The Risks

We should start with the risks, because many find it difficult to assess the risks of blogging in their own name. You have to be willing to accept that what you write will never be able to be fully unwritten. Your current friends, neighbors, and employers will be able to find it. Some make the mistake of assuming that others will never look. That is a possibility, but nothing you should depend on. You should assume that whatever you put on your blog under your own name will be found by the public. Treat it like publishing in a major newspaper–it may not be ordinarily encountered by as many people, but it is findable by just as many people.

And it will be found not just by your contemporaries, but by your great grandchildren. I’ve always said that it won’t be long before we have our first president who had a Facebook account. Along the way, I think and hope we will become more forgiving of various transgressions, but I think this recent article in the New York Times provides some nice examples of how your past stays with you online. Am I particularly proud of papers I wrote when I was still a student? No, but neither am I ashamed of them. Yes, I cringe a little when I see something I wrote when I was a little younger–like this post on fighting blindfolded that I never could have imagined would be sucked up by Google and still accessible nearly two decades later. It’s the same feeling I get when I see photos of myself or hear my voice recorded. But in all, I am willing to risk large chunks of my life being on display, not just to people I know today, but to people a century from now, when tastes have changed, and the word “chunk” in the line above has become offensive. I’m willing to stand by my words and risk not being hired by someone because I’ve mentioned that I am sympathetic to anarchist ideals, or because I like a particular band, or because I teach in a particular way, or because I’ve made stupid errors in spelling, grammar, or thinking.

Blogging under a pseudonym does not remove this possibility. Maintaining your private identity is very difficult to do, and someone with time, resources, or determination can probably ferret out who you are. But not using your own name, or providing too many personal details, can at least reduce this risk.

The Advantages

There are also significant advantages that you potentially give up by blogging under a pseudonym. I suppose the most obvious is that you have an opportunity to shape how people see you. When people Google your name, what do they find? If you are blogging–and your name isn’t particularly common–your blog is likely to show up fairly high on the list of responses. As a result, people I know have been recognized as experts in their fields, and have found opportunities that they might not otherwise have found.

The idea of personal branding still has some icky connotations of self-promotion and egoism. There was a time when only celebrities and public figures needed to manage their public image, that line of thinking goes. I don’t think this is the case. We take showers because most of us do care, even at some minimal level, of what other people think of us. It’s considered an essential piece of being sociable. This sort of impression management has simply grown more digital. So, it makes sense to groom your impression on the web, and blogging and using social media under your own name is a great way to do that.

It also makes you much more trustworthy as a participant in the social web. People want to know you are a real person, and you are standing behind your actions. As Fezzig correctly notes, “People in masks cannot be trusted.”

The Decision

I still advise students to choose a good professional pseudonym when they start out. Given that I think that there are significant professional and personal advantages to engaging in social media under your own name, why do I push them in this direction? There are a few reasons.

At the most extreme end, some of my graduate students are professional journalists, and required by contract not to publish on the web. This runs against my requirements, and puts them in a bind. I ask them to still do this, but to do so under a pseudonym. This bends the rules a bit, but so far, everyone has been fine with that.

You can always go from pseudonym to real name, when you decide to take advantage of those opportunities blogging under your real name brings, but you can never go the other direction. So, the risks are much lower starting out if you choose a name to write and engage under, with the potential of “coming out” down the road.

If your name is John Smith, blogging and engaging under your real name is probably already pretty anonymous. You might actually benefit by instead blogging as “SmithyTheArchitect” since it creates a brand that is findable.

Finally, you can do both. It’s harder to keep things straight, but you can produce material that you are particularly proud of under your own name, and engage in other ways under a pseudonym. Doing so means keeping separate online lives for each identity, which can be supremely difficult, but some choose to go this route.

Naming Right

In the end, I manage to convince about three quarters of students in my courses to engage pseudonymously, and the other quarter use their own names. If you do choose a pseudonym, think seriously about the image you want to project. Corndog1991 may be your handle from way back on AoL, but it might be time to upgrade. Run your name (and domain) by others to make sure you are not missing some obvious connotation, and that it is something memorable and not easily mis-spelled.

In the end, it is your decision: I just want to make sure that you know the risks and rewards–as much as it is possible–at the outset.

In the past, the intro course has been something of a survey, providing students with a glimpse of what comes later in the program, and it’s been largely bereft of hard-core tech. There isn’t enough room in our curriculum for a table of contents, though. Instead, I am going to cover what I think is most important for someone to know if they are going to be producers of content in the current media environment. I plan for it to stand alone in that regard. If they leave the program after taking this one course, I hope they leave with enough to be reasonably successful in the media field. High expectations, indeed.

In the past, I’ve started with the ancient Greeks, moved quickly to WWII, and then through urbanization and mass media in the twentieth century. I think it’s really important that students get the historical grounding in this stuff. They need to know that people were talking about the memex and augmented thought way before the “web 2.0” popularity. But they seem to complain at the outset that they didn’t come to grad school to learn history. (I hope some change their mind after thinking through things, but many are so turned off they may not.)

Instead, I’m going to start with the things I think are most important, and move back, forward, and out from there. It will come as no surprise that I still think the idea and practices of blogging are at the center of understanding social media. So, in the first week, I’m going have them set up a WordPress blog and Twitter account and identify an area they want to make a significant, field-wide impact on. I expect them to become micro-experts in that area by the end of the semester. And much of the semester will be dedicated to understanding how it is that they can produce good, engaging content, provide an excellent experience to the community that follows them, and gain attention in a noisy world.

So the central organizing question will be: How do I create a great blog–with a substantial return on the time I invest in it–within a short period of time? (Painfully short in the case of the 7-week online version of the course.)

Naturally, this turns a lot of my readings on their ear. It’s going to be hard to shave down some of the readings. For example, I probably ditch “As We May Think” in favor of “Don’t Make Me Think.” (An older version of the course is here.) A lot of the pieces, though, remain the same.

I will divide the work into:

1. First There Was the Blogosphere
2. Social Networks and Social Networking
3. Into the Twitterverse
4. New Structures of Knowledge
5. Mining the Flow
6. Designing an Experience
7. User-Centered
8. Getting Attention
9. Commercialization and Marketing
10. Onto the Holodeck
11. Locative Media
12. Physical Computing
13. User-Created
14. Hacking Citizenship

This topical organization makes touching on the vital pieces a little more difficult, but for my own organization purposes, as I flesh this out, I look at each unit and ask about why it matters to social media more broadly, in addition to:

A. History & Future

Who already thought about this stuff? I’m a big fan of the idea that there is nothing new under the sun, and most of the changes we see today have very deep roots. How do the sorts of activities we are seeing here reflect earlier forms of mediated communication? What changes and what remains the same? Who

B. Social, Policy, & Ethics

There was a bit of discussion of determinism and the relationship of technological change to social change in the earlier version of the course, and that will remain here. I’ll try to address mitigating some of the harm these technologies can bring, as well as identifying and enhancing their potential benefits. I’ll touch on issues of privacy, of piracy, of access to knowledge, of differences in ability, of freedom of speech, and of the relationship of media to democratic participation in government.

C. Design Process

I want to make sure students understand the concept of design patterns, of user-centered design and user testing. I want to imbue them with an appreciation for open standards. They should have a rough idea of what happens in large organizations when something needs to be developed, and what sorts of specializations exist. They should be able to identify some key designs or designers that influence their thinking. They should be able to understand some of the basics of information architecture and user experience. I want them to start looking at the world from a design engineer’s perspective: identifying problems other people don’t see and starting to think about how to fix them.

D. Strategic Sensitivity

I want them to be thinking in terms of ROI, even if that investment is in time or attention. Really, this is about maintaining a good environmental scan and being aware of threats and opportunities. How do you know what you are doing is the best way to do it? We’ll talk a little about business intelligence, analytics, and setting goals and metrics. This includes both at the organizational level and things like personal time management and lifehacking.

E. Tools

There’s a bunch of technical stuff that I’m including this time around that I haven’t in the past. A lot of this is baseline stuff, and many (hopefully most) students will come in already knowing it. But I want them, for example, to be able to understand what a web server is, how FTP works, how to set up a database, what HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, and web programming languages are and what they do, be able to prep images for their blogs, and use them appropriately, embed media, use basic HTML tags, semicodes, RFID, GPS, and the like. I want them to be WordPress masters and have a basic exposure to Drupal and CMSes in general. In other words, even if they can’t do everything on the web, they should know in basic terms what can be done and what technologies are used. (And yes, they lays the groundwork for a new version of the basic web dev course–ICM505–that will start from WordPress and Drupal and go on to CSS, HTML, jQuery, and enough PHP to support templating.

Obviously, these themes are far from discrete.

The next step for me is to cross the five themes with the weekly topics and come up with clear objectives for each unit, and then look for readings, listenings, watchings, and doings that will lead to meeting those objectives.

More to come…