Hyperglyphics

Another two months go by without a new post. Alas. I’m learning that blogging is, for me, not turning out to be a daily (or even weekly or monthly) writing tool. I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I, for some reason, feel an inordinate amount of guilt for not blogging regularly. It’s like this blog sits here and taunts me, calling me out as a fake, a fraud, a writer who doesn’t write. It rebukes me, telling me that I don’t practice what I preach to my writing students when I tell them to write regularly, daily, to put that writing out there in public so that it becomes part of the swirl of conversation, of circulating discourse. But, I’ve realized something…[How 'bout that strategic use of the cut. Just dying to find out aren't you? Sorry, couldn't resist.]

in thinking about my own writing and my guilt over not updating my blog “enough” (whatever enough means in blogging in the first place). In fact, when I really look at my writing from a broad perspective, I am, of course, writing everyday and putting that writing out there as part of a conversation. In light of all the recent debate about reading and writing in the new media age, I’ve been thinking about how much reading and writing the average person does on a daily basis and, it seems to me (absent any quantifiable data here, only observation and anecdote) that most of us are probably reading and writing as much, if not way more, than we ever did.

To use myself as an example here, despite the fact that I haven’t updated my blog since June, I’ve been writing extensively everyday for the past couple of months. Not just “formal” writing like the article proposal I just submitted or the recommendation letter I just knocked out for a former student. No, I wrote all summer long in the form of extensive comments on my summer school students’ work. In fact, I’ve been thinking that if I actually compiled those comments, they’d form something very much like a scholarly article, dealing as they do with the questions and topics we were pursuing in our class discussions and in the students’ individual projects. As do most teachers, I was pushing them to think further, suggesting new avenues of research, posing theoretical questions, analyzing their arguments and the effectiveness of their texts. The written record of all this would add up to dozens of pages of text were I to compile it.

In fact, that writing is part of my writing output, but it isn’t counted as such for a number of reasons. The main reason, of course, is that the student-teacher relationship is confidential to a certain extent. I can’t just publish a record of these conversations that took place within the confines of our online class space (Blackboard, <emma>, etc.), at least not without jumping through a lot of legal hoops starting with getting IRB approval, written permissions from individual students, etc. But what are the other reasons? Is it that we think of the writing that goes on in the classroom not as valuable or significant as the writing we do in pursuit of our research agendas? Isn’t there supposed to be a recursive relationship between research and teaching in the academy? We conduct research and bring that into the classroom in order to disseminate new ideas and knowledge. Most of us who take our teaching seriously are constantly researching, even for courses we’ve taught multiple times, in order to teach effectively and to keep pace with developments in our field.

My daily scans of the technology headlines from a variety of sources are part of my classroom work. I tweet links to articles that I think are relevant and useful for students in my classes and bookmark online resources on Delicious to add to my “bibliography” of resources and research. Those tweets, too, are part of my writing output, short as they are. I have to find a way to frame each link for my followers so that they see its subject matter and relevance to them, not an easy task when you’ve got such an extreme character limit as Twitter imposes. I really do think Twitter may be one of the best ways to develop certain writing skills, but that’s another topic altogether, so I won’t digress too much here on that.

The fact is, writing and reading are changing. That’s not in dispute even though the how and why certainly are. So why shouldn’t our notions of what counts for writing productivity change, too? When I was in college, professors wrote comments in the margins of the hard copies of papers we turned in. Limited by space, those comments were pretty brief and we didn’t really engage in extended written exchanges with our instructors the way students do now through online writing spaces like class blogs, e-mail, CMS discussion forums, etc. So I guess it made sense to think of a scholar’s written output as solely what they wrote formally for publication. But if many instructors are like me now (and I know they are), they write constantly, often in exchanges with students, but also with their peers and colleagues on discussion boards, listservs, and blogs. I think the new tool, Anthologize, that humanities scholars participating in the “One Week, One Tool” workshop at GMU developed, is an indicator that we will be viewing academic blogging as a legitimate and countable writing activity sooner rather than later. And who knows what tools we will develop to compile or incorporate things we write in other new media spaces like discussion forums, listservs, and social media spaces into publishable and “legitimized” forms.

As Clay Shirky points out in this WSJ op-ed and elsewhere, the early days of print technology also produced a surplus of texts, most of which were, as we might call them today, crap. We currently think of much online textual production as crap and a lot of it is. Those who tweet trivially about what they had for lunch are certainly not contributing anything of significance to the larger body of human knowledge. However, that does not mean that Twitter itself is useless anymore than saying that just because garbage is published in book form the form of the book is garbage. So when scholars use new media tools and spaces for writing that is significant to their work as researchers and teachers, that writing also has value and, hopefully, will become more and more legitimized and recognized and count as part of the body of that scholar’s work. I don’t know which new media genres and forms will ultimately win in the Darwinian struggle for legitimacy, but I’m just going to keep writing in all of them (even if only intermittently in some cases - hello, my poor, neglected blog!) and just see what comes out in the wash. The important thing is that we’re writing - in many places and spaces. It’s a lot of chatter to wade through, but I think I’d rather have too many ideas than too few. Might make it harder and it might make us feel stupid sometimes like poor old Nicholas Carr but, following Shirky, I think surplus is better than scarcity.