Serious Game.

Last night I wrote a post, then in another tab in my browser went to a page that, unbeknownst to me, had a Quicktime item embedded in it, which of course crashed my browser and caused me to lose my post.

My best effort to recreate the mood of last night would go something like: Hi folks. I’ve been busy and haven’t posted much lately. I’m nursing wounds from a seeminly inexplicable bike wreck, and reading a good bit and preparing a training session on using blogs in academic research, to co-present to colleagues at work. It’s funny that a lot of what my co-presenter and I are stressing in said presentation is a lot of the same philosophy that I was so publicly and vocally pushing circa three or four years ago in the context of Indymedia. I feel like so much has changed in my life since then, but it makes me feel good to realize that, despite what some people might think, I haven’t gone back on the important stuff that I was saying back then — the context has just changed a bit, and perhaps I’ve tempered certain aspects of my game.

Speaking of my game, I’ve decided that I’m going to try (at least for now) to come up with one somewhat serious post about stuff that I’m interested in studying per week. I think that’s a good goal and gives me a structure to work within, and we’ll see if I decide to change that once school starts. The rest of the random talking will continue as scheduled.

how did i not actually watch this until now?

Too good: Ted Stevens on the Internet as a series of tubes.

I know I’m late on the draw, but if you read my blog, it’s probably because you don’t realize there are much better things out there on the internet anyway, so I bet you haven’t seen it.

Regardless, the “series of tubes” thing is funny, but the thing that makes me uncontrollably laughy is when he explains: “I just the other day got - Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.”

boring prattle about blogs and academics

So, this post on Jonathan Sterne’s blog got me thinking today about academics who blog and the issues they may or may not face as a result. The letter he cites (here) written by Juan Cole sums up pretty well one aspect of blogging as free expression amongst academics and in the sidebar you can find a history of Chronicle of Higher Education articles about professors and blogging.

The controversy being discussed deals mostly with the idea of the expression of controversial ideas in blogs and the effect that might have on the careers of the bloggers (in this case in higher education). While being dooced is obviously a big issue in blogging, there are other questions I’ve been thinking about specifcally in relation to blogging among educators and “public intellectuals” (since I might end up in the position of being an educator of some sort sooner or later). Most importantly — and I guess this opens up intellectual property issues as well: when your business is all about thinking and providing knowledge (in the most general sense; let’s not argue pedagogy here), how free do you feel to express what you’re thinking, and to impart knowledge, for free via a tool of mass communication? Is it a good idea?

Some professors and critics (Jonathan is a good example) tend to blog but not so much about their areas of expertise. Someone like Michael Berube or danah boyd might sometimes blog about mundane stuff, at other times about current affairs, and at other times about her/his specific area of research. Blogging can provide an exciting way for scholarly thought and argumentation to work itself out in an informal manner before going to the big leagues (i.e., journals and the such) (here I am cheerleading for . . . WEB 2.0!!). But if you have certain information or insight that is fairly novel, and perhaps important, is your blog a place to express that? How does one decide what’s discussed and what’s kept under wraps until an article/book/dissertation appears, to give it context and, yes, to an extent, commodify it?

Which brings me to my other big question — are more and more academics starting blogs (and/or myspace pages and/or the whole bit) just to plug their “real” (contextualized/commodified) publishing? Case in point: Henry Jenkins, who’s supremely well-respected in the field of media studies and is the head of the MIT Media Lab, and who I will admit is awesome (though he loses me when he goes off about gaming . . . that’s more my fault than his though), started his blog specifically in support of his newest book. Jenkins is an interesting case in that starting a blog for his book about “convergence culture” and the meeting of old and new media makes sense both on a publicity level and on a, er, meta-mediated(?)¹ level (in that he’s carrying out the very tasks he studies and describes in the book) (from what I can gather, since I haven’t read it yet).

And if the answer is yes, people are starting blogs with the specific intent of using them to plug their books, how should I interpret their writing? As thought-provoking communication about important issues, coming from experts in their respective fields, with the interesting potential for feedback via comments, or as an extended and well-thought-out advertisement? And should you be interpreting my blog as silly comments about my life, interspersed with thoughts about stuff like this, or as an extended advertisement for my band (which, by the by, is playing its last show, for a good while at least, in September)?

1. I’m scrambling here for a/the word that can describe a communication the medium of which reflects directly the content of the message, in an intentional way rather than in a McLuhan sort of way. If you tell me what it is, I’ll append that nonsense, because, pretty clearly, that word does not do the job.

Hello WordPress!

I just imported all of my posts and comments from my blogger page, finding that of course none of my older posts will be categorized unless I go back and categorize them all ex post facto. I thought at first that also none of my images from the old blog would come through, but they all appeared after a refresh, so I’m in the clear as that’s concerned.
Regardless, I’m going to play around with the functionality and, more importantly, FUN FACTOR of using WordPress and decide whether I want this to be a total switchover. I like the idea of categorizing (I didn’t used to, but now I do). I don’t like the seeming lack of control over template style that I as the blogger have, but I guess I can probably go in and tweak it all old-fashioned htmlwise in some way? Actually I’m not sure how accurate that is, but we’ll see. Wish me luck!