Eleven years of Understanding Society

This month marks the end of the eleventh year of publication of Understanding Society. Thanks to all the readers and visitors who have made the blog so rewarding. The audience continues to be international, with roughly half of visits coming from the United States and the rest from UK, the Philippines, India, Australia, and other European countries. There are a surprising number of visits from Ukraine.

Topics in the past year have been diverse. The most frequent topic is my current research interest, organizational dysfunction and technology failure. Also represented are topics in the philosophy of social science (causal mechanisms, computational modeling), philosophy of history, China, and the politics of hate and division. The post with the largest number of views was "Is history probabilistic?", posted on December 30, and the least-read post was "The insights of biography", posted on August 29. Not surprisingly, the content of the blog follows the topics which I'm currently thinking about, including most recently the issue of sexual harassment of women in university settings.

Writing the blog has been a good intellectual experience for me. Taking an hour or two to think intensively about a particular idea -- large or small -- and trying to figure out what I think about it is genuinely stimulating for me. It makes me think of the description that Richard Schacht gave in an undergraduate course on nineteenth-century philosophy of Hegel's theory of creativity and labor. A sculptor begins with an indefinite idea of a physical form, a block of stone, and a hammer and chisel, and through interaction with the materials, tools, and hands he or she creates something new. The initial vision, inchoate as it is, is not enough, and the block of stone is mute. But the sculptor gives material expression to his or her visions through concrete interaction with the materials at hand. This is not a bad analogy for the process of thinking and writing itself. It is interesting that Marx's conception of the creativity of labor derives from this Hegelian metaphor.

This is what I had hoped for when I began the blog in 2007. I wanted to have a challenging form of expression that would allow me to develop ideas about how society and the social sciences work, and I hoped that this activity would draw me into new ideas, new thinking, and new approaches to problems already of interest. This has certainly materialized for me -- perhaps in the same way that a sculptor develops new capacities by contending with the resistance and contingency of the stone. There are issues, perspectives, and complexities that I have come to find very interesting that would not have come up in a more linear kind of academic writing.

It is also interesting for me to reflect on the role that "audience" plays for the writer. Since the first year of the blog I have felt that I understood the level of knowledge, questions, and interests that brought visitors to read a post or two, and sometimes to leave a comment. This is a smart, sophisticated audience. I have felt complete freedom in treating my subjects in the way that I think about them, without needing to simplify or reduce the problems I am considering to a more "public" level. This contrasts with the experience I had in blogging for the Huffington Post a number of years ago. Huff Post was a much more visible platform, but I never felt a connection with the audience, and I never felt the sense of intellectual comfort that I have in producing Understanding Society. As a result it was difficult to formulate my ideas in a way that seemed both authentic and original.

So thank you, to all the visitors and readers who have made the blog so satisfying for me over such a long time.