Borderland

I joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and pasted a badge in Borderland’s sidebar below the blogroll, above the ‘Activism’ section. I can’t turn the computer on and get any work done these days. I get spun around so quickly by the stuff I’m reading that I never get where I was headed. I still have grade reports to write, and my remaining days off are few. I want to build a web site for my students, but too much is going on.

A puzzle
People are making announcements left and right about reinventing themselves.

• John Pederson: Extinction Management – Quit Your Day Job 101
• Will Richardson: Reinventing Ourselves in 2006
• Stephen Downes: Reinventing Ourselves in 2006
• Cory Doctorow: I quit my day-job

They’re are all talking about changing skins like reptiles molting. The subject of retirement for me comes up regularly at home. But no-can-do, and besides, what would I have to chew on then? There aren’t a lot of other opportunities for people in my line of work around here. And I know full well that I’m no longer fit to live in the United States proper. (You can read that last sentence any way you like; it’s true whether the last word is an adjective or a grammatically incorrect adverb.) So I wonder about the mysterious ways of the world and I think about how comfortable it is way out here on the head of a flea at the tip of the very long tail.

Words of Lao Tzu come to mind.

What a booby I must be
Not to know my way round,
What a fool!
The average man is so crisp and so confident
That I ought to be miserable
Going on and on like the sea,
Drifting nowhere.
All these people are making their mark in the world,
While I, pig-headed, awkward,
Different from the rest,
Am only a glorious infant still nursing at the breast.

This isn’t to be critical. I always feel a little bit out of step with everyone else. Reinvention is something that just seems to happen to me. I’ve never had a sense of being in control of it.

I read Clay Shirky’s excellent article about power distribution curves. One thing he wrote was how eventually there’ll be so many bloggers that the term blogging will become meaningless as a descriptor for any particular kind of activity, and we won’t see any distinct connection between what people at either end of the long tail are doing. Shirky speculated that at the head we’ll see blogging activity that is essentially the same as broadcast media – distribution of material to an audience that is so large there is no direct interpersonal contact with them, while activity at the tail would be essentially conversational. I don’t know if that’s right, but I was thinking about it in light of this rash of reinventions.

An outrage
With a thoughtful hmmm (You see, I really don’t want to write those report cards!) I read Cory Doctorow’s I quit my day-job story. And I followed his link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and I started poking around. I found the page of badges and the Bloggers’ Rights pages. I thought that was pretty cool in a kind of academic way. I wondered if I should join; and I moved on.

The next thing that happened was fateful. I noticed that Graham Wegner and Leigh Blackall both posted links about a teacher who lost her job for blogging. I was captivated by this story. Most briefly, Meg Spohn was abruptly dismissed from her university teaching position in Colorado because she is a blogger and she wrote about her work. She gives a good account of what happened. All I can say is that it strikes me as an outrageous tactic to silence and intimidate educators who wish to speak publicly. Because of this – I’ve been online now for a couple of hours working through this – I went back to EFF and made my donation.

Who knows what could happen to any of us? There is historical precedent in other countries for the arrest and imprisonment of dissident voices. Who believes that our own government wouldn’t put citizens under surveillance for the things they were talking about!!? We should not take our rights for granted. We should not be afraid. We should not be complacent.