Sunday, November 9, 2025 • 1
“… every text is connected to other texts by citations, quotations, allusions, borrowings, adaptations, appropriations, parody, pastiche, imitation, and the like. Every text is in a dialogical relationship with other texts. In sum, intertextuality describes the relationships that exist between and among texts. What follows is a discussion of the strategies of intertextuality.”
Sunday, November 9, 2025 • 3
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.
Sunday, August 17, 2025 • 6
Thinking out loud about tech in the public sector, and the classic technical problem of covering the “last mile.”
Friday, August 15, 2025 • 7
As communications professionals in higher education, we work for institutions built on the pursuit of knowledge and innovation, yet many of us feel uncertain about how to thoughtfully integrate one of the most significant technological advances of our time: artificial intelligence. I offer some thoughts here.
“In 2024, there were a total of 454 words used excessively by chatbots, the researchers report.” When does use of AI tip over into something fraudulent? Experts disagree.
Private group chats are as maddening as public social media - and much harder to track. https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america
Tuesday, June 25, 2024 • 1
This has a bad headline, but the gist is that AI is already beginning to be used to power racketeering and ransom business models against vulnerable human enterprises. The net effect is a general erosion of the trustworthiness of written communication, especially online, as the same tools we use to perform our work and extend our social lives are increasingly used to scam us.
In relationship to collectors, purchases of physical media are on the rise, with vinyl outselling everything, and cassette tapes, CDs and DVDs making a comeback. I’m a longtime downloader and streamer, but have been buying vinyl lately myself. Indicative of lost trust in Big Tech?
Wednesday, October 25, 2023 • 1
Hilariously (sadly? regretfully?), since I’ve been writing online for public audiences since about 1997, I’ve been thinking about the art of posting, community building, and who benefits and how, for a very long time. All of this (https://blog.ayjay.org/the-three-paths-of-micro-blog/) sounds about right, specifically: “…it will — by design — never be a place for you to monetize your brand, troll, shitpost, or become an influencer. But hey, there are plenty of other platforms better suited for that kind of thing.
Microblogging on the open web - and why care? book.micro.blog
This is one to watch: www.theverge.com/2023/10/2…
As a professional poster (derogatory), this is exactly the kind of posting stream I’m interested in supporting for institutional communications. When you speak on behalf of a company or institution, you need the power to own your own platforms and content, the agility of posting to multiple channels from one platform/location, and it needs to be user friendly. We need support and ease of use, and since I’m also in public education, it would be great if we could do some of that for free or close to it.
I’m here after listening to this podcast yesterday, after a months-long conversation about abandoning social media in my department (https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon). With the move to algorithmic CPC taking priority over newsworthiness across most platforms, we saw a major drop in engagement. That was after the ridiculous “pivot to video” disaster, though departments like mine nonetheless consider video production in a real way every few months. We decided to call it after Twitter, the final app that answered our need for just-in-time communication, decided to become a walled garden with bad SEO. We’re going to let those channels go dark and focus on talking to our stakeholders in more effective ways.
I’ve been playing with Bluesky and Mastodon on my own, and in many ways, this micro.blog communication channel fits what we need. It doesn’t hurt that I like an indie model with a friendly vibe (micro.blog functionality reminds me a little of early self-hosted blogging and this site feels a little like early Tumblr). The problem: our audiences are not here. We still need to be able to post to myriad platforms, including the big baddies that we’d rather ignore.