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February 19, 2005
Pedablogging
I spent yesterday responding to the piteous pleas of my grad class: I set up an index to the class blog. Everybody in the class hates the blog, finding it too complex and too alienating. Some object to publishing in-progress, provisional work. So student work-in-progress is now going to be circulated off the blog.
The prospect of which made me realize how much I HATE email. I loathe the damned thing. I despise its demands. I wish it would crawl off into the desert and die. My students' sense of alienation from the class blog isn't even a patch on my longstanding and increasing horror of daily email invasions from the entire world—everybody from my family, to my department chair, to my students, to total strangers who want to know what my speaking fee is, to editors who want to know where my damned chapters are. And people are incensed when they don't get an answer within three hours! Email is where my overloaded life converges and shrieks for attention. It makes me want to crawl off into the desert and die!
In contrast, I am in love with IM. It's friendly. I have conferences with colleagues and students on IM, and I enjoy every minute of it--even when I have several going on simultaneously. My family has a closed chat room that we use almost daily to chatter and joke and complain about our lives. It's wonderful. Blogging? I'm crazy about it. But that one technology, email, is the work of the devil. Derek hates PDFs; Denise hates the class blog; Tom hates IM. And I hate, hate, hate email.
So are you saying to yourself, "Jeez, I'd better not send Becky any more emails"? Nah. Go right ahead and inundate me. After all, I'm still using my class blog, despite my students' objections; I'll still send Derek PDFs; and sometimes I badger Tom into using IM. Mostly I'm just intrigued by how fissured our relationships with writing technologies are. We refer to each other as tech-heads or Luddites, when it fact it's a lot more complex than that.
Just don't expect a quick response email from me; it's against my religion!
Posted by senioritis at February 19, 2005 06:00 AM
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Comments
Me, I hate telephones. Nothing worse than live talking to someone you can't see. Even IM I can stand better ('cause folks post cute pics of their dogs or cats or whatever that I can look at when I'm chatting with them)...
Posted by: Jon at February 19, 2005 11:20 AM
I'm getting over my contempt for them, and, as I wrote, I still use them with students. I just think they ought to be used reservedly rather than as if they were the saving grace of mass-distributing bad photocopies of book chapters--like some kind of PDF-o-rama. Up to three a week, I'm okay. After that, all frowns.
Posted by: Derek at February 20, 2005 01:08 PM
Yes, and the very act of venting about email has made me feel better about it. But it's still my least favorite technology!
Posted by: profB at February 20, 2005 01:23 PM