Also I realized I didn’t really comment of blogs directly — sorry! I see blogs as just one way out of many for us to experiment with the interplay between communication and content. I actually get kind of annoyed sometimes when I do a quick google search and find nothing but blogs come up as my top sources. I prefer a little bit of reliable information over a slew of information without a recognizable source, and blogs are hard to sort though that way. But I think that is why an academic blog is different from a personal blog or even a class blog. If the same author who is blogging is also publishing peer reviewed publications with the same information later, a blog is a great way to get up to date content efficiently out to the public. (Class blogs I have to think of as primarily for our, the students’, sake. Maybe my opinion on that will change as the course goes on. But for the moment I am content.)

I like what you said in proposing the counter argument to the Hitchcock quote: “If there is a ‘crisis’ in the humanities, it lies in how we have our public debates, rather than in their content.” I agree with you in a lot of ways. I think in the moment when we are in conversation or in a “public debate” (or public conversation), it is more more helpful and efficient to think about content first and then think of ways to communicate the content than it is to think of various ways to communicate first and then back fill them with content. But I also think this is what makes a class like this so helpful — it gives us a chance to take a step back and think about our methods of communication and teaching before we are in the moment.

Focusing on the way we communicate to the neglect of content leaves us vulnerable to rhetoric, and focusing on content to the neglect of communication leaves us vulnerable to irrelevance. Often I think that if we valued facts and data more highly in our public debates, this would give of the vocabulary with which to communicate about our conclusions and intents. While if we have our conversations primarily through facebook memes we might reach a broad audience but we will always be talking past each other.

That said, way I understood the quote in the context of the article is that in the end what we communicate and how we communicate it are inseparable.

Perhaps the idea is that if we assume that we in academia have something to offer the public debate in terms of content (and we should — research is content). Then finding ways to communicate this to a more public audience builds content in the public debate. (I would love to watch academics get together and host a presidential debate!) Basically if the goal is to solve the “no content” problem in the public debate, how do we go about solving the problem? Any answer I can think of involves good communication. So I agree with you that “occupying more public space does not necessarily make an opinion more meaningful.” But when you start with a meaningful opinion occupying a more public space does make the opinion more powerful.