Mapping the Long Road

Managing My Feeds

As I continue to think intentionally about my web presence, I have been considering the issue of what to publish where.  There are a number of issues that coalesce in this question: privacy, building community, over-exposure, fragmentation, etc.

Over the past month, I have developed a more variegated approach to my web presence.  In so doing, I have started relying more heavily on three posterous.com accounts: The Long View, which relates to my most public self, Associate Dean Long's Perspective, which relates to my daily activities as Associate Dean, and Life with Chloe and Hannah, which is a private, password protected space in which I have been chronicling daily activities with my daughters.

The Long View and Dean Long's Perspective both feed to my two twitter accounts, cplong and LAUSDeanLong, although there are ways to specify that a specific post on posterous goes only to one or the other of the twitter accounts.  As I think about controlling where my content is fed, I am increasingly aware of the power of social media and of the need to think strategically about what is published where.

I suppose this is really a question of audience and what to say to whom.  As I try to build a following around my work as Associate Dean, there will be things I want to say in that voice which are different from what I want to say in my voice as cplong, which I am increasingly thinking of as my most public voice - that is, the one with the broadest audience.

Here the question of Facebook becomes interesting.  I have been most intentional about my friends on Facebook.  For the most part, they are people from my personal life.  Now, however, my friends there are more complex, including not only personal friends from the past and present, but increasingly former students, professional colleagues and others who have come to know me exclusively through my digital presence. So, now with the ability to manage privacy more discriminately and with the increasing popularity of my Digital Dialogue, Ancient Philosophy Society and the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies pages, I am thinking about how and whether to expand the breadth of my Facebook friends.

Over the past year, I have thought of my Twitter account as the place with the broadest reach and most indiscriminate publicity - that is, I only block a follower if I think the account is advertising or spam; but I have not concerned myself with precisely who is following me.  On Facebook, however, I have always limited my exposure.  Now, however, with much of my more personal posts about my family being protected through one of my posterous accounts, I am increasingly thinking of my Facebook presence as more like my Twitter presence.  And yet, I think I might be alienating former friends by posting things there related to my academic and administrative work.

This leads me to wonder, again, about what to feed where...

Fractured online identity? – Targuman

In the post Fractured online identity? – Targuman, Chris Brady continues the conversation we have been having here on this blog below, see my post: Fractured Identity.

In response to Chris, I have been thinking about the question of over-exposure in relation to the Long Road blog.  I agree with him that anonymous blogging is problematic and I am committed to blogging always as myself.  However, I am thinking about what Stevier says about her kids and allowing them to determine their own online presence.  Hers are older than mine, but I have not been particularly discerning about limiting the way my kids are exposed on my site.  That, perhaps, needs to be rethought.

In rethinking it, I may decide that I need to shift direction a bit on the Long Road.  And yet, the original purpose of the Long Road was and remains to blog a philosophical life.  For me, this means, to quote Aristotle, a life "with parents and children and a wife and, in general, with friends and fellow citizens as well, since humans are by nature political" (Nic. Ethics, 1097b10-11). Perhaps, though, there is a way to reflect on my experiences as a husband, a father, a friend and a citizen in public but in perhaps more discriminate ways...

Opening Up the PSU Discussion of Ethics

I am working with Nancy Tuana at the Rock Ethics Institute and we are thinking about opening a new blog we created on the Rock blog site called "Speak Up" to the entire Penn State community.

First, is this technically possible given the structure of the blogs@psu implementation of Movable Type?  It would require, in effect, making all PSU users who have activated their personal space co-authors.

Second, what are the advantages and dangers of such a model?

Let me think out loud here about this for a moment:

The advantage is that we embrace a way of being open that has the possibility of making the REI blog a genuine site for the organic growth of a community concerned with pressing ethical questions that arise in students' lives.  If we can lay out a set of guidelines, practices and conventions about posting to the site, it would give students a way to "Speak Up" about ethical issues they confront everyday.  This is potentially a very powerful model and possibility.

The danger is that the space will become too contentious and overwhelmed by students who are unable to distance themselves from their deeply felt convictions to engage in reflective and conscientious ways.  My initial response to this is that our role as educators is to help students learn how to engage in thoughtful dialogue about precisely such issues of contention.

Everyone I talk to about opening university controlled digital spaces to student generated content, students included, express skepticism about the students' ability to engage with one another in a mature and thoughtful way.  My intuition, and it is based on my experience with students in the classroom, is that when administrators, staff and faculty are part of the community these digital spaces open, students respond in thoughtful and often quite remarkable ways.

What do others think of this model?

Sound and the Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogue 18: Political Unconscious - Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue

I received some good feedback from a person named philosoraptor on episode 18 of the Digital Dialogue podcast with Noëlle McAfee.

Philosoraptor wrote that my voice was more difficult to hear than those of my guests. I am using the Zoom H4 and probably need to think about how best to position the microphone during the recordings of the Digital Dialogue. 

I will also need to work on my own technique.  Allan Gyorke already has told me that I need to project a bit more into the mic.  This is no problem for me in class, but for some reason with the microphone, I tend to mute my own voice.  It seems that I need to continue to work on my podcasting technique as I produce the Digital Dialogue.

A New Path on The Long Road

via www.personal.psu.edu

As I begin to turn my attention to the beginning of my tenure as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the College of the Liberal Arts, I have been thinking about how to integrate the digital community we will attempt to create there into my ongoing digital identity on the blogs associated with Long Road.

It is perhaps best to have the posts I make there as Dean integrated into the main page of the Long Road, posted with an image of its own, so that it becomes part of the Long Road feed that includes all the posts I make in any of the associated blogs.

This makes sense as a model, but as the digital community around the College of Liberal Arts grows, I will need to think about how to integrate the proliferation of content that will grow as students, faculty, staff and alumni begin to interact in the digital space envisioned there.

Digital Dialogue with Video

Digital Dialogue on Vimeo

I am trying to gather video material together here on Vimeo related to my work using digital media to cultivate dialogue around issues of philosophical importance to me.

I have also created a page with http://mag.ma in an attempt to gather together videos from various sources related to my interests.  You can see my channel at:

http://mag.ma/cplong

Blogging about Blogging

Having thought about this space overnight, I've decided to use it to highlight specific dimensions of my "blogoverse," as my friend and colleague Brad Kozlek calls the long road. Given that this TypePad site allows for followers like Facebook and Twitter, I thought why not use it to direct people to elements of the blogoverse that might slip through the cracks?

Given how simple it is to use the Blog It bookmarklet to capture and comment on a specific dimension of my site, I think this would offer me an opportunity to do a little blogging about blogging.

Fractured Identity

Well, here I am posting to this new TypePad blog, which has some very nice features.  However, I have spent a lot of time cultivating my web identity on the collection of blogs that I have gathered here:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/TheLongRoad/

So, I am loath to think about moving even if this site does add a nice social dimension to things and it makes posting quite simple.  My issue, however, is that I don't want my web identity to become too fractured and I am working to cultivate a community around my work on the Long Road...