“Publish:” A scary, scary thing.
July 10, 2020
The Internet is as terrifying as it is ubiquitous for the modern performing artist. Recently, I published this, my long-overdue “professional” website (read: not actually constructed of Post-its on a chalkboard). It is essentially no more than an annotated curriculum vitae with pretty pictures and audio-visual links, but for me going live was like crossing an emotional Rubicon. Somehow the action of synthesizing what I had already done for hundreds of live audiences and classrooms, including articles written for wide audiences regarding my philosophy of teaching and discoveries employing action research, seemed so much more…exposed, out there, where any stranger could stumble upon it (perhaps that one grouchy student who keeps making up courses that I don’t actually teach so they can say that I smell bad, that I’m the devil incarnate, and that I’m super ugly, that I have stupid tattoos and dress badly on RateMyProfessor. Go look if you think I exaggerate). I didn’t fear that other internet trolls were going to come across my more pedantic articles via JSTOR or EPIC—if they could access those, they were welcome to critique as they saw fit—but I did worry that misspelling “I like gerbils” might lead some cruel stranger to find me, my life’s work, and… what… I don’t even know. Be bored senseless by it?
This was, perhaps, a hypocritical response, as for the last three years as I progressed through my doctoral studies at Teachers College-Columbia University, a school unusually “woke” to the unique potential of online learning to enrich rather than dilute its offerings, I had unflinchingly written many hundreds of thousands of words to far more discerning audiences, my colleagues and instructors, without relying on an editor or publicist to assess their readiness for public consumption. I regularly use social media (Facebook and Instagram brings me to my fortysomething cognitive limit… I’m still not really certain what TikTok or Tumbler is, though I equate it with “pithy discourse”) to convey to my students and my friends self-deprecating anecdotes, my love of The Muppets and my search for the perfect vegan dessert (to be found no further than Vegan Treats in Allentown, P.A., by the way, which the HappyCow App found for me on a recent road trip to Washington, D.C.), and it’s not uncommon that my brain begins to fuse my scholarship and my “real life” together as one voice, one online presence.
In fact, the more I think about it… the more I see evidence of this fusion in the very fact it’s hard to identify where education stops and where true life begins. Like many type-A people, I cannot seem to do so much as fold the laundry or walk the dog without how-to podcasts playing through my Bluetooth headset, lest that time be “wasted” (Adam Savage’s Podcast and NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour are favorites, the latter to see all the movies and TV for me so I can go directly to their recommendations, and Penn Jillette’s “Sunday School" to voice all of the unpopular political opinions I am afraid to in polite society). I realized a few days ago when looking for a certain vegetarian cookbook that I had given all of mine away while Konmaring the house last year, but had forgotten entirely because every time I need a recipe I Google “the easiest way to make a….” for a more useful tutorial.
In fact, If I look back to all of these examples, I become 1) humbled by my utter dependence on all things web (such as the 10 minutes of news I am allocated a day via Up First), before I even take into account that my job was made possible by virtual meeting software last year, and 2) suddenly very aware of how “democratic” all of this is. There is a new form of peer review out there… a glorious, more diverse sort, which creates a sort of augmented, authentic selective reality, where I may benefit from the world’s trials, tribulations and triumphs as they may from mine. That I might even have a reciprocal duty to pay homage to this vast library of digital knowledge by tithing a bit of my own understanding and know-how.
And, with that, my first blog post. Huzzah!
