Blogging and the Complexity of the Academic Ecosystem

Peter Taylor forwarded to me and other participants in the "Infrastructures and Agents" Inter-College Faculty Seminar in Humanities and Sciences (ISHS) an interesting article from the Chronicle that addresses the "virtues" of scholarly blogging.  Among the many fascinating issues raised, such as scholarly productivity, the perceived value of digital publications, and public engagement, I was intrigued by the claim that our "academic ecosystem" is "more complex" than it was before.  I must admit that much of me wants to agree with this statement.  After all, the possibilities for digital scholarship seem to be endless, from the standard digital essay, to the blog, to the wiki-compilation, to the video mashup, to the audio remix.  And I generally think this "complexity" is a great thing because it expands the nature of what scholarly work can be and makes visible the research that has often been obscured from public view.  That said, I worry about fetishizing of this "new" complexity, mostly because it participates in what I think is an irresponsible adherence to the myth of progress, the notion that we are always improving upon what had come before.  Moreover, this perspective may encourage us to assume that our academic ecosystems were once quite simple, which I don't believe was ever the case.

I want to know what you think about this.  Is it fair to suggest that new digital forms of writing, such as blogging, increasingly complicate our methods and networks of knowledge production?  Does "complexity" helpfully characterize our current academic ecosystem?