Publish or Perish

One reason why I decided against going for my Ph.D. (well after I failed to get into grad school the first time) was that in academia you had to publish or perish. I disliked the culture that forced you to write when perhaps you had nothing to write about or maybe you preferred teaching to performing research. Novel concept, I know, but some professors preferred to teach!

ironically enough, through blogging I've occasionally experienced some of this. You, the audience, really like to read these things. You may not like to comment, but you do appear and spend some time here. Some days I feel a little guilty for not having anything up or if I do have something up it's a fluff piece. But what happens when the bloggers suffer burnout? Unlike others I don't feel the need to shut down comments, heck I don't get that many so I feel no need to moderate them. I certainly don't feel the need to shut down Confessions, but it is amazing that even within this small circle of Six Degrees of The Cooper we've expressed a little burnout at times.

I do feel a little burnout now, with a little of it from blogging, but most of it from my online discussion group. Currently Atlas, our group name, is rehashing, yet again, a topic that we've beaten to death for over a year and a half. Because this is an election year the battle lines have been drawn between the factions and the action gets hot and heavy. Well, at least it gets heavy for one faction that has been foaming at the mouth for at least 6 months as the Pillars of Centrist Indiana and the conservative base have been quiet this week. I feel those two factions are simply watching the rapid discussions with mild amusement and letting our liberal base expend lots of energy early. It's a marathon, not a sprint, but I'm not going to explain that to them. They may publish a lot, yet perish from their own exhaustion.