Getting blogged down in a PhD

PhDs and blogs equal an informal scholarly communication process for the times I am bogged down in the fucktardery of life. You see, bad things happen to good people and they tend to happen when you really can't afford the time for them to be dealt with: like when you are doing a PhD!!!!!!

My target to fast track my PhD is 1000 words a day but after a recent life mishap, opening my chapter document and writing into it was overwhelming. I just couldn't do it. There were too many words, too many linkages, too many academic protocols (like correct citations) to deal with. Overwhelming.

The cure for overwhelm is underwhelm...and to take small action. Overwhelm leads to confusion which leads to inaction. Therefore the scholarship of reduction is action. I couldn't be hypercritical given that I teach this so I had to swallow my own medicine and model a way to overcome the paralysis of a life sucking tick.

So I turned to my blog and started writing between 500 and 1000 words on a concept related to my research. To start with a blank page that contained my thinking to the concept only, was a lifeline. It was freedom and it enabled me to think deeply without disappearing down a PhD rabbit hole. 

Rather than getting bogged down in my own life, my meagre method of refocusing into my research saw we getting blogged down into my PhD, and I LOVED it because it worked. My head felt informal and informal writing was all I could cope with as an ontological scaffold for building formally around when I was more emotionally regulated

I wrote six blog posts around six concepts to do either with my methodology, my theorists or my Industry Partnership. Some of them I posted to social media, some not. The beauty of it was that not a word or hour was wasted. Those blog posts can be copied/reworded into appropriate chapters, attached to my thesis as an appendix, act as a research diary and create an avenue for another scholar to use them as citations or any comments as secondary data for unobtrusive methodologies. Best of all, the blogs and the subsequent SEO on them begin to establish me as an academic in the area of social and cultural resistance to the status quo.

I discovered blogging in 2003. On the way to London from Australia, I read an article on the new and groovy habit of blogging for personal or business. It outlined the history and spoke about the collapse of geographic boundaries to enable smooth connections. Given I was leaving home to work abroad, this appealed to me as an avenue to keep family and friends informed of what I was doing...and acted as a travel log lest I disappear so that someone could track my last movements.

Although in 2024 I blog to my website and own domain name, in 2005, I began my first blog on a free platform. Within it I learned the blogging world and discovered algorithms, html coding, CSS, blogger communities, marketing, SEO, key words, tone, purpose, audience, and the importance of time to publication. Since then I have blogged to many platforms, blogged professionally and watched blogging become a mainstream marketing technique and information dissemination tool...and everyday I still learn about algorithm and other technological changes. 

Despite my long history with blogging as a communication tool, I never considered it as a worthy scholarly tool for PhD underwhelm. Naturally, there are some problems with publicly blogging your research as scholarly communications, namely the theft of ideas, non citations, academic voice and plagiarism, but for underwhelm via conceptual writings blogging is a treat. AI is a problem for scholarly blogging - how does a reader know that the words are your work? It comes down to integrity. I have never used AI to write my blog posts - my material comes from experience and from my own thinking...and I guess that's why I am one of a small population of people doing a PhD rather than gaining influence through the use of posts written by AI. I have, however, used AI for some of my social media posts because the purpose and audience was different. Plus, I wanted to see how AI worked. 

PhD students, try blogging as either a research diary or to underwhelm and refocus. Posting a piece of conceptual writing publicly requires you to be accountable for your time, your thinking and your writing. Time is perpetual motion and that PhD is not going to write itself as time keeps moving on. Underwhelm, underwhelm, underwhelm but every day write something around your theoretical concepts. If 1000 words is too much, write 500. Just write and share it with your supervisor or PhD colleagues. 

There is an academic paper brewing in this and I have just created another citation by me to add to my paper and for my PhD examinators to find when they stalk me to see if I have credibility and leverage within my professional field. You could create this too just by blogging your way out of PhD overwhelm.

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