I wasn’t sure on the banner image (didn’t want one that came with the theme), and I went searching through old old emails and came across one a colleague emailed me back when I was at Oregon State. I thought it suiting enough. We’ll see.

Thanks, Nels! According to the protocols of this award/meme, I’m supposed to write about seven details of myself that you won’t be able to discover by reading about me online (I suppose this means in any forum online?). And, like Nels, this is difficult for me, because I share a lot online in various places. Largely, I think I’ll draw back to my childhood and early adulthood.

1. I grew up with a blue heeler named Billie Joe, a sweet dog who remained, for as long as I could remember, chained to her dog house except when we’d let her go to play. While we had other dogs who would roam about freely, Billie Joe remained chained up, which I never really understood (it was just “how it was”), but I think had to do with her roaming nature. I think my parents were afraid she’d just roam away if she were left unchained. Billie Joe was sweet, but under-appreciated. I think a lot revolved around her for me, without me really being aware of it—more symbolically than anything, perhaps. One of my worst nightmares when I was a kid (my brother’s face slowly squeezing into nothingness) was set right beside her dog-house. When I was a freshman in high school, I came home from basketball practice late every night—and since it was winter, it was always after dark. I’d come home, exhausted, and not veture outside. It was a whole month before I knew that Billie Joe had passed away, because I was so busy and my parents never told me. My parents have some sort of rugged farm attitude toward pets: they didn’t tell me for a while after the two house cats we had when I was teenagers died either (I was out in Oregon).

2. You can probably find this somewhere online (haha), but when I was in high school I started wearing baggy clothes, as was the style for disaffected kids in the 1990s (though my peers and I, being in southern Iowa, were a few years behind the fad, probably). I refused to wear a belt, though, so my pants sagged quite a bit. One day (fall 1998), a friend tried to de-pants me in the school hallway, and I successfully evaded her attack by holding onto my pants. In the clear, I kept walking, until another friend de-pantsed me, and my boxers went with them. The whole hallway saw me half-naked, and I scuttled into an empty room—empty except for the woman in her 30s or 40s laughing at me. Embarrassing moment, for sure, but I took it in stride, laughed it off, and wrote about it in my application letter to the Freshmen Honors program at Iowa State.

3. My first email address was ska_nerd@deseretmail.com (I think that’s how it was spelled). I had been using my parents’ email, but then suspected that they were reading my emails, and switched over. I think I had friends using Deseretmail, which I think was a religious site, and I was obsessed with ska music. The site went down a few years later, but it was my first webmail experience.

4. My parents gave very boring names to animals: Billy Joe and Red (dogs), Boots, Yellow, Tuffy (cats). I thought I was oh-so-clever when we got a new cat when I was a young teenager and I named him “Who.” I thought the Abbot and Castello schtick “Who’s on First” was hilarious, and tried to recreate the conversation “What’s your cat’s name?”…”Who” as many times as possible.

5. When I first got a cell phone (one of my parents’ phones when I went off to college) I detested the idea of being able to called at any time, and simply left it in my dorm room all the time. That changed sometime around my junior year of college, but I was definitely anti-constant-contact ten years ago, which is quite a bit different from now: hey just text me, tweet at me, email me, facebook message me, etc. (Though now I rather hate talking on the phone.)

6. The first time I remember being hit (besides in fights with little brothers) was my senior year of high school. We were playing roller hockey in our high school parking lot, and a bunch of drunk high school students kept driving through the parking lot. Here it was (in my mind at the time): straightedge punks vs. drunken hicks. Of course, none of my clique wanted to fight, and the only punches were: they attacked Tyler and drove off, and then when they came at me, my best friend at the time (Logan, a big guy) stood between me and someone else, and when that guy swung at me (glancing my ear), Logan swung once and knocked him to the floor. Billy retaliated by putting Minor Threat lyrics into people’s lockers the next day of school, and I wound up turning to pacifist passages in the Bible. I view this as one of the turning points in my life toward pacifism, oddly enough.

7. One more animal story: When I was a kid, one of our donkeys got struck by lightning while our cousins were visiting. At least, that’s how I remember it. I thought it was totally freaky!

And now, onward to my seven awardees!
1) Debbie, because I imagine her response would be delightful
2) Matt: May you produce text and then finish your dissertation!
3) Dana, whom I adore (and whose blog I adore)!
4) ML, who is doing the Peace Corps in the DR
5) Daisy, for her kitties!
6) Robin, who generally blogs about awesome tech stuff
and 7) Dawn, who rocks!

If you blog using WordPress, WPtouch is super easy to install. Here’s a few screen captures of my blog from my iPhone:

• I really like this post from Tenured Radical, which is largely about facebook, faculty meetings, and school starting. In particular, this line is spot-on:

If I can say I learned anything it was that faculty really ought not to complain about their students not listening properly and asking questions that have already been answered, because we are, as a genus, just as flawed in this respect as they are. Probably more so because we are more likely to ask questions at……great…….length.

• A new cafe, Snakes and Lattes, in Toronto has opened that is attempting to eschew laptops (no wireless there) and get people to actually interact with each other. The Torontoist covers it here.

• Inside Higher Ed has a great discussion about the textbook industry.

• Recently a man was prosecuted for videotaping a police officer and posting it online. The charges are that videotaping violates wiretapping laws, which seems flat out ridiculous. I’m reminded of David Brin’s The Transparent Society, in which he argues for reciprocal transparency. My major critique of his argument is that he doesn’t take seriously enough power relations. In an ideal world, sure we’d share information with powerful figures (law enforcement, corporations, etc.) if they shared the same information with us. But the world’s not ideal: crappy police actions can still be protected by crappy laws. The police have privacy in public that isn’t afforded others. (If I do something in public and it’s videotaped, the owner can post it online without a problem.)

• Profhacker has a new Teaching Carnival up! Lots of awesome blog posts to check out.

Bruns’s Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond is a solid argument about how the Internet is changing the way we produce content. Bruns explains that content creation online “operate[s:] along lines which are fluid, flexible, heterarchical, and organized ad hoc as required by the ongoing process of development” (1). He argues that the term “production” is outmoded for much online content creation because it implies a final product, instead of an ongoing process of creation. He proposes that we understand content creation online as produsage to highlight how the roles of consumer and user are disappearing, replaced by a system where “the distinction between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance” (2). This change in creation processes is made possible by develops of the Internet as a media. Bruns specifically points to differences between the Internet and previous mass media: an increased access to the means of production and distribution, the ease of peer-to-peer communication, and the ability to share, manipulate, modify, and edit content (13-14).



Bruns outlines four principles of produsage that signify when it works best: 1) open participation and communal evaluation; 2) a fluid heterarchy that leads to an ad hoc meritocracy; 3) creation of unfinished artifacts through granular changes; and 4) the development of communal property that results in individual rewards (particularly social capital) (24-30).



After extended discussions of open software creation, citizen journalism on blogs, and wikipedia, Bruns turns to how “we [. . .:] identify, collate, process, evaluate, combine, and synthesize the diverse range of content now available to us from a variety of sources” (171). Bruns explores metadata — data collected about usage, information, and behavior, often through automation, or through links and tags (174, 178-179). The book is a rather extensive and detailed discussion of various aspects of online produsage. Worth a read (or a skim, at the very least — the book seems to get repetitive at points, but offers some useful insights).



A few quotes on new media and developing relationships: “The social, collaborative basis of the content creation communities engaged in produsage also indicates this: in produsage projects, the object of the communal effort is almost always as much the development of social structures to support and sustain the shared project as it is the development of that project itself” (23). “content creation is an act of maintenance and construction (of both content and the social relationships among participants) at least as much as it is one of production” (23).



Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang 2008.


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• Composition instructors know it can be difficult to teach using a handbook. How do we approach the text as a useful resource for students? All too often it’s easy to assign pages from a handbook for students to read, or to provide links to online resources and move on, assuming students are going to go there on their own. Rebecca Moore Howard provides ten principles of teaching with a handbook, a useful list that stresses teaching how to use the handbook—a lifelong skill for writers. She has more on what she’s doing in class with the handbook.

• One of the first things those who are new to Penn State learn is that PSU’s Webmail sucks. It’s not pretty to look at, it’s not organized well, emails can get buried easily and are hard to see, the organizational scheme isn’t very “intuitive” — those who have used gmail usually respond to the interface: “Wow, why don’t they code this like gmail — or switch over!” I prefer to forward my psu email to gmail and download it to my Mac Mail client and iPad Mail. Onward State has a recent post with links on how to do just that.

• Blogrolls are a thing of the past, and Traci Gardner provides some reasons why. She doesn’t discuss the increased use of RSS readers, though a reader brings that up in the comments. I don’t think I’ve updated my blogroll in two years or so — perhaps I’ll put that on my to-do list. Gardner also provides a a list of almost 70 blogs in rhetoric and composition.

• Many of us use caffeine to keep our energy up, or to keep our energy stable, or to just survive. Here’s an interesting Death by Caffeine tool to find out how much caffeine it would take to kill you. You can choose your caffeine of choice (many many options!), enter your weight, and find out. I drink mostly brewed coffee (black), and it would take 92 cups to kill me of an overdose, according to this. Or, if I went to Starbucks and got tall coffees, 38 cups of them. It’s not healthy to drink as much coffee as I do, but now I can rest assured that I’m no where near deadly levels.

Particularly, a few posts ago, I mentioned the politics of spaces. A friend and I had a conversation about how gay male social and sexual behavior seemed different here now than five years ago (his comparison) and I noted how it was much different here than in Oregon. Too small of a sample size, but there does seem to be a privatization of public sex culture — moving online and into bedrooms, rather than public spaces (the stuff that Tim Dean so eloquently discusses in Unlimited Intimacy).

Me Reading Proof I Exist

When I visited my friend Billy from high school while driving through Chicago in June, he gave me some copies of his recent zines (and by recent, I mean within the last few years ago). Billy first introduced me to zines (independently produced magazines) in high school, when we’d read stuff by other high school and college kids throughout the Midwest. He even produced his own, which I contributed to. I’ve loved zines for their amateur style, their tone, their personal nature, and the way that zinesters network for years. But I don’t read them as much as I’d like to. I’m hoping to return to some of that soon.

It was good to read Billy’s zine, Proof I Exist — this issue a series of letters he had written friends after pulling himself out of a funk. I rather like his title, because it seems to be representational of the recurrent exigence of zines: the “recurrent need for cultivation and validation of the self,” as Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd put it in regards to blogs. As I argued in my master’s thesis, zines can be understood as an genealogical ancestor to blogs, and it was the shared personal nature of writing for a public that led me to be interested in the links between the two genres/forms (understanding that genre is not solely form, but I’m not sure I’d call either blogs or zines quite a genre).

Anyway, I recently read Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from the Underground cover to cover:

Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture by Stephen Duncombe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first read parts of this book for my master’s thesis three years ago, and I was wanting to return to it and read the whole thing for a while. This book thoroughly discusses various aspects of zines and zine culture, including the sincere nature of zines, the anti-authority, and the independent, anti-corporate attitude of many zines. Duncombe is himself a zinester, and so is quite knowledge. He avoids being too academic, while drawing on academic discussions and theory in accessible, interesting ways. I appreciate his own investment in zines as well: he has a stake, and he’s quite explicit about his own viewpoints in aspects of zine culture (for instance, his argument that the self ghetto-ization of anti-conformists can lead to de-politization and that zinesters need to be actively engaged with others and not just “write to the choir”). Very comprehensive and engaging read.

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IRAN: A Nation Of Bloggers from ayrakus on Vimeo.

Whelan writes that not signing your name in public is irresponsible: “One bane of the Internet is the anonymous blogger who abuses his anonymity to engage in irresponsible attacks.” “Irresponsible attacks” is probably an ideologically charged way of saying, “I don’t agree with him and so he’s irresponsible,” but to put that aside, Whelan seems to charge that it’s simply irresponsible to be anonymous (never mind that anonymous and pseudonymous are different). But I doubt Whelan would agree with this larger generalization, unless he’s not a big fan of the Federalist Papers. There’s a long lineage of writing anonymously or pseudonymously in public forums, for a variety of reasons. In Rhetorical Refusals, John Schilb explains how Foucault gave an interview without attaching his name, so that his ideas can be considered w/out the influence of his celebrity. Blevins explains that he protected his identity so that his conservative students wouldn’t feel alienated by his liberals views and to protect his conservative family members who have jobs in politics.

A few years ago a friend of mine revealed the identity of another blogger on his blog. His rationale was in some ways akin to Whelan’s, though from the opposite side of the political spectrum: He felt this other blogger was irresponsible to issues of social justice and was outright homophobic and subtly racist—and this was important in the profession that both of them shared. To this day, I’m not sure how I feel about the “outing.” Foucault’s dreams of a time when it doesn’t matter who writes, which some have touted as a possibility now with the Internet, seems like ill-thought idealism.