Category Archives: communications

Cutting the hard line

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We no longer have a landline. This past week our household made the shift. By no means the first to do so. And certainly not the last. It just made sense at this time.

I needed a new phone. My venerable Nexus 5 was on its last legs. In truth it was probably beyond its last legs. Its battery no longer held a charge for more than a few hours. And there were some other issues all age-related. Plus I was due a new phone for entirely extraneous reasons, which I might mention in a future post.

I’ve had my eye on the Google Pixel ever since it arrived on the scene. And yes, I know there is a new version coming some time in the late autumn. But I needed a new phone now. It seemed like a good opportunity to simply transfer our landline number to a new mobile. But there was a catch.

Without a landline, there would be no way for K. to reach me (or anyone else) when I’m out and about. K. has never had a mobile phone. She says she never needed one. Still, it would be hard to convince her that if she also got a mobile then the only apparent challenge to getting rid of the landline would be obviated. She’d need a stronger reason. But then disaster struck.

A minor disaster. K. lost her beautiful iPod Touch while we were on vacation in Spain. It was a brilliant little device and she was heartbroken. (I’m exaggerating a bit because it had been a gift from me.) So we were faced with the choice of either replacing the iPod Touch with another iPod Touch or move to an iPhone with 128GB of space so that it could also carry all of our music and podcasts. In the end it was not such a hard decision. K. now has an iPhone SE. It’s a little bulkier than her beloved iPod Touch, but still very small by mobile phone standards these days. And she’s already loving it (I think).

The only challenge now is remembering where my phone is at all times (since it now has the old landline number that most people used to reach us) and remembering to turn on its ringer.

I’ll adjust.

Converging on WordPress

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convergingSometime last autumn, I got the itch for change. As is typical for me, the itch was preceded by a rethink of my PIO, short for Personal Identity Online. It’s good to periodically reassess your PIO, especially when changes to your goals, your practices, and your tools crop up. In my case, each of these was relevant. The result of the change was a shift in technology (a move from Drupal to WordPress for my main website) and an integration of apparently disparate components in my PIO.

Although I had a number of reasons for switching to WordPress, none of them were problems with Drupal. I continue to believe that Drupal is one of the best solutions for building a robust web presence. I still manage a couple of Drupal sites. And if I was tasked with building something more demanding than a small personal website, I’d turn to Drupal first.

Back in 2007 (which feels like a long time ago even to me), I needed a solution for a small frontispiece website. I’ve got a modest communications consultancy and I really only needed for people to be able to find me easily so that we could work together. Some years before that I had started a blog on Google’s blogging site. There I mostly blogged about technology and open source matters, both of which were relevant to my work at the time. I wanted to continue with that blog but draw the feed into my frontispiece website in order to make the content easily available there as well. Drupal handled these tasks gracefully. Plus using Drupal, despite the steep learning curve, gave me access to web management skills that I could deploy elsewhere. It wasn’t long before I had a number of Drupal sites that I was helping to build and maintain.

Time passes and we change. Most of that change is just getting older. But some of it involves new interests and new activities. Here are some of my changes: After 2009 I started writing fiction in a more serious way than I had previously. I also started reading fiction more seriously and, given some recent experience working with exceptionally cool librarians, I wanted to have a simple way to catalogue my reading. So I joined LibraryThing. I also wanted a venue for writing short pieces that weren’t fiction but were often about literature. At the time I didn’t know where that would lead, so I didn’t want to simply co-opt my technology blog. The easiest solution was to set up a new blog nested inside my main web domain, but without any strong connection between them. That was the beginning of the Transformative Explications blog. In 2011 I joined a group on LibraryThing called the 75 Books Challenge. (You’d be surprised at the number of people out there who read more than 75 books each year.) Part of the standard practice of that group is to write a brief review of each book that you read. Starting in 2012 I took on that practice. And that became a fun project in itself (I’ve written more than 175 reviews now). Eventually I decided that some of those reviews might easily find a home on my Transformative Explications blog. They did. Then the last motivator for change came from attending a writers’ conference at which self-identification, as a writer, was recommended. So there you have it. There’d been a change in practices, the tools that I used, and, as I began to realize, in my goals. Definitely time for a rethink of my PIO.

The fun thing about communications rethinks is that by the time you realize that they are necessary, they practically run themselves.

It was clear by late 2013 that my principal blog was actually Transformative Explications. Moreover, I was spending the vast majority of my free time reading, writing, and thinking about short stories and novels. Yet my PIO masked this. Having established a modest, if mostly hidden, identity as a reviewer and writer on Transformative Explications, it seemed the simplest thing would be to use that as the basis for a revamped web presence. This would mean that a blog would be the main component of my website. And that meant that I might as well move to a platform that was principally built on the blog model, thus WordPress.

So much for the decision about technology. It wasn’t that hard at all.

There is more involved, of course, in rethinking one’s PIO. I no longer wanted to bifurcate my PIO between my interests in technology and my aspirations as a writer. I’d need integration. And that meant merging my blogs together. But it also meant accepting that these apparently divergent interests could be encompassed in one integrated identity. And that’s why the revised version of Transformative Explications covers all of my interests. I also decided at that time to finally start using Twitter, but again with a unified PIO. I am a writer who also thinks seriously about technology and openness.

One last question remained. Having thought through a revision of my PIO and the consequent choices that afforded for a different web platform, would there be any useful transfer for others? The short answer is, yes. I’ve added a WordPress client site to my communications portfolio.

Twitter community through self-identification

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DSC_7172I made my first tweets on Friday, 15 November 2013. They were a long time coming. I set up my Twitter account more than three years ago. It has taken me this long to overcome my communications anxiety. Not so much anxiety about what to say, although there is that too. But rather anxiety about how this communications stream fits into my PIO, my personal identity online.  Frankly, I didn’t have a viable use-case for me back then. What’s changed?

To some extent Twitter has changed. In the past three years it has grown not just in numbers but in sophistication. These days it would be hard to deny that communities form, interact, and disband within the  Twitter environment. That is part of what motivated my plunge into the tweet pool.

I like the fact that Twitter is not a deep well or walled garden or whichever metaphor you best think captures the semi-permeable envelope surrounding Facebook and users within Facebook. Yes, I’m on Facebook, but I rarely, if ever, use it for anything other than staying abreast of the status updates from my many friends and relatives. For me, Facebook never overcame my anxiety about openness. I have a bias towards openness. I want what I write to be readable by anyone. I think that forces me to be a bit more circumspect about what I write. Just as it would if I was in a real live conversation with someone. Twitter has not produced the same level of anxiety for me. Although it is possible to “protect” your tweets so that only your preferred set of followers see them, the ethos is clearly to leave your tweets visible to one and all.

However, it was something other than anxieties over openness and the challenge of wit or wisdom in under 140 characters that convinced me to activate my sleeping Twitter account. It was something that arose during a panel discussion at the recent Wild Writers Festival in Waterloo.

Many of those present were published writers at different stages of their careers. There were also lots of people present who were one or more steps behind in their career arc. Many of those people, I think, marvelled at the level of camaraderie on display amongst the ‘pros’. How, they asked again and again, could they also find such a community?

Writing is hard. Community, if you don’t already have it, is probably harder. The writers on the panel struggled with what to advise. Many of them had found their writerly communities while in school, often after they embarked on a graduate degree, an MFA. Others followed a different path and felt they had only found their community after their initial publications. That led to speculation as to what the preconditions of such a community might be. The best answer to that question, I think, came when one of the panellists turned the tables and asked whether the questioner self-identified as a writer.

What does it mean to self-identify as a writer? And why might that be important for joining or forming a writerly community?

I think self-identification here means declaring publicly that you are a writer. You aren’t a hobbyist. This isn’t an avocation. When someone asks you about yourself, the first thing you say is, “Hi, I’m a writer.” It’s both what you do and who you are. It’s a vocation, which is a strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation. A strong feeling of suitability.

There is no need to be diffident. Indeed, an unwillingness to declare yourself as a writer may be precisely what is holding up your entry into the community of writers. If you do have that strong feeling of suitability, then declare yourself.

Declare yourself. Sometimes it comes down to just that — admitting to yourself that you are, in fact, a writer. And once you’ve done that, then the next step is to declare it publicly.

Which brings me back to Twitter. I have chosen to use my Twitter account as a means of publicly self-identifying as a writer. I like the extremely limited number of characters that Twitter permits for your personal bio on your profile. Mine now reads:

writer, reader, sometime thinker

Come join me, if you wish. Follow me @randymetcalfe

 

PIO – an academic question

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Previously I have been thinking about Personal Identity Online (PIO) in terms of how a consultant might shape or influence how he or she is perceived. I took that as a straightforward communications challenge and put forward suggestions on setting up a consultancy website, blogging, tweeting, and more. Now I want to turn to a couple of thorny issues for academics who are thinking about their PIOs. I want to describe two cases: (1) a well-published academic currently unaffiliated with a university, and (2) a tenured faculty member who uses a non-academic email address and/or domain name for his or her academic web page.

The days of completing your Ph.D. and walking directly into a tenured faculty position are long gone (and maybe they were only ever a myth). The norm for the academic career path in the Humanities tends to be Ph.D., post-doctoral research (if you are lucky), sessional or contract teaching (sometimes, sadly, referred to as “casual” staff), a mad scramble for publications, and then (if you are very lucky) landing a tenure-track assistant professorship, followed by another mad scramble for additional publications, high teaching-evaluations, and “service” (which includes administrative duties as well as contributions to one’s profession such as peer reviewing submissions for publication). Finally, if all goes well, you achieve tenure. And now you can set out on the longer journey toward becoming a full professor. (NB. these are terms for the progression in North America; in the UK and elsewhere the terminology and the progression varies somewhat.)

Between completing your Ph.D. at one institution and securing tenure at another, the young academic may find himself or herself employed, at one time or another, by a surprising number of academic institutions. They might even temporarily be employed by two or more institutions at the same time, for example if they were contract teaching individual courses at different institutions. There may even be times, despite one’s stellar publishing record and high teaching-evaluations, when one finds oneself between institutional employers. In that situation, how does the young academic self-identify online?

There are complications, naturally. Over the years, the young academic may have been given, temporarily, an institutional email address and quite possibly webspace for hosting teaching and other academic information relevant to one’s department. These persist as links on web pages or email addresses in colleagues’ email clients long after one has moved on. What is the half-life of an institutionally hosted academic web page? And how long will it continue to skew search engine results years after it has become inaccessible to the person who originally set it up?

The self-identification question is one on which I do not have a settled opinion. Recently there has been a move to recognise that a substantial portion of our tertiary teaching population is in some stage of the progression described above. One term mooted for such individuals is “independent scholar”. There is even now a Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars. (I think there is still work to be done on thinking this through since one benefit of “full membership” – a library card for Simon Fraser University – requires the scholar to appear “in person” in order to pick up their new library card.) Is independent scholar the best self-describer available? I have also seen individuals self-ascribe by the name of their academic group, e.g. Historian, Philosopher, Physicist, etc. That might not work so well for all groups. How would the researcher in comparative literature self-ascribe in this way?

The second case I mentioned – the tenured faculty member using a non-academic email address – could easily arise out of the academic progression I described. The itinerant academician might have found that a non-academic email address (and also a non-academic domain name for a personal academic web page) is simpler. It saves the need to request an update to one’s friends and colleagues’ email address books each time one moves on. Even once tenured the academic may find that it is easier to stay with the non-institutional email address and/or web page. (There are also cases where some institutions have less than fully reliable email infrastructure, unlike the rock solid email infrastructure we used to have at the University of Oxford. In such a case, the academic may feel it safer to give out his or her non-institutional email address.)

Again, I do not have, as yet, a settled opinion on this. Clearly, however, the two cases I am describing are related. Here all I have managed, if at all, is to describe the communications challenge. I’ll need to do a bit more thinking in order to come up with my preferred solution. But I welcome suggestions. With our universities expanding dramatically, but without a consequent expansion in the numbers of tenured faculty, my suspicion is that the above situations will be faced by increasing numbers of scholars, independent or otherwise.

Rethinking my Personal Identity Online (PIO)

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I have a confession to make: I have never tweeted. There you have it. Shocking, I know. I’m concerned enough about this to have gone and got myself a Twitter account the other day. Within hours two other users were “following” me. This despite the fact that I had never tweeted (and still haven’t). I wondered what they were expecting, with no history of tweets to judge that following me would be worth their while. I suppose my name, or more likely my email address, was sufficient within Twitter to attract them to my empty account (yes, I know them both outside of twitterdom). But that didn’t lessen my communications anxiety. What would it be worthwhile me saying (or, rather, tweeting)? Mark that. Before I have input a single 140-character utterance, I am thinking about the wider ramifications/implications/considerations of what I might place in the infosphere.

Recently, on an email list to which I subscribe I got notice of a call for papers for a special issue of the journal Minds and Machines (I haven’t bothered with a link because it is not an open access journal). The issue would be on the construction of Personal Identities Online (PIO). It caught my eye because some years ago this was a subject that concerned me somewhat. Seems like a long time ago now, but I remember struggling with the possible implications of fully embracing openness, which at the time meant mostly free and open source software to me. I concluded that the way to live openly would be to avoid a radical disjunct between my online identity and, for want of a better term, my “real” identity. As much as possible I wanted them to be seamless. That is the reason the URL for this blog has my real name in it. If I join an online community, or an open source community, again, I tend to use my real name. If I put a comment on your blog or elsewhere, I won’t hide the fact that it was me. I’m not naive; I know that some individuals have exceedingly good reasons for obfuscating their online identities. But I wasn’t in that situation and I wanted to take up the challenge of living in the open.

For the past month I have been helping a friend build an online presence for herself in a new career. At first we talked a lot about her goals. We also talked about what a personal website or blog, or a business website, says about you and how you can influence that impression in small ways. This prompted me to undertake an audit of my own online presence and begin to think through what I was saying with it. On which, more anon.

I know that a number of my friends are on Twitter. I know this because I see their tweets appear on my Facebook (FB) page. I had wondered why they were using an external micro-blogging site in order to post FB updates. Later I learned that through yet another tool you could post to numerous online communities at the same time, for example to FB, Twitter, and LinkedIn. (TweetDeck is an example of one of these tools.) Why would I want to do that? Why do they? I suspect I must have fallen behind the times on this.

The good news is that I’m back thinking about such things. As such, I thought an initial post that I am so doing would be a good way to solicit input from others on aspects of their PIO and how they manage same. In a series of posts (you noted the “I” in the title, right?) I want to turn my attention to blogs, rss feeds of various kinds, websites, online communities like FB and LinkedIn, and, of course, Twitter. I may even find something worth tweeting about.