Sample Reality

Career Killing Blogs

Slate has a new article on academics who blog, Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs - When academics post online, do they risk their jobs? by Robert S. Boynton. The article mentions the infamous (among a very small circle of academic bloggers) Chronicle article, Bloggers Need Not Apply, which essentially argues that academics who have their own blogs ultimately damage their careers.

Boynton’s take is much more nuanced, recognizing both how the academic publishing industry is rapidly changing (downsizing is more like) and what underlies the tension between blogging and universities (which academic blogger John Holbo calls in Boyton’s article the last vestige of the “medieval guild system”).

As for me, I don’t expect my blog—this blog—to affect my career one way or another. It’s not like I’m spreading gossip, sharing dark fantasies, or posting my neuroses.

Many of my posts are simply observations—the kind I would talk about with a group of friends, if I still had the time. But I’m too busy teaching and writing to sit around anymore and talk about these kinds of things. So I steal a few random minutes, spit them out on my blog, and then, I forget about them.

The posts that aren’t simply observations are usually ideas in incubation that will eventually surface (peer-reviewed, documented, cited, leeched of personality) in a conference paper, journal article, or someday a book. The posts are placeholders, in a sense, for the real intellectual work that lies ahead.

What my colleagues make of all this, I have no idea. I suppose the real problem with academics who blog is that they leave evidence that they’re not at that precise moment engaged in research or teaching. A blog is an index to one’s daily “unproductive” activity. If all of our other unproductive time (eating, commuting, watching television, basic personal hygiene) was likewise plotted and mapped for the world to see, then everyone would realize that everyone else is also making space for things other than “work.”

Baby’s First ATM

So yesterday my wife, son, and I ventured for the first time into Kids-R-Us, home of the well-behaved toddler, destination of choice for the stark raving mad parent. Our visit deserves a separate post of its own (suffice it to say that it ended with the purchase of 100 plastic balls, each the size of a grapefruit), but what really needs to be said is this: why does a child need a play ATM machine?

Here you see an image of what the proud parent ahead of me in the checkout line bought their little girl: the YOUniverse ATM toy, complete with a plastic ATM card, an alphanumeric keypad, a functioning screen, a slot that accepts bills, and Baby’s first PIN number. WTF? Seriously, a PIN number.

It’s true that many toys are nothing but thinly disguised training tools, preparing our children for the drudgery of adult labor—play kitchens, play vacuums, play tools—but I think the play banking machine is a different beast altogether.

The machine takes for granted an idea that I will go to my deathbed resisting: that our electronic lives—our database selves composed of PINs, account numbers, credit records, virtually every transaction of our day-to-day lives, stored and aggregated in corporate datawarehouses—are essentially our whole identity.

Without that PIN, we’re nothing.

I am reminded of a scene in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in which our hero Jack Gladney visits an ATM machine:

In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automatic teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval….What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. (White Noise 46)

Written over twenty years ago, this passage still seems fresh—if only we stop to think about it. Automatic Teller Machines have become such a part of our daily life that we forget. “Automatic” now describes us as much as it does the machines themselves.

DeLillo continues, “the system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with.” I think Baby’s First ATM functions as an innoculation to the more disquieting, unsettling aspects of our second, database selves. It’s not a conscious effort by the banking industry, of course (I am not that conspiracy minded). Rather, I think it’s the absurd, logical extension of the reduction of our lives to sets of data owned by corporations.

WordCount Poetry

My students and I have been playing with WordCount, Jonathan Harris’s slick database of the 86,000 or so most commonly used words in the English language, ranked according to frequency.

As Harris points out (playfully calling it a “conspiracy”), there are many sequences of adjacent words in the ranked list of 86,800 words that are either eerily prescient, beautiful poetry, are both.

For example, sequence 1941-1945 reads “faith establish facts requires membership” — which does in fact seem to say something about the notion of faith in today’s America.

What other found poetry awaits in the list of words?

Here are a few I discovered:

love means upon areas effect likely (words 384-389)
hate ease shadow inevitably loose (3107-3111)
langley channelled haemorrhage (14867-14869)
unfortunately noise revolution index rare (2172-2176)

And actually, come to think of it, this compilation of lines seems to have a dark undercurrent of meaning flowing through it, too.