The interesting thing about emerging technology is the more you’re steeped in it, the less you can easily delineate between your work life and your personal life.
This is a problem for some people. Actually, for all people. Some are just more comfortable with it.
I have lived my life online – in some capacity – since 1984. I am very comfortable discussing my personal experiences within the digital public sphere. I’ve made a career out of it. And I don’t plan on stopping. It’s how some of you are finding me today, thanks to the folks at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) who have pimped the blog series I’ve just started for them.
Despite my comfortable-ness, I find two things curious: I still feel the need to introduce myself (on my own blog) and I have multiple blogs for my different projects.
Why is that curious?
I can address the second one much easier. Simplicity. I run websites and blogs specific to the projects I’m working on: Dungeons + Dreamers for the second edition of our book; The Cult of Me for the upcoming book; The Dudeman for my teaching; and a host of Wikis for my collaborative learning classes (e.g. ethics, magazine writing, social media.
It just makes sense to separate these out. (This is what cognitive dissonance tells me anyway and I’m going with that).
The first one is much harder to explain. I feel like I should offer an introduction and explanation for myself and this site. It’s the repository for all my projects (as you’ll see from the navigation on the right). But it’s personal as well. I write about addiction (I am a recovering addict), the writing process, traveling and the status of my current work. If you’re interested, I assume you’ll dive into the links on the right.
It’s that should that gets me. I’m not sure why I feel that way. After all, I started this whole escapade by telling you how comfortable I am with the blending of the personal and the professional. Yet here we are.
I don’t actually have any good answers to this quandary, although I certainly have some thoughts as to what that might suggest. But that’s simply speculation on my part, and using a personal experience to extrapolate a larger meaning – in my opinion – is a bad logical reasoning structure.
So let’s just leave it at this: Like you, it’s too difficult to sum all of this up in one short blog post. Hopefully, you’ll find something interesting there that encourages you to dig a little deeper and maybe even send me an email or leave a comment. Or even cooler, hopefully you’ll see a project that I’m working on that sparks an idea for you. And that encourages you to shoot me a note.
Either way, I’m looking forward to meeting you all in the friendly confines of cyberspace.