The Reluctant Early-Adopter
I was amused to find that my “score” on the digital-authorship checklist in the first chapter of Create to Learn (Hobbs, 2017, p. 13) was in the “experienced digital author” range–not because I was unaware that I had experience with authorship in various spaces, including digital ones, but because I was and am keenly aware that my digital authorship has almost always arisen in much the same way that my adoption of various digital teaching tools has: through pragmatic necessity more than choice. In other words, left to my own devices (pun intended), I might well still be publishing my work in print-based literary journals, much as I might still be teaching exclusively with pencils, paper, and physical books.
But the fact is that as a writer today I can’t be left to my own devices any more than I can as a teacher. To an outside observer, I might appear to be comfortable in digital spaces, and I might even be seen as an early adopter in some cases. I don’t actually feel particularly comfortable, and I know for certain that I lack the excitement and daring of the true early adopter.
As paradoxical as this will sound, my journey as a digital author has its roots in the small-press poetry world of the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s. I was born in 1972 to parents who at that point had been running a small press out of their living room for a few years. They were all of 22, and had become immersed in the vibrant Midwestern small-press universe in their late teens. I knew long before I thought of myself as a writer that writers existed in communities, and that those communities both were themselves, and were connected to, audiences. When I read Jenkins’s chapter on “Fandom, Negotiation, and Participatory Culture” (2018), my first point of contact was with the participatory cultures that have always existed in the poetry communities I’ve known. In the 70s, my parents used a typewriter, a mimeograph machine, a lot of media-rate stamps, and, when necessary, the telephone; as much as it is true that the poetry landscape specifically still values paper (especially limited edition chapbooks and broadsides printed in small runs on fine, hand-made paper) more than other literary cultures do, I have no doubt that if my parents were starting out in small-press publishing today, they’d be doing much, or most, of their work online. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to learn about, reach, and connect with and to various audiences.
Indeed, over the course of the 20 years during which I have thus far been publishing my own writing, everything from submissions to journals as artifacts has shifted from mostly-paper-but-a-small-percentage-online to precisely the opposite: I might have made one or two paper submissions of work in the past few years, and my collections of poems themselves still come out as physical books, but nearly everything else I do in that arena I do electronically. I have to, because I want to reach audiences and to be part of various audiences, myself. My Twitter and Instagram accounts exist only because my current publisher asked me to create them–and I still haven’t become a regular user of either. Why not? Only because the Facebook poetry world to which I’ve been connected for about 12 years–and which I got into for similar reasons–is currently more efficient for what I need and want to do. I don’t particularly “like” Facebook (I’m not sure I quite “dislike” it, either, come to that), but I do value some of the audience-curation it both allows and creates.
As I work my way down the Hobbs checklist, I find similar phenomena playing out, but because of audiences in PK-12 education more than in poetry. “I have given a speech using PowerPoint [and, now, GoogleSlides] slides I created,” “I have participated in a video chat,” “I have produced a video,” and “I have produced a video and uploaded it to YouTube…or another site” (Hobbs, 2017, p. 13) are all “yes”s for me specifically because at some point in the past 10–15 years of my work in schools, I have needed to do these things in order to communicate with the audiences that have been relevant at the time. Indeed, most of my work in those four particular areas has been undertaken in the past six years, because in 2017 I said “yes” when asked to become the first teacher at La Jolla Country Day to teach a fully-online course, and because in the administrative role I took on in 2021, I give a lot of presentations to widely-varied constituencies (for example, yesterday I created the slides for tomorrow’s presentation to the Parents’ Association).
Thinking back, I can trace such phenomena through my work in schools. I laughed aloud when I read the opening sentence of Chapter 1 of Create to Learn: “You’ve grown up using the Internet” (Hobbs, 2017, p. 3). I was 22 when the launch of Windows 95 and the simultaneous dominance of AOL brought the internet into the first iteration of its current ubiquitousness. I used email for the first time at the age of 20, and began using the “world wide web” with some regularity when I was 24 or 25.
And yet, I was among the first “laptop teachers” in American independent schools, because in 1997, when the school for which I was working asked for faculty volunteers to whom would be issued Toshiba Satellite laptops for use in the classroom and beyond, I knew for certain that “faculty volunteers” would be “all faculty and staff” by 2000 or so. I knew how little I knew, and figured I’d better get a good start on catching up. Sure enough, correspondent leaps in my digital development have been necessary at regular intervals: faculty mailboxes filled with pages’ worth of colorful memos became the perpetual need to manage an email inbox; faux-leather-bound grading books became RenWeb/Blackboard/Blackbaud-MySchoolApp/etc.; paper syllabi and mostly-internalized plans became documents in various LMSs, GoogleFolder after GoogleFolder, and networks of shared files; overhead projectors gave way to SmartBoards, SmartClassrooms, and all other manner of smartstuff; and so on.
So here I am now, completely taken with the central thesis of last semester’s EDC 532 course not just because I am convinced that digital reading really is reading, but also because there is something deeply comforting for me in having an excuse to talk about reading in “the old ways.” I end every day reading part of a murder mystery novel. Are many of these Kindle books? Yes, but only because I know that I cannot afford or house so many hundreds of books on top of the books we already have in our home. I’m the quintessential old-school reader and writer–I draft my poems with Sharpie fine-point pens, and I read most texts on paper with an annotating pencil in my hand–and yet I’ve used who-knows-how-many digital tools to build the first audience/s for my new collection of poems, which at this point I have only seen in the form of what is now just called a “digital ARC” (a .pdf of what would once have been a physical advanced reader copy). The book’s “cover reveal” was a social-media-based distribution of .jpg and .pdf files of an image that was built digitally based on a GoogleMeet conference call between my Texas-based publisher, my California-based self, and a pair of somewhere-based design consultants.
What I look forward to more than anything when it comes to this book are the in-person readings and book-signing events–the times when I get to use stage skills honed over decades of practice to reach out to people who sit or stand mere feet away from me and a stack of physical copies of the text. But when we “launch” the book for the publisher’s community of supporters, we will do so via Zoom, at a time chosen to maximize friendliness to multiple time zones. And I will have a blast, sitting in a chair in front of my MacBook, dressed in a sportcoat just as I will be at the first in-person reading in Seattle, gesticulating just as much as I will in person, pitching my voice in the same ways, hoping that a webcam and built-in mic will capture enough of the “real” thing for the new-real version of that thing.
References:
Hobbs, R. (2017), Create to Learn. Malden: Wiley Blackwell.
Jenkins, H. (2018). Fandom, negotiation, and participatory culture. In P. Booth (Ed), A
Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (pp. 13–26). Routledge.
