Blogging, formation and theological writing

I'm quite interested in how blogging becomes part of the way we write, reflect and grow. I'm also interested when I get a mention in someone's posting! Here's a note with a bit of both: "I could never have recreated this dynamic record of my thoughts and other people's responses to them with a conventional diary. Let's just hope our academic institutions are up to speed with the way that their students do their theology these days, Andii Bowsher's blogs are perhaps indicative that they certainly are." see at Re-vis.e Re-form: Blogging as formation.
I think that I'm one of only a few regularly blogging academics in UK theological colleges -so perhaps Rachel is being a bit optimistic (?) to see me as an indicator that academics are blogging in theology; some do, most don't. I'd have to say that for me it is a kind of reflection/research tool. There are blogs I use to collect things that I may later use in writing, I make brief comments on whatever it is to help me later on orientate whatever it is to the main area of thinking. Then there is blogging I do more widely where it may not be directly theological (ie work) oriented but related to my wider interests (though even here I note that nothing truly escapes theological interest completely) and even amusement; this is about feeding my curiosity and thinking out loud. I think the latter is related to being an 'E' in Myers-Briggs terms; ie I tend to find that I discover my own thinking/ideas by externalising it or them.

I think that the other reason I blog is to keep me writing. However, it is this that I have to consider: does it get in the way of more 'serious' writing? That is to say, the kind of writing that 'counts' in RAE, for example and goes down on CVs as 'publication'. And perhaps in that we name one big reason that perhaps more academics don't blog. For me it's a shift of paradigm which may, or may not, take hold. In the inherited academic paradigm 'worthy' writing is recognised as such by passing through the filters of peer-review in 'recognised' journals. In the possibly-emerging way-of-things, worthiness is recognised by hits, citations and commendations. The good stuff snowballs into something with lots of links and comment.

However, I have to say that all is not as simple and rosy as that schema might make it. In both worlds there are the vagueries of 'reputation' and some good stuff is missed because either the author is not known, not known by the 'right' people, is diffident about putting themselves forward, mistimes their contribution so it cannot be 'heard' for the noise or in the unpreparedness of the audience or simply it is in the wrong place to catch the attention of a wider audience perhaps because it's a blog hosted by the 'wrong' company because the fashion is for certain kinds of writing to use particular platforms.

So you see, in both worlds/paradigms, there are gatekeepers. In one formally appointed (and prey to the dangers of being self-perpetuating hierarchies and group-think), in the other informally grown but not less prey to distortions. The ideological justification for the blogging model is the Wisdom of Crowds. The reality is that the conditions for the 'wisdom'is don't always exist and we have an informal reproduction of the same-old-same-old. It remains to be seen whether web3.0 with its more semantically-aware algorithms and bots might help to change that, or whether such changes will act to reinforce the brakes on crowd-wisdom emerging.