Flying Gogoplata

As I have mentioned before, I have been getting recent insight into my audience by using Google Analytics. Though for the most part it is exactly how I expected, there are a few…anomalies I had certainly not expected to see. For instance, a significant portion of my incoming referrals originated at the OCF Blog … somewhat unsettling considering I hadn’t been terribly kind to them recently. But a bit more unsettling was the number of search engine hits I was getting for search queries like “facebook selling user information” or “facebook platform hoax selling.” GAH! Both of those are page 1, and that last one is third from the top. Though I haven’t gotten terribly many hits from these kinds of searches, I feel the need to disclaim myself for these topics. I am in no way an authority on Facebook’s terms of use or other legal documents. I do not work for Facebook or represent Facebook’s stances on anything in any way. Though having said that, I still think I’m right about what I wrote.

Seeing my audience start to grow beyond my local community (and into southern Canada apparently. Huh?) has put a bit of the fear of God in me. I had always intended my blog to be a bit more commentary and criticism of things like art, software, technology and such. The course’s posting requirement has brought up writing that is a lot more personal than I had originally intended. A friend of mine recently commented to me that the blog has a lot of potential for the easy publication of a very professional writing, but that it also maps on to a very personal writing space that makes it difficult to fight the urge to make it your personal diary. I’m thankful that I had been forced to write so frequently as I now have the confidence to consider a broader audience in my writing. With that in mind, I hope I will be able to move out of “beta” in the near future and move into a professionally minded writing release cycle. This, for me, requires the discipline to be very selective in my writing without ceasing to write altogether.

It has come to my attention recently that running a search query for “sorority blog” on some search engines, my blog comes up on the list of results. I feel an urge at this point to explain myself and my particular depictions based on some of the feedback I have received from my local audience. Then again I don’t think I’ve written anything worth apologizing for either. I have two sets of pieces in my “Sorority Girls” category: those addressing my experience in the History of Information course and those addressing my relationship with Kappa Kappa Gamma. The former was fairly insincere snobbery and the latter was a sincere reach-out.

Looking back on it, I probably would not have written or titled the first two pieces the same way if I were writing them now. I’m on this stint of exploring stereotypes and trying to expose them wherever they come up, but there’s a large part of me that wants to believe there some validity or justification to subscribing to these stereotypes over others, as these boys and girls (as these societies are undeniably structurally gendered) collectively represent a society of exclusion that I try to actively work against in the communities in which I’m involved. And there is also something about the sorority girl stereotype that makes it easy to explain the different modes of discourse between a Cognitive Science and a Mass Communications major that the nuances in the modes of discourse don’t reach without much more effort.

However, it is obviously hypocritical to then ask my house mates to drop those same stereotypes and biases for the purposes community building with our neighbors. In my attempts to give the benefit of the doubt I think I may have inadvertently reinforced some of them to my local community. At the same time I’m still not entirely sure a large chunk of my intended audience was ever reached to begin with. I am still happy with what I wrote in the last two pieces, but I would have liked them to hold more weight in the real world.

I’d like to make one thing clear: I am very happy the OCF exists, if for no other reason than that I use the model of the OCF as a proof of concept for a functional, student-run computing service network whenever I pitch similar ideas to the USCA. It’s an organization run entirely on volunteers and donations, providing a service completely free of charge for which they could easily charge, and continue to support users who have long since graduated.

What seems to be amazing to so many people is that the organization is student-run. I have a lot of trouble understanding exactly why that is. None of the physical resources they have are particularly inaccessible to them because they are college students, and the environment here seems to be conducive to the particular pool of human resources the OCF requires. For some reason, however, there seems to be a mistrust of empowering and employing in positions with real responsibility where it can be avoided, particularly in the USCA. I have consistently argued that the OCF is proof that there is no inherent danger in entrusting responsibility to students, and the result of that empowerment is typically far more accessible to the locality than anything a big company provides.

For me, this does not excuse a lack of professionalism in procedure. As I understand it, I have made a few folks at the OCF a bit unhappy for saying so. But even though you have no paying customers, it undermines your credibility if things go wrong and they don’t get fixed in a transparent manner. I am happy with all the changes the OCF has made to correct this, but I still believe my criticisms (not my rants, mind you) warranted merit. Particularly because I had entrusted my coursework to the reliability of the OCF. At this point in my experience, I couldn’t be happier that I stayed with them. They addressed all my needs/complaints directly. I look forward to continue using them as the case study for functional student operations.

The assignment on writing influences was one I had fully intended to write but had no idea how to tackle. I am by no means a literature buff and don’t really have enough experience reading books for leisure in my adult life to know how I’ve been influenced by writers. The closest I’ve been to regular reading of literary work is the large number of plays I used to read. But even then, I was looking at dramatic text with a performative evaluation as opposed to a literary one. Even when considering different media (film, music, video games, etc) as the facilitator had suggested, I had no lens under which to evaluate how my writing was being influenced. I knew how my thoughts were influenced, my opinions, my attitudes, my behavior even, but never really this mode of communication. And as much Calvin and Hobbes I’ve read, and as likely it is that it has formed good portion of my personal philosophy as well as my writing style, it is difficult for me to overtly identify any Bill Watterson in my own wordy ramblings.

Then my best friend commented on one of my quick-fire pieces:

…your writing has improved dramatically over time as I noticed in this piece and “Endless Stupidity” were pretty fucking awesome and enjoyable to read and to a novice, they remind me of penny arcade.

I don’t think my writing is anywhere near as good as Penny Arcade, but I can see now how heavily influenced I’ve been by this kind of nerd culture. I’ve spent a lot of time reading Slashdot, ExtremeTech, Woot, 1up, IGN, Penny Arcade and though many of these aren’t particularly or consistently funny (save for PA, which is both) they have this nerd humor that I’ve picked up and bleeds into my writing. I have never been entirely sure that these are styles I would like to emulate. Sometimes they are completely juvenile. But it often informs my presentation, and with that, it directs the tone and pace of quite a bit of my commentary.

As a preface and implicit apology, I would like to say that I have given up on my original idea for this 5-post series that will become my final paper for the Blogging DeCal course. I had originally intended to write a series on my patriline to honor my recently deceased grandfather. I made two unfortunate realizations recently. First, I have run out of time to craft anything that thorough and have instead opted to write something significantly less intense so that I have something to hand in to the course facilitator on at Monday’s class meeting. Second, I don’t have nearly the fiction writing skills to do any honor to the mythology of either of my bloodlines.

In most other time-insensitive scenarios, this work would come spaced days apart with posts in between. It is certainly my first attempt to publish anything in a serial format. With that in mind, the restrictions of the course are forcing these out much closer in time than I have intended., so if they seem a little packed together it’s because they’re meant to have a bit more padding. On that note, the time-sensitivity is also forcing these to be ordered in a somewhat less natural fashion. I intend there to be few if any dependencies in the next four pieces, but they all depend on this introduction, which will be pushed to the bottom of the page before it is read.

Enough apology. The following pieces are a set of reflections on topics I have chosen or intended to write on frequently, on my experience in writing within the framework of this course, and on some of the feedback and responses I have received about particular pieces or on the ideas within them. I don’t intend to entirely revisit all the pieces I’ve written on a particular topic, but they will certainly be referenced. I hope to steer away from a tone of finality as I am afraid such a tone will discourage me from writing when the course ends, but it cannot be avoided entirely as this is also an earmark for the end of this stage of my writing experience.

So here goes nothing: these are some reflections on my past semester as a blogger…