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April 21, 2005
The Purpose of Austrian Addiction
Austrian Addiction has been up for a number of months now and I think it's been going well thus far. I thought it was about time to present some thoughts about the general purpose and intentions of Austrian Addiction.
A few weeks ago I had lunch with a number of members of the GMU community including Tyler Cowen, Peter Boettke and visiting speaker David Freidman. After healthy portions of vietnamese cousine, shared opinons about the Lord of the Rings, and some general debates about economic theory, the topic of conversation focused around the recent phenomenon of the blogosphere. Boettke and Friedman, seemed less open to the idea of blogging than Cowen, the major advocate at the table and contributor of Marginal Revolution. Friedman seemed hesitant to start the hobby for fear of developing an addiction of the habit. Boettke shared the notion that blogs were not the equivalent to academic research and he viewed them as a distraction from more serious work.
Cowen offered an alternate perspective, one that I think is not only capable of getting more reknowned scholars on the web but also is more accurate at capturing the unrealized potential of web logging. Cowen simply implied that he viewed blogging, not as a substitute or distraction from academic work, but as a compliment to it. Friedman and Boettke seemed skeptical at first. Cowen explained how he had recently blogged a chapter of his upcoming book. Boettke asked flippantly, how many responses he received. Cowen replied, "hundreds!"
I couldn't agree with Cowen's take on blogging more. As far back as I can remember learning about the scientific process to compete in elementary and middle school science fares, it was always emphasized to me the importance of keeping a log, or journal, so that the procedure taken could be charted by others who later wanted to repeat your experiments. The social sciences may not need such rigourous historical documentation to reproduce experimental conditions, but the wealth of information that can be communicated through the blogosphere is only to the betterment of the overall spread of ideas.
A number of weeks ago I attended the Austrian Scholar's Conference at the Mises Institute, where a panel was dedicated to discussing the role of technology and the spread of ideas. The same debate of portraying blogging as a distraction v. contribution came up. I think the real problem boils down to a key difference that I may be the only person who makes. Live journals are different from blogs.
A live journal is the daily happenings and off the cuff comments of a person or group of people. The only unified topic of the site is the person or people who created it. Live Journals reveal lots of unlinked information about individuals, like what they ate for dinner, funny things their pet did lately, and serious opinions and ideology. A web log or blog, on the other hand should be a log of collectively relevent information of similar topics.
It is the latter conception that the Austrian Addiction will attempt to operate under. As I engage in research and writing projects, this site will host research sources, original writings, and comments organized according to those topics. I hope it serves to spread such interests to those who read the cite with as much entertainment and excitment as they have provided for me.
Posted by djdamico at April 21, 2005 4:37 PM