrong ways to do things. Yet in pub­lic­a­tions the fash­ion is to present con­clu­sions as being the inev­it­able out­come of out premises. Using a blog as a reflect­ive tool means lit­ter­ing my pub­lic note­book with ideas that turned out to be extremely evit­able. If blog­ging becomes more the norm this might become a socially accept­able part of the schol­arly pro­cess. But could the oppos­ite be true? Will it become more desir­able to have a research blog that doesn’t run into dead ends? If so will people edit them­selves for pub­lic consumption?

I’m all for edit­ing final writ­ing — my first drafts veer between the adequate to the awful — but edit­ing notes of thoughts in pro­gress on a blog both­ers me. Of course that could be because I buy into the Exten­ded Mind hypo­thesis and see my blog as an exten­sion of my mind. If it turns out Adams and Aiz­awa are write this’ll be another pub­lic dead end on the site.