I'll also say that the process I've undergone in the last year has provided me much time and opportunity to think about the merits and demerits of scholarly/intellectual life in so-called "new media" fora. (For the record, I think "new" is a grossly inapt descriptor at this point.) The apex of the "public intellectual" phenomenon is largely taken to be a mid-20th-C. event, and the vitality of the public intellectual's life is understood to have declined rapidly after that short-lived peak. Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline is a interesting study of this. Pace Posner, who worries that 21st C. fora like blogs and social media sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) have left us with no "quality-control" on public intellectual life, I find that these media are becoming more and more obviously vetted by something very closely akin to the more traditional expert "peer-review" regulations. Of course, it is still the case that anyone with an Internet connection can write/post anything he or she wants, but Posner et al's worry that everything that is out there is being read ceteris paribus seems to be a largely misplaced worry as we move rapidly forward in this new century. Just in the last year, while I have been (for the most part) away from this site, I have seen an increasing number of my colleagues move to or advocate for not only "new media" scholarly productions but also "open-access" publications of more traditional scholarly output, the latter an obvious consequence of the force and influence of the former. That is to say, to borrow a phrase from one of our country's great public intellectuals: you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone, 'cause the times, they are a'changing.
In sum, you can expect to see more regular posts on this site henceforth. So please bookmark, or re-bookmark, RMWMTMBM in whatever reader you employ. And, as ever, I look forward to the conversations.
