The hastening death of the theological journal

On my blog that I refuse to name or link from here any more, I mentioned something I think I can helpfully point out here.

Jandy has a really helpful review of blogging and 18th-century periodicals. What I want to point out is that the technology and the aura of institutional authority go hand in hand. I’m not going to reduce authority to technological monopoly, but I am saying that the technology helps a great deal.

When those 18th-century journals started, they were an amazing revolution in communication and shook up the status quo with the beginning of a new world. But that new world was still one that encouraged centers of authority. Publishing and circulating journals required money and tools. It also required some inherent prestige because no one was going to pay for a subscription to the What-I’m-Thinking-About-During-Breakfast-on-Tuesday Review written and edited by Joe Blow.

In other words, it was still very much a part and reinforcer of modernity. There was the high-culture of literary magazines and then there was the other stuff, bar songs, weirdo opinions that never got published, etc.

When Charles Hodge attacked John Williamson Nevin in the Princeton Review, it took Nevin two years to get together a forum for responding. He wrote an amazing response. I wonder how many who read Hodge in the Princeton Review ever learned of Nevin’s reply.

Can you imagine what would have happened to Hodge today at the hands of Nevin’s Mac and a blogger account? Internet, google, blogs; they spell the end.

We still see people trying to sneer at the blogosphere and favor some sort of academic pedigree. Peer review and all that. But these same persons find themselves forced to blog and go to comments just to keep up. They can’t just tell people to stop listening to any voice but their own monthly output. If they want to be heard, they have to blog. And so they do. And any pretensions of peer review are clearly unfounded.

There is no peer review beyond people telling you what they think of what your wrote. There is no more high culture of the theological academy. It is over. It is done.

We still see some attempts to do “web magazines.” Why? Imitating what was required for the medium of the era of print simply is not a good use of the web.

So all we have is the ghost of modernity where there was an authoritative culture that could decide whether or not to allow you to reply in their pages to someone who attacked you, and tell you who would have the final reply, and dictate to you what your word count must be. The afterimage burned momentarily on our retinas but fading.

This isn’t necessarily a good thing. Would Nevin’s reply have been as amazing if he had been able to respond immediately? The sheer pace expected by the medium is probably conducive to carelessness and second-rate work.

Remember this radio interview with Guy Waters? FM radio shows are still great for local outreach, especially drivers. But if anyone is interested and does some google research, suddenly we have a two-part “radio” interview responding to it. No advertisers. No FCC license. Just some guys wanting to get the truth out with some affordable equipment and a lot of hard work. The mystique of “having a radio show” is still around, but not forever.

I’m hoping there will always be some place for theological journals, but if so, the only ones that survive will be the ones that show they are careful about the truth and will give time to those whom they criticize. Only theological journals that could prosper as blogs will make it.

11 thoughts on “The hastening death of the theological journal

  1. Jim

    While cost of publication goes way down, the reader’s “search costs” go way up. It’s possible that that audiences will actually become more insular. When a new author published in a refereed journal, readers know that the article has been “approved” in some way by the editor and reviewers. (A noisy signal of quality, to be sure, but a signal nonetheless. The problem in this system is that it rejects “outside-the-box” thinking.)

    But if the same author publishes on his blog, people who would have read the paper because they trusted the editor may no longer find or read it. So the irony is that it’s possible that net learning might go down, even if quality remains the same. (Note that I’m only identifying a possibility here.)

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  2. David

    Mark & Jim,

    Two thoughts:

    1. I don’t think that Jim’s concern is justified. Since we can only read a very tiny portion of the writing on any given subject, we all clearly need someone to help us identify where to invest our precious time. Academic journals meet this need through gatekeepers who limit what we can read. Blogging meets this need through guides, who recommend what we should read. As a simple example, if I reviewed and recommended a book about worship on my blog – it probably wouldn’t carry any weight except with those who know me personally. If Jeff Meyers were to review and recommend the same book – many people would be prone to buy it. This is simply the fact that Jeff has earned credability in this area, because he himself has written an excellent book on worship. In a peer-reviewed journal, that review may never be published at all. I believe that if an unknown author has something of genuine value to say – it is more likely to be picked up and spread through the recommendations of blogs that are informally networked together than that it would be published by a traditional journal.

    2. Are you aware of any academic institutions that have done a good job of adapting to web based publishing? Since the entire constituency of every seminary journal has access to the internet, it seems inevitable that someone will figure out an attractive way to publish scholarly peer-reviewed articles on-line while integrated blog-like and comment features that allow for both controlled debates among scholars and unlimited commenting by anyone interested in the subject.

    David

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  3. Ben G.

    I don’t know of any academic institutions that have done it, but I don’t think it’s quite fair to sneer at web magazines as fading relics of a bygone age. Slate and the Onion A.V. Club, to cite one well-regarded example and one personal favorite, provide what now amounts to corporate blogging and, I think, a model for the eventual prosperity of theological (and other academic) journals in bloggerland.

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  5. Jim

    David, on “networks”: I remember a game that I played as a child at birthday parties. One person would whisper a message in another person’s ear, and it would go around the circle. By the time it return to the original sayee, it was unrecognizeable.

    Or consider the notion of “informational cascades” in economics. There are two restaurants by the highway, one is bad the other is good. An out-of-town traveler chooses one at random. It happens to be the bad restuarant. The next traveler comes, sees one car at the bad restaurant (not that he knows it’s the bad restaurant), concludes that that must be the better restaurant of the two (otherwise why would there be one car there), and eats at the bad restaurant. And so on and so on. Everyone ends up eating at the bad restaurant. If they had chosen them at random, at least half would be enjoying a better meal.

    Blogdom may democratize the herd instinct, but it’s the herd instinct nonetheless.

    Now don’t get me wrong. It may ultimately prove to be on-balance better than the system of controled access to information that we have now. But I also think there are lots of reasons to think it quite possible that it will provide no net benefit, and might (just might, mind you) prove worse.

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  6. Mark

    I wonder if Brainerd or the Tennent brothers would have spent so much time blogging … or Whitefield or …. you get the point! How many of us are too busy with our computers to evangelize the dying multitudes out there? The world, even the Reformed world, have enough bloggers and far too few Spirit-anointed preachers.

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  8. Mark Traphagen

    Jim:

    I don’t think your roadside restaurant analogy fits. It leaves out a crucial difference. In your analogy each visitor is only coming to the restaurant stop once and thus has only one chance to make a choice. Also, each visitor will only eat one meal, so he or she will never experience the other restaurant. Your analogy also assumes no locals or repeat customers, whose cars would also be there as “votes” for the better restaurant.

    My experience on the blogosphere is not that limited. I start out by sampling numerous blogs. Sure at first I may be attracted to the ones with lots of cars out front, but I’m not there for one meal passing through. If the blog doesn’t satisfy after a few visits, I drop it. Eventually, my feed list contains only blogs that I have found to be of continual interest and worthwhile reading. Also, as someone mentioned, most of us regular blog readers eventually find “guides,” bloggers who consistently link to blogs that are worth a look. So it sorts out in the end.

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