Blog You Should Read: Daniel Little: Understanding Society: Daily Focus
…That’s 954 posts, almost a million words, and about a hundred posts in the past twelve months. The blog continues to serve as an enormously important part of my own intellectual life, permitting me to spend a few hours several times a week on topics of continuing interest to me, without needing to find the time within my administrative life to try to move a more orderly book manuscript forward. And truthfully, I don’t feel that it is faut de mieux or second-best. I like the notion that it’s a kind of ‘open source philosophy’….
Highlights of the past year include….
- Extensive discussion of critical realism….
- Some extended thinking about causal mechanisms
- A burst of posts about agent-based models….
- Several posts on Margaret Archer’s theory of morphogenesis
- Posts on rising global inequalities
- Posts on the recent history of China
- Posts on the continuing effects of racial inequality in the US
One thing I have always found intriguing about writing the blog is the amount of data the medium provides…. A blogger has an inherently closer relationship to his or her audience than a traditional academic…. With more than a million page views a year on the blog, this data is pretty granular. Here are the top five posts of all time since 2007, based on the number of page views:
- What is a social structure? (65,962)
- Lukes on power (33,131)
- Sociology as a social science discipline (29,446)
- Why a war on poor people? 16,352)
- Social mobility? (15,614)
The ‘war on poor people’… the great majority of those 16,000 views came within a few weeks of its publication…. linked in a column by Paul Krugman… the academic equivalent of a viral cat video on YouTube….
I suppose many scholars would look at blog entries as ‘working notes’ and published articles as ‘archival’ and final, more authoritative and therefore more suitable for citation and further discussion. But I’m not sure that’s the right way of thinking…