read | Chris Aldrich

👓 Strategy and Solidarity | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

As I noted in my last post, I recently read Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community as a means of thinking a bit more deeply about the ways that Generous Thinking deploys the notion of community.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Calls to work on behalf of the community or to the community’s values wind up not only, as I noted in my last post, ignoring community’s supplementary role with respect to capital but also essentializing a highly complex and intersectional set of social relations. ❧

This reminds me of some studies in psychology about why people vote and for whom they vote. It’s not always who they would vote for individually, but who would a group of people like them vote? This makes the “community” portion far more complex than it would appear.

I should track down the original references, but I think I remember reading about them via either George Lakoff or possibly Malcolm Gladwell.

Under late capital, the non-profit has been asked to take over the space of providing for community needs or supporting community interests that had formerly been occupied by the state as the entity responsible for the public welfare. ❧

I know the book American Amnesia talks about the value built up by a strong government working in conjunction with a capitalist machine over the past century or so. I wonder if the later half of the book gets into how to shift things back in this manner?

👓 Community, Privatization, Efficiency | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

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Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

Thanks to a recommendation from Danica Savonick, I’ve been reading Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community. Danica pointed me toward it as a corrective for some of the ways my gestures toward community flirted with the romanticized notions Joseph seeks to question, and hard as it is for me (an optimist, for better or for worse) to open some of the ideals I hold to harder questioning, that questioning is proving fruitful.

👓 Community Review | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

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Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

In my last book, Planned Obsolescence, I argued for the potentials of open, peer-to-peer review as a means of shedding some light on the otherwise often hidden processes of scholarly communication, enabling scholars to treat the process of review less as a mode of gatekeeping than as a formative moment in which they could learn from and contribute to their communities of practice. In Generous Thinking, my focus is somewhat different—less on the ways that scholars communicate with one another and more on the ways we invite the world into our work—but the emphasis on opening up our processes and imagining the ways that they might invite new kinds of conversations remains.

👓 Why Not Blog? | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

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Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

My friend Alan Jacobs, a key inspiration in my return (such as it is, so far) to blogging and RSS and a generally pre-Twitter/Facebook outlook on the scholarly internet, is pondering the relationship between blogging and other forms of academic writing in thinking about his next project. Perhaps needless to say, this is something I’m considering as well, and I’m right there with him in most regards.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

The blog was not just the venue in which I started putting together the ideas that became my second book, the one that made promotion and various subsequent jobs possible, but it was also the way that I was able to demonstrate that there might be a readership for that second book, without which it’s much less likely that a press would have been interested. ❧

This sounds like she’s used her blog as both a commonplace book as well as an author platform.

In fact blog posts are not the kind of thing one can detail on one’s annual review form, and even a blog in the aggregate doesn’t have a place in which it’s easy to be claimed as a site of ongoing scholarly productivity. ❧

Mine have gone more like (1) having some vague annoying idea with a small i; (b) writing multiple blog posts thinking about things related to that idea; (iii) giving a talk somewhere fulminating about some other thing entirely; (4) wondering if maybe there are connections among those things; (e) holy carp, if I lay the things I’ve been noodling about over the last year and a half out in this fashion, it could be argued that I am in the middle of writing a book! ❧

Here’s another person talking about blogs as “thought spaces” the same way that old school bloggers like Dave Winer and Om Malik amongst many others have in the past. While I’m thinking about it I believe that Colin Walker and Colin Devroe have used this sort of idea as well.

👓 Let Me Link to You | Kicks Condor

Read Let Me Link to You by Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)

So wait. Where are you? I guess I’m caught in my filter bubble again. After #DeleteFacebook, maybe you went back to your bicycle and your Polaroid camera. But maybe you’re out there still...

I love some of the growing ideas about links, discovery, and serendipity that I’m seeing bubble up in my feed reader lately. I bookmarked this one quickly while skimming on my birthday and finally got to revisit it. Can’t wait to see where Kicks Condor takes the exercise.

👓 How Online Hobbyists Can Reaffirm Your Faith in the Internet | New York Times

Read How Online Hobbyists Can Reaffirm Your Faith in the Internet by Farhad Manjoo (nytimes.com)

Much of the internet feels terrible. But using the web to learn an offline hobby can give you a glimpse of a healthier relationship with your digital devices.

I see a lot of what I love about the IndieWeb community being discussed tangentially in this article. Interestingly, with respect to this article’s headline there’s a double-entendre with regard to who they are and what they actually happen to be doing as an online community.

#IndieWeb #FTW