a thaumaturgical compendium

I keep getting the Marquis Who’s Who query letters, and I keep sending them updates to my life (e.g., I’m now at Quinnipiac University). But I also always feel a little cheesy. Does anyone actually buy or use these things any more?

First, I know that many similar guides are are actually “just” scams. But is the Marquis version any better, really? Some years ago, probably as an undergrad, I recall using the Who’s Who pages at the library to track people down, but that was pre-WWW. At this stage, that seems silly. I’m reluctant to say this, because I know people who are actually pretty proud of being in Who’s Who, but it seems like a significant waste of time. I’m now included in a few of them: Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in Science and Technology, and (flummoxed!) Who’s Who Among Emerging Leaders. I actually kind of wonder who’s in that one, and whether any of them will actually “emerge.” Oh, and my partner is in Who’s Who of American Students; or at least she was, I guess she’s not a student any more so they drop her? And where is Who’s Who of American Canines? I guess that must be the AKC—or rather Who’s Who is the human equivalent of the AKC?

Part of my interest in Who’s Who is that it seems to be an anachronism. While they make a claim to legitimacy, indicating that they are not just a vanity guide, I imagine that the primary source of their income is the plaques and crystal awards they sell with your name on it. Wouldn’t the prominence of the guide be increased significantly (further driving those sales!) if they opened access to the guide? But then, isn’t that true of most publications at this point?

I try not to post too much about personal failings here. I don’t post about how my sometimes badly behaved dog just pulled me down during our walk today making me look silly and banging up my knee. I don’t post about my poor research output—at least in terms of quantity—perhaps because it is obvious. And I didn’t post about the plenary talk I gave at the SUNY CUAD meeting last summer. CUAD is an association of SUNY “university advancement” folk: alumni relations, public relations, press, and the like. They asked me to come and talk about blogging and the university.

I told them what I tell everyone: you must let go. Use the force, do not try to control it. The message that you should nurture a public image rather than attempt to control the discourse tends not to sit well with PR folks. Along with a number of problems (bad speech, bad room, tech difficulties, time issues), all but a small handful of the people in the room dismissed my talk out of hand. It didn’t help that I criticized an effort at play currently at SUNY New Paltz and elsewhere to create what might uncharitably be called “fake blogs.” The effort to create “blog-like” sites that do not take on the ethos of blogging is, in my opinion, doomed to fail. Or, to put it in the words of a group of students I talked to about a similar “official” university student blog, if there aren’t pictures of people drunk or complaints about parking, it’s not really a student blog.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed is running a story about another approach. Realizing that students no longer pay much attention to broadcast email (nor do some faculty, I should admit), some are experimenting with other means of communication. Harcum College, for example, has established a MySpace page as a sort of official/unofficial channel of communication. As hard as I pushed, UB was not willing to offer RSS feeds of their information, and Quinnipiac seems even more interested in controlling the public message. As a result, it’s not possible to have an official Quinnipiac site that, for example, demonstrates what interactive communication really is. It’s great to see an institution willing to take the chance of engaging this new medium.

An article in the Wall Street Journal likewise looks at a congressman’s attempts at using MySpace and Facebook to promote his campaign.

What is a little odd about these is the idea that email and official sites are fine, but that there is a very important place for informal communication online, and if an organization is missing that, they are missing a lot. The failure of many has been the mistaken view that one’s image will be sullied by communicating informally with customers, clients, employees, constituents, voters, and students. On the contrary, those who are literate users of the new social technologies expect you to communicate through these informal networked technologies. If you don’t someone else will. While you cannot control the message in these channels, you certainly can influence it—it shouldn’t be all or nothing.

I recently went to see Avenue Q, which features a great number on Schadenfreude. It was a little chillier in Manhattan today, enough that we closed the windows last night. In Buffalo, they are snowed in. They closed the airport—which never happens. There are motorists stuck out on the interstate. And as much as I want to be sympathetic, there is a piece of me that is singing “sucks to be you!”

On the other hand, my chair invited me and the other new guy, Quinn Saunders (Ontario?), out for drinks yesterday and informed us that Connecticut winters are neither the picturesque snow of Vermont, nor the rain of New York, but sleet and slush. Oh, what fun.

This is one of those “not dead yet” posts. Not dead, perhaps, but trying desperately to catch up from the trip. Had some other demands on my time, in addition to jet lag and nearly two weeks “away,” and so I am more than just pressed for time, I have officially blown out deadlines on the following:

• A review for a journal
• A book proposal
• A cleaned up draft of one of the papers from the conference
• A cleaned up draft of the other paper from the conference
• Email out for the “Trusted Wikipedia” project (which needs a new name)
• Grading (of course!)
• Lectures (of course!)
• A short article on teaching big classes using blogs
• Email out to my undergraduate advisees about setting up appointments
• Reading my last MA student from Buffalo’s thesis draft
• Report and documentation of the AoIR membership system
• Getting the papers moved over from the conference to an archive
• Organizing web working group for AoIR
• Getting together my expense records from the trip

And I’m sure a dozen other things promised and not delivered. Please feel free to comment here and berate me if I owe you something and haven’t gotten it to you. And this doesn’t even mention impending deadlines for things like the International Communications Association paper.

And I’m coming down with a cold (of course). And I pulled my back playing with the dog weeks ago and it still hurts. And I have no radio in my car, because I haven’t had time to put a new one in, so my drive feels like even more wasted time. And that, dear readers, is why I’m not blogging.

I’ll be back!

I may be too old to be a cool traveler. While waiting for a flight, I was chatting with a retired diplomat who had been in Brisbane for a school reunion. During his career, he had served in diplomatic missions all over the world, including as a Fijian representative at the UN in New York (one of his sons is at Canesius College in Buffalo) and as part of UN development efforts in Korea. He explained that his ideas surrounding travel switched soon after he was in the position of visiting several dozen countries in only a few weeks, and living on airplanes. You really did get used to it quickly, he said, when you threw out the romantic notions of making travel difficult.

I—like you, dear reader—made fun of people on tour busses. (And silly tourists like that pictured above, who snuggle with koalas—this one is named Axel.) I remember being in Indonesia as one of those monster tour busses passed us on the road. We were in a little van, and the driver was trying to fix a gasoline leak in the engine, using his lighter so that it was easier to see. We were uncoddled, authentic travelers, albeit with a little extra air conditioning here and there. They were insulated from the living existence of the country.

And so, yes, I had somewhere in the corner of my mind Therouxian ideal of paddling up to the natives and talking about cannibal soup. Clearly, there is that authenticity, but the locals like hamburgers too. And the truth is, as I get older (ahem), comfort is increasingly a big part of my travel puzzle. I’m sure that keeps me from seeing some really cool stuff, but it also keeps me sane enough to keep traveling. And I still get to snuggle with koalas and sea snakes now and again.