ABSTRACT
This chapter provides new empirical evidence of the ways in which blogging, as a form of writing and academic publishing, produces both scholarship and the scholar. It presents a report on an online survey of 279 volunteer respondents. The chapter provides a brief note about the approach to understanding the academic self. It argues that writing was a technology of self-formation. The chapter discusses what kinds of academic selves were being created through blogging, mobilising a Foucauldian toolkit in order to help us analyse open-ended questions to an online survey. The analysis showed four dominant blogging practices: creating a scholarly persona; 'slow thinking'; pleasure seeking; and knowledge sharing. While the benefits of sharing an academic self in formation were recognised by 'sharing' bloggers, making this evolution of the academic self public was commonly framed as 'risky' by at least one-third of them.
