What is this site and why am I doing it?
I’ve stopped posting on most social media and moved to the fediverse. I still browse other platforms to keep up with trends and friends, but I only post on IG (friends only) and here.
What I share here is separate from but related to my professional life—I’m thinking out loud and making room for rough, unfinished ideas. I write mainly for myself, but if others find it useful, that’s great. This is how I approach learning and communicating online.
While this is my preferred approach, I acknowledge that sharing unfinished ideas publicly is risky and you have to accept accountability for the messiness that comes with that. But I know that working through your vulnerability through the act of writing lets you tap into your most creative, innovative self and test your ideas against an evolving sense of what’s good. The potential for an audience, however real or implied, keeps you more honest and less self-indulgent.
My personal story shapes this view. I was a non-traditional college student who often felt removed from campus life. I spent a lot of time online during the era of YTMND and BearShare, tracking the daily plot of my life and studies with a public website that eventually became a major news and opinion platform for women online during the early 00s. This happened largely because I had a kind and intentional mentor who shaped my thinking, and many wonderful and challenging allies and collaborators along the way.
In the beginning, a kind English professor saw the innovative work I was doing online and took me under her wing. She and her grad students were growing a new English program focused on composition and digital rhetorics—an approach to digital communication interested in how people use digital tools and data to express themselves online, and spent a lot of time plumbing topics like digital literacy, technical writing, games and interactivity, and critical engagement with bias and marketing. It’s a field particularly focused on the intersection of tech, positionality and writing, and how these things ripple out into the rest of our lives. A small cohort of grad students welcomed me into their PhD pod as a townie undergrad, fed me home cooked meals, taught me to knit, and encouraged me to think more deeply about what I was building, and especially to consider how far my voice could reach with a little intentionality and planning.
As I add to this page, I’ll be thinking out loud about digital rhetorics, digital communication, emerging technology and linking back to foundational ideas I see reflected online today. I’m also a communications professional in an embattled public sector, and will consider how these ideas inform my decisions and philosophy as a practitioner. Occasionally I’ll say something longer.