I grew up loving technology.
I was lucky. We lived out in the country, right on the border of Loveland and Milford in Cincinnati, far away from the emerging computer technology culture on the West Coast. We lived next down the road from the Shriner’s Oasis, where they held the Bill Goodman Gun & Knife show once a month. Occasionally, the cows would get loose around the area and we’d see one.
Somehow, though, my mom and dad had the foresight to buy me a computer when I was 12. The damn thing didn’t have any software, with the exception of a word processor with no spell check. They also bought me a dot-matrix printer and — if memory serves me correctly — a 1200 baud modem.
Then, as my dad said: “We didn’t even help you take it out of the box.”
Thankfully, I was also a sports fanatic. Baseball to be exact. A game founded on statistics, databases and precise number management. A perfect compliment to my growing love of technology.
I was too young to be frustrated by the computer’s lack of — anything — and too obsessed with dissecting sports and numbers to realize that along the way I was learning some very basic structures of how technology works.
My baseball career ended rather abruptly after high school. A partially torn groin muscle along with youthful indifference meant my athletic door had closed. Still, I found myself in college at Miami (OH) University and I had to do something.
I still tinkered with my computer (I was one of the few students with a laptop, purchased with my own money), but I threw myself into my other passion: writing. Probably for the same reason I did with athletics: girls seemed to like writers in college.
Eventually, I made my way as a journalist. I did what lots of young journalists do. I got a job at a weekly, Cincinnati Citybeat, and wrote about city government and pop culture (not together though).
The first story I ever wrote was about Jim Carroll and Hunter S. Thompson, who happened to be in Louisville for a poetry event. My story was so bad, it never saw the light of day. (A year later, I met Carroll again and I happened in on an interview with Jimi Hendrix parents — how could I possibly not love journalism.)
Eventually I made my way to Austin — I forgot what happened there — before landing at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, just as they were adding some new media components to the program.
I worked at Conde Nast’s Wired during the day, and did Berkeley at night. When I graduated, I moved to Wired News, the online, daily version of the magazine. I was hooked on new media by then. We did weekly audio news casts. I did a weekly downloaded radio show. I covered culture and entertainment.
I was in the court room for the Napster trial. I’ve sat in Congressmans’ offices discussing copyright. I’ve met digerati worth millions who could be my younger, slightly less handsome brothers.
I wrote at Wired and Wired News during the boom and the bust. It was awesome.
Eventually, I settled back in Austin and co-authored a book, Dungeons and Dreamers, with John Borland. But the wanderlust struck and I found myself working at MIT’s Technology Review, building an online, daily news operation.
Fun? Let’s just say I lived through interesting times.
The daily grind got to me. I love journalism and technology. But what I really love is storytelling. Through words. And interactivity.
In 2006, I had the chance to come to Northern Kentucky University, not too far from that little country town where I grew up, to build an innovative program called Media Informatics. The program combines basic computer coding, interactive Web graphics, digital storytelling and project management. It’s all of my loves manifest in a program.
After three years at NKU, I took a job at Ball State University as an assistant professor and Emerging Media Fellow in its journalism department, where I’ll once again combine my love of storytelling with technology.
My life has come full circle: from small town to big city and back to small town. These days, my life consists of working on my books (there are 2 in progress and another I’m editing), teaching and traveling.
You’ll see on this site links to my books, links for teaching. And if you stay here, you’ll read about my travels and explorations.
And don’t forget to introduce yourself. Because I’m always fascinated by people. Enjoy.
