Status Update

Quick Study feeds into my Facebook account -- and so does my Twitter presence, episodic as it, too, has been. The Venn diagram covering their respective audiences is hard to picture. I'm not enough of a luddite to refuse to try such things out. But the need for more experience in this department is not a crying one. Let's hope that the age of innovation in brand-named new-media identity-syndication systems is now drawing to a close.

In any case, a new application on Facebook creates a collage of sorts out of randomly selected "status updates" from the past year. Looking over the result, I see that it contains a couple of sentences crystallizing out my basic attitude towards life online:

Appreciating the deep inner motivations of a feces-throwing monkey is arguably less important than knowing when to duck.

I just became a "fan of Theodor Adorno" on Facebook. All things considered, it's for the best he is not around to know about this.

For twenty-four years now I've been writing for publication. The first half of that period, I never did so online. (It went without saying that everything I wrote was for "print publications." The very expression would have seemed ridiculous.) In the dozen years since first taking that step, writing directly online only became part of my routine over the past six. Ambivalence towards the medium seems like the necessary and rational response to it. I tried to discuss this during my talk at the University of Iowa a couple of months ago -- or at least to sketch out some of the grounds for that ambivalence -- but that effort was much too provisional and elliptical. Need to develop this in writing before long. The problem being that ambivalence can make for paralysis.

Insofar as Quick Study has had a dominant theme for the past two years, that would be it -- a sense of approaching and avoiding the question of how to deal with an environment for writing that keeps changing, so that assessment of it potentials (good and bad) keeps falling short of coming to terms with the actuality of mess. But clearly "duck and cover" won't be a sufficient strategy for the long term. What is blogging (for)? That's not even the main question at this point. Maybe more like: What are the enabling conditions of being a certain kind of writer? Do they still exist?

I've been trying to think about this for a while now but it feels like running into a wall. Just walking around it does not seem to be an option.