 who is currently the director of digital humanities at Michigan State University. But I wanna believe Kathleen, and I don't know if this is true. The first time I met you was at what was then called the CHNM or the Center for History and New Media. And there was a meeting there, and I don't remember the official title, but it was kind of like ground zero for what would become digital humanities. And that was an interesting moment. At the time I believe Kathleen was still at Pomona College, you had just published planned obsolescence, is that right? Or anxiety of obsolescence, which came after planned obsolescence or no. Planned obsolescence comes, okay, there you go, how about that intro? So, working on it. And I think you were teaching at Pomona and you had actually soon after moved to MLA to run their MLA Commons. And I think that was also the moment in which you were really kind of offering a really interesting and thoughtful critique of things like academia.edu, where higher ed was essentially offloading their community building to these third party services. And I really was fascinated by that. But after MLA you moved to Michigan State where you are now. And not only did you publish generous thinking at that time, but some of the work that Kathleen and her group is doing right now at Michigan State University to build HCommon Social, I think is some of the most fascinating, thoughtful and forward-looking work in the field. So it is really a pleasure to introduce Kathleen Fitzpatrick today to talk about the web that was, thank you Kathleen. Just make sure that sharing is working. Thank you. Woo-hoo. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Lauren. Thank you to the entire Reclaim Team. I am absolutely delighted to be here. This is one of my favorite groups of people and I'm thrilled to get the opportunity to talk with all of you today about something that has been bothering me for about 15 years, right? What happened to blogging, right? We heard a bit yesterday over the course of the day and in particular in the opening panel about the early excitement around blogging. And lots of us frankly wanna figure out where that excitement went and how we might get it back. And there are a lot of obvious answers to this question that are circulating out there, but it's a question that I take seriously and quite frankly I take it personally because blogging made my career. And I mean that literally, right? Insofar as I have anything like a public presence today, it was created by blogging. Everything I've written, every project I've worked on, every job I've held, I owe to one extent or another to my blog. And so I take what's become of it in the year sense pretty hard. And I wanna think with you today, I spend some time digging into what went wrong. And to figure out in particular how that particular magic that blogs created back in the day might be, whether it might be recoverable and how. So I'm gonna start this in quest. Every time I say that word, I think of Quincy Emmy, right? So, dated myself, dated some of you, like it. I'm gonna begin this in quest by jumping 20 years backward to 2003, right? And I was, as you've heard, an assistant professor of English and Media Studies at a small liberal arts college on the eastern edge of the West Coast, right? Where the sprawl of LA County sort of falls off into the desert. I've been out of grad school for five years and I was struggling to get my first book published. I was feeling the deadline of my 2004 tenure review, bearing down on me a spoiler alert, I did receive tenure. As it looked at the time of my tenure review, as though I found a home for that book. Though it ended up being declined at the 11th hour, actually I guess at like three minutes after midnight because the press's marketing guys couldn't figure out how to sell it. So it finally did come out from another press that first day in 2006. But it ultimately had a far smaller impact on my career than did the writing that I've been doing online in the interim. So content warning, I'm going to continue making a lot of us in this room feel old through the course of this talk. But to paint the scene a bit, in 2003, live journal and blogger had each been around for about four years. And of course, GeoCities for another five beyond that. And these were a totally messy and anarchic set of tools and spaces that allowed users to build out forms of self-representation and community connection. Bringing the ethos that had long been found in discussion spaces like Usenet and IRC and a range of mugs and moose to the graphical windows of the web. So live journal and blogger were also like the leading edge of the transformation of the worldwide web from a relatively static service. Presenting pages that lived on servers that required both access and a certain degree of expertise in order to manage on the back end. And instead, these new applications embodied the principles of the read-write web, which allowed users to interact with and to add to web content via the front end. That read-write web was one feature of the complex of web-based applications that was in the early years of the 21st century, which is a phrase that kind of kills me a little bit every time I say it. The early years of the 21st century, turning the browser from a means of presenting static web pages into something far more dynamic. And that more dynamic thing is a big part of what a lot of us originally understood the term web 2.0 to mean, right? So credit for coining this term is usually given to Tim O'Reilly, who in 2004 hosted the first web 2.0 summit, intended to explore what the web was becoming as it took flight from the ashes of the dot-com bus. Wikipedia, however, attributes the first use of the term web 2.0 to Darcy DiNucci in a 1999 article entitled Fragmented Future, and I am, yeah, sad, because that's actually supposed to be a screenshot, which isn't appearing, and I apologize for that. I don't know what exactly has gone wrong here. Let me see if I can get this to reload. So you can maybe see. All right, sort of, come on, reveal. You can do it. There! Okay, that's what that's supposed to look like, in any case. In this article, DiNucci describes the first generation web as essentially a prototype, right? A proof of concept for what she says is interactive content universally accessible through a standard interface. But she goes on to note that given that that content loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfolds, it was clear even then that it was only an embryo of the web to come. So DiNucci goes on to describe the many screens and devices that might interact in the future with what she called web 2.0, including, as she suggests, your microwave, which might automatically seek out correct cooking times online. And she notes quite presciently the particular challenges that web publishing would face in encountering such a wide range of screen sizes and resolutions. But what DiNucci did not include in the future was what would happen when the web browser did more than retrieve and display content, right? But rather allowed for the content of that creation, or creation of that content in the first place. Okay, good, I'm glad this one is loading. It took another few years before Kingsley Itahen in 2003 wrote a blog post thinking about XML-based applications such as RSS and their potential for the next generation web, saying, I refer to this as web 2.0. I wanna point out that this is Itahen's actual blog, which is still live on the internet. It's a system that he rolled himself, right? And so it's still totally living out there. This is not way back machine screenshot. He went on to post another post about a month later in which he was quoting Jeff Bezos on the executable web in the rapidly expanding Amazon web services that were supporting a wide range of database-driven online retail sites. And that this post comes so quickly on the heels of his talking about the executable web points exactly to the problem of web 2.0, right? The channeling of interactive creativity into business. And if you need something to break your heart just a little bit this morning, try this on for size. That teeny, tiny text there reads Q. What benefit is Amazon.com getting from this? A, it's too early to say. It's certainly not a major source of revenue for us, but when people use our web services, they give us credit for that. This turns out to be very helpful. So does break my heart just a little. But anyhow, by the time Tim O'Reilly and John Patel took the stage for the opening keynote at that first web 2.0 summit, and I wanna point out that this one is way back machine. This doesn't exist anymore. They were ready to outline a vision for the future of the web as platform, right? Starring a lot of folks looking to build truly great companies on top of it. And it's thanks to those folks and their interest in platformization that we would find ourselves just two short years later honored as Time Magazine's Person of the Year. Being told that we control the information age, right? The unbridled enthusiasm of the cover carries over into the story by Lev Grossman, though it's possible to see in the story an early hint of the forking paths that web 2.0 presented. And on the one hand, Grossman notes that the explosive growth in active creative participation in online spaces was quote, a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. On the other hand, the extent to which we, right, you and I really control the world being built is uncertain. And as Grossman hints at the importance of those who own the platforms on which all of this engagement was taking place, making it possible for, and again, I quote, millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity to get backhauled into the global intellectual economy. Backhauled, it's an incredible verb for that, right? So I've gotten a little bit ahead of the story that I wanna tell today, which is in large part about those forking paths, which point to community and collaboration in one direction and to the global intellectual economy in the other and the fundamental failures that meant that we were always destined to find ourselves lost in the latter, even while we sought the former. So let's back up again, back to 2003. As I noted, Live Journal and Blogger had been actively feeding the Read-Write Web for a few years, as had several other early blogging packages. And around that time, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little decided to take the software that they had been using to blog, V2 Cafe Log, which was about to be discontinued and build something on top of it. And so they released the first version of what they decided to call WordPress on May 27th, 2003. Now, as for me, I first heard the word blog uttered in a workshop at UCLA during the summer of 2001, when Jenny Bay, who was then an early career scholar of digital rhetoric, presented some early research questions of hers that she was exploring around the development of forms of online communication being popularized by folks like Jason Khaki. And I remember being a little bit puzzled at first, not just about how you'd go about building a website on which you could post regular updates about things you found of interest, but also, to be frank, about why you would do so. I just didn't see the appeal at least at first. But the idea got stuck somewhere in the back of my head and about a year later in June 2002, it resurfaced. I had just finished revising the manuscript for that first book and I knew that it was probably gonna be a year or two even before anyone would be able to read it. It turned out to be almost five years, which I don't know what I'd have done if I had known that at the time. But even given the deeply naive view of the scholarly publishing process that I was still clinging desperately to at the time, I was antsy, right? I had things to say and I was tired of waiting for my stuff to find its way to an audience. And so one afternoon, I was procrastinating by searching online for some old friends from grad school and I ran into this website that one of them had. And it was one of those blog things. It was funny and it was smart and people were reading it. And I knew that people were reading it because they were responding to his posts in the comments. And I thought, oh man, that's it, right? So I figured out how to get an account with the web hosting service and how to install movable type. And I started blogging and my original site looked like this. I named it planned obsolescence as a bit of an inside joke. The title of that ill-fated book, the first one that I just finished working on was the anxiety of obsolescence. And the blog format felt like it provided a vehicle for if not exactly fame and fortune, at least a kind of obsolescence that I could control. So here's what my very first post on that blog looks like today. Since 2002, it's been migrated from movable type to expression engine to WordPress. From whoever my first hosting provider was, I don't even remember at this point, to dream host, to reclaim, from planned obsolescence.net to kfits.info. And most recently from WordPress on reclaim to a Jekyll-based static site that's hosted on GitHub. And yet despite all of the web's evanescence and everything that could have gone wrong in the process of all of those migrations, and despite my certainty that I was working in a form that was productive of nothing but obsolescence, this content remains, right? It remains accessible, it remains available, and it remains alive. So when I started blogging, what I thought I was after was the instant gratification of publishing, right? Being able to push my words out to the world. And all of the other thousands of words that I produced were either stuck on my hard drive, waiting for a press to agree to consider them, or they were languishing in journals that I wasn't sure anyone would ever read. I mean, the whole exercise of scholarly publishing as we knew it then felt a lot like shouting down a well. But this blog thing would allow me to take charge of my own process to push stuff out when I was ready. It turns out though, that what I really wanted deep down under that sense of feeling stifled was the possibility of response, right? When you shout down the traditional publishing, well, the only answer you get is your own voice bouncing back at you. The possibility that someone will actually read your article and cite it in their own and then have that reply pushed through the publishing process is so slow as to have lost all traces of the conversational. The early world of blogging, however, was all about conversation. I'd post something and someone would read it and leave a comment, or they'd read it and they'd write a post in response on their own blog and they'd link to mine in the process. And there was this entire web of conversations that were taking place in the blogiverse. And through that web, I found my way into a cluster of early literary and media studies scholars, all of whom were writing and thinking together and lifting one another's ideas up and making them better along the way. This cluster of bloggers formed a community, one that I wasn't even really aware that I needed back in my remote small liberal arts college bubble. That bubble was an awfully comfortable place and yet I had no real collaborators inside it. Connecting online with folks who were pursuing questions that were related to my own produced a kind of engagement that was hard to sustain by myself. And blogging turned out to be enormously productive for me. Not only did all the relationships built in that community evolve into some of the closest friendships that I still have today, but the writing that I did on the blog led to every single idea that I've had since and every bit of recognition that my work has had. So blogging in 2003 was the bomb is what I'm trying to say. But right alongside the creative ferment being produced by blogs in 2003, there were a few other developments happening. 2003 saw the launch of Friendster and MySpace and then fairly quietly at first, like this thing called face smash, right? These platforms build themselves to different extents as ways to engage with your social networks online, which doesn't sound all that different from what I was doing with that blog network, except that of course these were platforms, right? In which the accumulation of connections and competition for influence rather than the building of relationships became the point. So by the time face smash turned into Facebook and started moving beyond Harvard's gates, social networks had become spaces for the accumulation of social capital and venture capital, right? They were about you, you, you, and not at all about who we were together. Twitter was in this sense, frankly just another nail in the coffin, but I hold fast to the conviction that Twitter is ultimately what did in blogging as I knew it. Not just because it was so much quicker to spit out 140 characters than it was to write an even moderately considered blog post and not just because that heightened sense of immediate gratification was coupled with knowing exactly how many people were following you and thus at least theoretically how much of an impact your post about what your dog ate for breakfast was gonna have, but also because one of its real benefits, right? Following people who linked to cool stuff online, including to your moderately considered blog post, resulted in stealing the conversation away from the blogs themselves, right? So if someone had a response to the blog posts that you linked to on Twitter, they responded on Twitter, right? And the conversation, that conversation rarely had a chance to develop in the ways that it had in the comments on the blogs themselves or in linked posts from other blogs and worse, the fact that that conversation was taking place might not even be something that the original post author was aware of or able to participate in. So folks wrote WordPress plugins and attempted to repair that conversational leak by aggregating tweets and republishing them as comments on the posts to which they responded, not least among them, the folks affiliated with the indie web community who argued for personally owned alternatives to corporate platforms, ensuring that the content that you produce remained under your own control, published and connected where and when you want it. And I am a huge supporter of indie web and its goals, but I do wanna note that I worry a little bit that focusing on ownership per se misses part of what went wrong. The problem is not just that the platforms into which we poured our time and energy, our creativity, our representations of ourselves and our relationships with others. It's not just that those platforms were corporate owned. It's not just that those corporations had VCs to whom they had to provide quantitative proof of success. And it's not just that our relationships got caught up in the Silicon Valley cash nexus, though needless to say, all of that is demonstrably bad too. What's so antisocial about social media rather is mostly a radical misunderstanding of the nature of sociality itself. So Siva Vajanathan has described the history of Facebook by saying that it's the history of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. That ideology assumes, among other things, that society can be represented coherently through the network graph of a highly individuated self and its accumulated connections. That society is nodes and edges and that's about it. So Fred Turner's phenomenal book from counterculture to cyberculture is pretty instructive on the ideological connections between the alternative communities of the 1960s and the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley, each of which focused on freedom as something possessed by the sovereign individual. And this understanding of freedom as negative liberty, freedom from interference or regulation, rather than positive liberty, freedom to live fully is a deep failure to reckon with the complexities of sociality. Real sociality is about human relationships in the contingent ways that individuals with different histories, cultures, languages and experiences build a sense of mutual responsibility through ongoing conversation and endless negotiation. And that failure to understand real sociality results in, at best, a deeply impoverished network. The Silicon Valley dream is a deeply libertarian landscape, one built on platforms that elevate the sovereign individual who can stand tall without obligation. So Martin Eve in a forthcoming project that I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of, thinks about this mode of platformization and he's thinking particularly with respect to the governance processes that are constructed through the blockchain and epitomized in the cryptocurrencies that it supports. But he thinks about this mode of platformization as the subjugation of the social to the technical. These technologies in fact represent the desire to eliminate the contingencies and complexities of the social and replace them wholesale with a form of technicality that can be individually optimized. And this desire and the degree to which it is manifested in our social media platforms is what ultimately leads me to argue that social media has never been social. It's not that things have recently gone wrong with bad new overlords or dangerous political shenanigans. Everything that's been wrong has been wrong from the start. Social media as we have known it has always been highly geared toward the individual and the wants and desires of that individual as understood by, as understood, processed by and catered to through the technology. Even more, the goal in that technical service to the individual has likewise never been social, right? No matter how much Silicon Valley rhetoric celebrates the idea of global connection, the connectedness that these platforms is able to produce is between you understood as a pair of eyeballs and the algorithm which continues to feed you what it thinks you most want to see in order to keep you sutured into the network itself. So just to dig in a bit on the elements of the antisocial that makes social media what it is. First, the platforms encourage a presentation of selfhood that is less about representation than about performance, right? Tailoring what is shared to the audience, each of whom is likewise engaged in a performance of self. Second, the interactions among these performed selves become a form of confirmation, right? I see what you are presenting and I respond in the way I am supposed to rather than providing room for really thoughtful exchange. And finally, the platform ruthlessly tracks these interactions in order to figure out what you like for a value of like that mostly means stuff you click on with the goal of feeding you more such stuff in order to prolong the connection where the connection is not between you and other humans engaged in a process of thinking together but rather between you and a platform whose profits derive from your attention. Now there are so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to begin. When we are reduced to performing selfhood, when our conversations get turned into performances of connection, our online interactions too often turn into knee-jerk reactions rather than considered responses. And on some level, this is what the platform wants, right? Whatever the algorithm behind social media actually looks like when you dig into its code, it serves to produce the greatest rewards for the worst behavior, right? Elevating posts that will produce reactions and thus feeding our worst impulses. So as Vajanathan argues, Facebook is explicitly engineered to promote items that generate strong reactions. Facebook measures engagement by the numbers of clicks, likes, shares, and comments. This design feature or flaw, if you care about the quality of knowledge and debate, ensures that the most inflammatory material will travel the farthest and the fastest. So the point is to keep you glued to the interface to keep the dopamine hits coming. It's not only not engineered to produce a sense of social connection or responsibility to the actually existing human beings on the other side of those interactions, it in fact functions to break any such sense of sociality, except insofar as it confirms our own performances. So I could go on about this for quite a while, but I think I've said enough to convey the depth of the grudge that I bear against Facebook and Twitter and all of the social media platforms that together undermined what my small community of bloggers was doing together. But I have to acknowledge a couple of things here. First, Jaisal Engel reminds us to ask, however much corporate media platforms have done to gentrify the internet, was the internet ever really un-gentrified? And the short answer is no, right? There was no golden age when the internet was blind to race, class, and gender, no magical era when communities could thrive without corporate interference in a push toward profits. Now, undoubtedly the picture that I have in my head of the wonders of 2003 skews Rosie as a highly educated upper middle class white cis woman in the academy. Folks without my level of access and support may not have found the web such an easy place to find a home. It's likewise important to remember the extent to which social media has been important for people who are marginalized or isolated, people who cannot safely be themselves in their families or their communities. Many, many people have found support and comfort and have developed real meaningful relationships that began on those platforms. And I personally have been able to keep in touch with old friends I'd never have seen. Otherwise, I've been able to see my nieces and nephews grow up and social media networks have the potential to provide millions and millions of users with access to news and information. Of course, how good that news and information is and how much I really get to know about those old friends and how my nieces and nephews feel about the pictures their parents are sharing remains a real question. The other thing that I have to acknowledge and as plainly as I can is that I own some of the responsibility for what social media did to my blog and to the community that I was part of. I mean, I fell for it, right? I let the immediacy and the reach and the metrics turn my head and pull me away from the work that I was doing. And I let it happen because to be frank, the blog was hard work, right? It required time and attention to think through posts and to make them worth sharing. It required real engagement with what other writers were posting and a real willingness to think through their ideas and contribute something of value to the conversation. Blogging required real work in the same way that real sociality requires real work. And however immediate blogging's gratification seemed in comparison with writing and God forbid trying to publish an academic book, it had nothing on the nonstop dopamine fountain that was Twitter, right? So I let myself get pulled away into social media and so did most of my blogging friends. But over the last 10 years, to one extent or another, nearly all of us have found ourselves in a love-hate relationship with Twitter and Facebook and lots of us have been looking for more satisfying alternatives. So several of us are part of a small, private, matter-most community that I host. One that is utterly closed and will remain so in perpetuity. Some of us have left Twitter for mastodon, including the smallish but open instance that my colleagues and I at Humanities Commons are hosting that HCommons.Social and I would be delighted if y'all would join us there. And a few of us keep doing what we can to bring blogging back, right? To use the web spaces that we own and control to do longer form, less noisy work. So if this talk is gonna close with anything like a call to action for those of us here and those of us who are on the stream as well, it's for each of us to go back and see if we can recover some of the best of what 2003 represented, right? And infuse it with everything that we've learned in the two decades since. And what I want to get back to is in part the kind of personally owned infrastructure advocated for by the indie web folks and in part the decentralized communities of mastodon. But it's also an understanding of the web as a space for the kind of inventiveness that doesn't have a business model behind it, right? Creativity without venture capitalists, thoughtful conversation, the potential for building real relationships. And that's what was the best thing about the web that was, right? Less the infrastructure that was personally owned or decentralized, though that too. Then about its potential for real sociality and joint invention and the kinds of experimentation that it inspired. I mean, the ways that new features of the blogiverse got hacked together with duct tape and bailing wire rather than with the polish that venture capital funding brought. I mean web rings, right? Blog rolls, Ping-a-matic, right? And my own personal favorite, RSS, right? The little engine that could of the web. It's been pronounced dead more times than I can count and it just keeps coming back. And so in this vein, I want to close by bringing up one of my web heroes. And I don't know him personally and I really, really hope he's not a horrible human because I so admire what I see him doing in public. Brent Simmons, who is the developer behind Net Newswire. So his website, Inessential, makes clear that the app, which is a super clean and modern RSS reader, is and will remain 100% free. Simmons originally launched Net Newswire in 2002, amazingly enough. It was acquired by New Skater in 2005 and by Black Pixel in 2011. And sometime in about 2015, Brent started working on a new RSS reader, Evergreen. But in 2018, he reacquired the intellectual property involved in Net Newswire, merged it with the new product and returned it to active development. So Net Newswire, a free and open tool for engaging with the free and open web. And as he notes, he will not accept money for the app, but he points to a number of ways in which you can support it. The first of these being write a blog instead of posting to Twitter or Facebook. So if you don't do it for me, do it for Brent. And do it for Net Newswire, take your work back. Keep it not just free and open, but genuinely social. Use your work on the web to share, to think, discuss, learn, reclaim your intellectual property as Brent did and your intellectual production for all of us. Thank you very much. Kathleen, thank you so much. That was an amazing talk. I would say more, but I have to go blog right now. Now, awesome. Obviously we have time for questions, comments. Martha coming back to you. And if anyone else wants to run with another mic for questions, that'd be great. Thank you for that. It definitely made me remember the good old days. But I'm really curious what your perspective is on all of this in relationship to our work with students. I mean, even back when we were better about blogging and better about being active in the community that way, I think it was often a struggle to figure out how to introduce our students to that work in a way that felt authentic. That wasn't just a replication of the post once, comment twice that we do in discussion boards. And I know that here at Mary Washington, I very frequently would work with faculty who'd say, oh, my students hate blogging as much as they hate writing and journals. There's lots of reasons for that. But now trying to reignite some of this work, I feel like there's an even larger hurdle to overcome with students because the ones who we have now have fully grown up within a saturated social media world and they associate that with community online and with what it means to be online. And so I wonder what that work looks like now when we're working with students. I think that's an enormous question and thank you for raising it. I'm not sure I have a good answer or at least not one that's gonna like. Here's how you handle it, right? Because what do I know? But I will go back and talk about some of how during the blogging heyday, I used blogs in my classes and the ways that they were effective. Now those students, I mean, this was Pomona College. Pomona was one of the early schools on Facebook after it left Harvard, right? So my students were on Facebook relatively early though they saw that mostly just as a tool for talking amongst themselves without like me listening, right? So that, I think they felt enough of a separation between social media and their student lives that they were able to see the power of what was happening in blogs and in open communication. I talked to them about the blogs that we used in those classes as explicitly being, like they had grown up in an educational system in which they wrote papers or they wrote reading responses and they handed them in to me and I read them and gave them comments and no one else ever saw that stuff unless their parents wanted to see it for some reason or another. And this was a way for them to begin thinking about what it meant to write for other humans and not just for a grade, right? To think about what it was that constructed a post that made people want to respond to it and what it meant to do this work in the open. We talked a little bit yesterday about the ways in which our institutions and FERPA and all kinds of other sort of anxiety makes us sort of keep all of that work facing inward. It's safer to do it in D2L because that way, we're not violating any regulations, there are no privacy problems, all of this. I had my students, when they blogged, create pseudonyms for their blogs and something that could not be connected to them. I told them explicitly, I wanted this to be a space where they could make mistakes and they could learn from them and all of that. Everyone in the class knew who was who in those pseudonyms but nobody beyond the class knew who they were. And so there was a little bit of protection and a little bit of a space to learn. There was a kind of post once, comment twice part of the assignment. But it was also, I just talked with them a lot about what it meant for them to build a community in which they were having the kinds of conversations that we had in the classroom at random hours when they were thinking, when the idea sprang for it, like now is the time for them to post something. And the most magical thing that happened and I never engineered this, but I think if I were to do it again, I would try to engineer it now that I actually know a lot of the people whose work that we're reading in the classrooms almost inevitably every semester some student would post a response to something that we had read and the author of the thing that we had read would pop up in the comments. And it was this incredibly magical moment where everybody realized like, oh my God, first of all, the author is a real person, right? And secondly, my work could be in conversation with someone who is a professional in this space rather than just with my students. And that really mattered, that mattered a lot. Now, how to get back there with students who have been so saturated in Instagram and TikTok and every, I don't know. But finding ways to kind of get across to them the economics of those platforms, the ways they're being used by them and think about what it would be to build an alternative together in this space is one path in I think. So not a satisfying answer, but you know, an idealistic one if nothing else. Hi, Kathleen, thank you so much for those comments. Really rich presentation. I think my question might allow you to build additionally on your response to Martha and it's about the political economy of the university and academia. And there's a sense of, I think one of the elements that connects to the blogging you were doing 20 years ago to what Jim and the DTLT folks and early kind of critical tech folks were doing was responding to a sense that the future of technology and the future of scholarly publishing and the future of humanities was somewhat unwritten 20 years ago and that there was an opportunity for us to think about it intellectually but also to carve our pathways professionally and that there was an open moment within the university system. And I'm not sure that that moment looks the same now and I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on the transformation of the political economy of higher education and what kind of opportunities there are, what can, for younger scholars to tap into that same ethos and drive, which was, it was about community but it was also about self idealization and carving a path for ourselves. So what does that look like now? Oh boy, it doesn't look great. I'm gonna be honest here. I mean, in so far as it's possible universities, colleges and universities have become even more risk averse than they were in 2003. I mean, just because so many of them have been through various network infection problems or hacking issues, you know, so they've become even more risk averse and the College and University Central IT has become even more enterprise computing focused than it ever was in 2003. So in 2003, it was possible for me to go to my academic technologist friend who worked over in Central IT at Pomona and say, I wanna start this blog thing and she's like, why would you wanna do that? And when I negotiated with her, she found the external hosting for me. She figured out how to do a domain map. Domain mapping, she talked to her higher ups and said, it's not on our network and so it won't be a problem for us. Everybody said, okay, that's great. And it was all fine. I don't know if I would win that argument today. The good news is, however, there are very well-respected surfaces like domains that allow me to do the work that I wanna do out in open spaces, to experiment in ways that don't threaten my CIO with the kind of work I'm doing. But to come back to the political economy question, nor does my experimentation convince my CIO that we all ought to drop D2L and instead go with an open source community-oriented solution that can help all of us together build a better future, right? Part of what I think we need to do, if we are going to get past this moment in which the sort of corporate solutions with the capital S have taken over all of this space on our campuses is that we're gonna need to get faculty and students highly, highly educated about the budget in our institutions and about how much money is going to these corporate providers of the platforms that our institutions are relying on. We're gonna need to get folks with a kind of spirit of invention and experimentation and collaboration to come together and say, we could do something better if we work together that would be academy-owned, right? Rather than something that the academy continues to funnel cash into because it presents itself as being an off-the-shelf solution, which it never is, right? And so I think, I mean, it's gonna take protest, right? It's gonna take organizing. It's gonna take a refusal to use the corporate solution and instead insistence on using open source solutions. So one of the things that we're doing right now with Humanities Commons is really trying to look to institutions that have like the places in institutions that have that understanding that they're not being well served by the platforms that are out there and that they need to start working together in order to produce better options for all of us. A lot of those folks are in libraries and a lot of them are recognizing that if libraries work come together and actually collaborate rather than just sort of talk about the potential of collaboration, they could build something better than any service provider could produce for them. So early repository systems, right? Almost all open source, those are continuing to be worked on collaboratively. They require a deep, deep investment on the parts of the institutions that participate in those projects and yet the investment pays off. And if that investment were more evenly spread around the academy, it would be even better. It would be even more dynamic. So that's kind of where my hope is, is as with Commons in a Box and with the CUNY Academic Commons to be able to say like, here's a solution that works better for all of us. Why don't you join in and come participate in this? And to try to do that sort of sneaky back route transformation as we build the protest necessary to get everybody to reject and refuse to continue spending millions and millions of dollars on corporate solutions. So that's what I got. Yes, coming to you Anne-Marie. Kathleen, thank you very much for that incredibly moving speech. And I'm sorry I had to duck out. The question I had was, what do you think about the role of media? And by that I mean, blogs are usually text with some images, maybe animated GIFs, which we learned about this morning. But over this past 20 years, we've also seen the rise of platforms that are focused on other media. So you mentioned Facebook, I would think here Instagram and Pinterest, which are primarily image-based. We have YouTube, I mean, there are other platforms, but it's basically YouTube, which is enormous, possibly the world's single biggest cultural artifact right now, that's of course video-based. We have audio, which has been growing pretty, feel free to put them quietly, for quite some time, especially podcasting, especially audio books. None of these really fit the web that well. I mean, we can embed videos all the time, but that doesn't seem to be the main use of blogging. Some of us will post images and photos and that kind of thing. But it seems like increasing media richness has also pulled people away from blogs. And I even mentioned gaming. Gaming is enormous and you think about platforms like Twitch or like Discord, which are kind of the opposite of blogs in all kinds of ways. I'm just wondering if you could just riff on that media dimension. Yeah, so I mean, I am an English PhD. I am all about words. And so it's not surprising to me that I gravitated toward and still feel my heart in blogs. And part of, and this is part of the narrative that I left out, part of what happened was the availability of more media forms, video blogging, podcasting, the greater options that like weren't so text saturated as blogs were. I really see some hope in the Fediverse and the kinds of distributed open source solutions for things like photo sharing via pixel fed, right? And video sharing via peer tube. And other forms of basically activity pub driven independently owned and operated community oriented means of sharing media other than just like tweets, right? I am hopeful that activity pub, basically the underlying standard that allows for the exchange across many different kinds of platforms of many different kinds of content will be the place where we see that possibility of coming together around various media forms that really don't require that corporate level platform anymore that can pull us back away from YouTube and let us think about what it means to control our own video content and to get it into circulation with the communities that we're trying to see. So I don't know that that's a fully satisfactory answer, but I do think that future development around activity pub is likely to enable us to do more sharing of more kinds of stuff in richer ways in the years ahead. So we'll see what comes of that. But that's kind of where my thinking is headed right now. Thank you, thank you for your talk. And I want to go back to that point you made about protest and push on that a little harder again. How do we effectively mount that protest? And I see that as somebody who has never had academic freedom but that's the pointy end of this. And I say that as somebody who's watching one of their colleagues be sued by an ed tech company for criticism. It's dangerous work and it's incredibly dangerous work. We need those with academic freedom to do that work. But how do we create that movement? How do we create that protest? Because we see the issues, but yeah. So I'm struggling with that. No, I think that's exactly right. And I do think that you need those with academic freedom and those with secure employment within the institution to be willing to take those steps. I am currently working on a book. I am in another book of very late stages of revising the manuscript for this one. It's a follow up to generous thinking. It's called leading generously. And it is ostensibly about fixing the leadership problem in the academy today, but ultimately it's actually about organizing and protest and how it is that we could build solidarity across lines of like the categories of employment on our campuses that have been used to divide and keep us quiet. To those of us with tenure, keep us quiet about issues because we don't face them. And also they're coming from my tenure and so I'm gonna do everything I can to protect my privilege, not recognizing the degree to which you don't have that privilege. And in fact, one of the key privileges that you don't have is the ability to say no, where I get to say no, right? So this book is really attempting to press administrators, particularly at that middle management level of chairs and deans and tenured faculty to think about what we stand to lose if we don't build solidarity with the employees and other stakeholders on our campuses who don't have the security that we have. And to think about how to build those relationships and how to build the movements that might help us return some of the teeth to shared governance in our institutions, in many institutions, and this is definitely true of my own. Shared governance still exists in name, right? We have a faculty senate, but if you actually trace the sort of lines of authority, like what happens after the faculty senate passes something, nothing, all right, there is no binding nature to anything that the faculty senate does. And so as a result, academic governance, shared governance within the academy has turned into kind of bureaucracy and busy work to keep us all occupied, rather than coming together in ways that actually might make a difference. I have so much more to say about this, I'm not gonna go on, but the point being, you're exactly right, that is exactly the problem, and that's one that I'm hoping that I can begin helping people find their way to fix it. Hi, Kathleen, I'm gonna pull in some questions from Discord. Awesome. We've got Mark Wilson asking to follow up on Brian's question, how can we, the people, access ways to increase our media and fluency? That is a really good question. The main thing that I would say really would be to start, like to get into these conversations where these places are happening, right, and to start poking at something like mastodon, how does it work, peer tube, pixel-fed, like to really experiment with some of these low stakes tools that can then help us begin to invent something new from there. I also am a great believer, I mean, I'm gonna go back to Boone Gorgas a million years ago, de-googling his public presence and like trying to get himself entirely out of all Google products. This was in the mid-2000s sometime. Like the more that we refuse to participate in these sort of free products where we are in fact the thing that's being sold, the better off we can be. So I hope that that might help. And I'm not sure that really got at the import of the question, but there we are. Absolutely, I'd encourage folks to share resources too. We've got one with Grant over there. Curious, the age comm and social, I noticed that you used in the hometown fork. I'm wondering what you found appealing about that fork. So hometown, for those of you who don't know, it's a fork of the mastodon software that's produced by Darius Kazemi. And it is a delightful, delightful fork. It means that since we're using this fork, we have a little bit of a lag between when mastodon issues a new release and when Darius gets the fork updated for that new release. But the things that hometown provides, first of all, and the main one that I was immediately attracted to was that it allows the site administrator to set a longer character length for what were then toots, tweets, posts, right? It also got rid of the word toot and it instituted posts before mastodon made the switch. Anyway, but so we've set ours to 1,000 characters, which means that you have the ability to create something that looks more like microblogging than it does like just spur of the moment kind of what my dog ate for breakfast posts. The other thing, and this was the most important part for me ultimately about hometown is that it has a setting that allows you to post in network only, right? So that I can post something that just goes to hcom and stuff social and does not ever leave that community. So you can build actual community because you can bring together a server full of people who trust one another and engage together on internally facing dialogue. And that's the key thing that I think distinguishes hometown. Darius built it originally because he's using it in the same way that I'm using Mattermost with a cluster of friends that he has a closed server with. And that kind of in network posting really mattered for that cluster of friends. He has generously given this to us too. And so I strongly encourage any of you who are running master on servers to take a look at hometown and see if it does some of the work that you might want. Hi, thank you. I'm Molly, everybody. I feel like you all know each other. A lot of words that are coming up for me and that I think build on what your question is like vintage and also it's unironically artisanal. And it's a lot of the words that are about recapturing our humanity. All these words that are going on in this parallel conversation we're having about AI right now. And so I've been chewing over this and listening to all these comments and I'm thinking an obstacle is in scale. Like you've got your private community that you're gonna keep closed. It feels like what if each common social got as big as these other platforms would we eventually hit the same commodification problems the same dehumanization problems? Yeah, yeah. I think that's an excellent question to ask. And this is those of you who were around for the young conference yesterday will have heard I think bits and pieces of this conversation. Scale is exactly the problem, right? And when your venture capitalist funded you have to be able to scale. And so all of the problems of moderation get pushed off toward AI or they get pushed off to horribly treated off-short labor. And instead of like the community taking responsibility for itself and moderation being a key problem of the owners of the network rather than the folks who it gets off-short to. I mean, if H comes to that social scaled at that kind of rate it would probably have all of the same problems. And we've seen this with Mastodon.Social in the last few weeks, right? Where a new account creation on Mastodon.Social is not reviewed. It's completely open to create an account and a whole bunch of crypto spammers came in and started like really sending out a whole lot of spam leading a lot of instances to block Mastodon.Social, right? To block that entire instance because it was producing so much spam. I think that scaling is in fact that one of the things that goes wrong is like this idea that bigger is better that we need to have more that we need to get everybody in. And one of the things that Mastodon allows is a community to remain small and tight but to connect to other small and tight communities. So to scale through network connections rather than scaling up the size of a particular server beyond what its community capacity can really be. And that's the kind of thing that I would really ideally like us to be thinking about is like how can we build connections without losing the sense of who those of us in a particular space are? I will also add, so Humanities Commons has been around for a bit now and at the point when, I guess we were still just MLA Commons at this point when we were first opening up the repository that the Commons is connected to. It's a broad based repository that connects into the social network of the Commons sort of allowing people to deposit material, get a DOI for it and then share it with their communities and with the world. And I was working with a team at Columbia University Library who were helping us with the build out of the repository portion and Barbara Rachenbach who's now University Library and at Yale said in a conference panel that we were presenting as we were first unrolling the repository and talking about our work together on this project. She said, we had to prepare ourselves for catastrophic success. And that is like, it's a phrase that's been stuck in my head ever since, like really trying to brace yourself for like what if everything goes right and everybody joins, right? What do you do then? And at the time, I thought it would like the idea of that being a catastrophe was hilarious, except that she was literally talking about what if we crash the server? What if there's too much stuff? What if storage gets away from our capacity to handle it? Like what do we do then? And now I think of that catastrophe as being a social one as well, right? What if we succeed so well that all of a sudden the community gets beyond us? And so scale is, I think it's something that we're gonna have to keep a very close eye on. Hi, Kathleen. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, there you are. Hi. Thank you, I love this discussion. That almost reminds me of a lot of the conversations yesterday around constraint-based design and just I know that they're making a documentary and you're talking to the size of your community makes me think, I love this event because it's about 50 people. And if it was a hundred or 200, the conversation shifts. So do you think there are other constraints? You mentioned moderation that if intentionally applied can help design a community to be avoiding that catastrophe of scale? Absolutely, absolutely. And I think one of the things that in well-designed mastodon-based communities is really, really making them work right now is codes of conduct, right? Codes of conduct are a key set of constraints that everybody who joins the network has to agree to. And when we all adhere to the server rules that we have set up, it doesn't keep us from engaging with one another. In fact, it makes it possible for us to engage one another and to build the relationships of trust that we need because we all take a kind of responsibility for our behavior in this space. And we all agree to hold one another accountable through the reporting function that allows us to kind of point out where failures to adhere to the code of conduct are occurring. And so I think that that is one key kind of social constraint that the community and lots of really good functional communities on mastodon are being designed for and with. I do think that there are potential technical constraints that can serve that as well. And some of them are like coming back to Darius because I'm in hometown and the ability to post in network on things, right? That ability to keep my post from circulating might enable me to have a more open honest conversation with the folks I'm trying to reach than it would like if my post is just going out into the world and anybody can respond to it and I'm getting piled on because of that. So I think that thinking about like social responsibility as connected to technical constraint is something that might help us produce communities that are a bit more mature and able to function in ways that we need them to. As I'm listening to this conversation, I keep hearing Adrienne Marie Brown in my head and her, what you do at the small scale sets the pattern for the whole system kind of thinking. Yeah. And when we're thinking about constraints and human sized communities, how do we deal, so I think she's right, but how do we deal with not becoming exclusive? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that I think is, oh God, it takes a lot of soul searching, quite honestly. When we started H Common Stuff Social, we made the decision that we were gonna review all accounts before we allowed people. But what do we review them for? Right, like how do we decide? Like who gets to join us and who doesn't? And it's been really hard. There are a few markers that when someone creates an account and you're pretty sure they're gonna spam you, that you can look for, right? If I get an account request that has the name of the person, the account handle and an email address that have no connection whatsoever across those three and it's coming from a Gmail or another free email service, I can look at that and go, yeah, I don't think so. We also use the like, hey, why do you wanna join us? As a way of just like, do you say thoughtful conversation or do you say, my peers are here? Or do you like, do you say anything that leads me to believe you're coming into this in good faith? That's all I'm looking for, right? Is like evidence that you're a real human being and not a crypto spammer. And like, I really wanna be here because you say something thoughtful about it. Beyond that, I don't care if you are in the humanities, I don't care if you are an academic, I don't care what language you submit that form in. I just wanna know that you're gonna be a good faith member of this community. And so I think that really finding the balance in that matters and I think finding the balance requires having an open system of moderators who are not all just like you, right? Who you can check with and say, how do you read this? Do you think that's okay? Or what do you do with this report? How do we handle it? And having a community-oriented system of server moderation is also one of those ways that I think we can prevent ourselves from becoming too exclusive. Hi, I'm Kathleen. Just to piggyback on that, how do we avoid the bubbles? Yeah. Because that's the other side of distance, in some ways. Yeah, it is. I mean, so the bubbles, I mean, and when you say bubbles, I have two immediate thoughts, one of which is my Pomona College little like the students used to refer to campus as being in the bubble. And it really was this precious little bubble of a community that looked like a country club and anyway. It was delightful in many ways, don't get me wrong, but it was not the real world, right? The other set of bubbles that I think of are of course the filter bubbles that are produced by the algorithms of Facebook and Twitter feeding you the things that for whatever reason those algorithms want you to see. Whether they want you to see it as on Facebook because they wanna keep you scrolling and therefore are gonna feed you stuff that you respond to and that you can demonstrate active engagement with or on Twitter, like what does the Twitter, hi Donnie, what the Twitter algorithm is feeding you for. But the issue is that both of them produce filter bubbles because it's showing you stuff that it knows that you wanna see and it's not like either it's producing stuff that's gonna provoke a reaction or it's producing stuff that is like the community of the like-minded, right? We're having this conversation and we're just preaching to the choir all the time. I mean, which ironically, that's what I have been doing in this talk, right? It's total preaching to the choir. But so how do we avoid that? Some of it is like, frankly, we take the algorithms out of the picture and go back to a timeline that's just the timeline, stuff that happens in the order that it happens and you see things that way that are not necessarily part of your filter bubble. But on the other hand, there is part of me that wants to suggest that certain kinds of bubble aren't necessarily bad, right? So I love on H-com and stuff social to scroll through the local timeline. Like what, like everybody on H-com and stuff social and what they're posting. We have folks posting in, I can't remember at last count, I think it was seven different languages. We have folks who are all around the world. We have folks who are in the humanities, not in the humanities, but they all are posting interesting stuff that's about the commons and the work that we're all doing collectively. And that bubble, I think it's diverse and it's not all totally like-minded but it's a bubble that I find highly productive. They're bringing stuff in, they're boosting posts that are things I wouldn't have found otherwise. And so I think, I mostly just want us to be a bit more conscious of the bubbles that we're always in and to think about when we're in them being conscious of them and being there for a reason because there are times when you need your community in order to support you for something and then recognizing everything that's going on outside the bubble. But I don't necessarily need everything that's going on outside the bubble to be bombarding me 24 seven. I'm gonna go back a little bit to some of the questions about engaging students and getting them away from the habits formed in terms of what they're looking for by social media. One of the things that I've been thinking about lately is in addition to how social media has evolved, how online storytelling like webcomics and things like that have evolved over time where it's gone from, you can be like a decent artist, you can be okay, you can even be bad as long as the writing's good enough. But over time it's become the barrier to entry is you have to be amazing when you start and you have to be a great project manager, you have to be updating regularly, you have to write really well and all of the webcomics are consolidating onto a particular platform, webtoon, where they all used to have their own individual sites where they were hosted, which this question sounds like it's gonna be all about your thoughts on webcomics but really it's more about your thoughts on platform consolidation and this push towards polish in terms of the idea of what we want is things that are real, no, what we want is things that look nice that we can say are real. Oh man, that issue of polish is a huge one with respect to the sort of conglomeration of social media platforms, right? Part of their appeal was their shininess and none of our like indie web stuff had anywhere near that shine, right? So if you look at Instagram, right? Versus other means of photo sharing that sort of appeal of the interface and the ways that it sort of eases you into the community and it packages your stuff to look just like the stuff of like major influencers and then it gives you the metrics that can tell you what kind of impact you're having. Like all of that kind of flash is part of how we get sucked away from owning the spaces in which we're doing the work and from the more kind of ragtag community building that I would like to see us get back to. So like I can't fault anybody for getting pulled in by that kind of consolidation because I totally was part of that in moving from into Twitter and into Facebook and getting my head turned by what some of the possibilities were there. I think a big part of what we're gonna need to do for all kinds of things. And I really don't know enough about the world of web comics to say anything specific about what's going on there. Just like with Brian's question, I mean, I really don't know much about folks who are producing a sharing video in ways that like I can't speak to it as directly as I would like, but we need alternatives, right? We need alternatives that are built on open standards. We need alternatives that can allow the creators to maintain control and ownership of the material that they're producing. And we need to do a whole lot of education out there to let people know why the shiny platform that they're using that's so user friendly and it's so appealing and it's got such a great community and there's so many people there is not a good option, right? Why they're better off with smaller numbers and smaller influence over here. The number of my colleagues, and I mean like really thoughtful colleagues in digital spaces within the academy who are like really resistant to moving off of Twitter because they're like, I've got this many thousand followers on Twitter and I've only got a couple of hundred on Mastodon. And so my stuff can't reach anywhere near the same number of people. I mean, I try to tell them like look, run an experiment, okay? Post the same thing on Twitter and on Mastodon and think about the relative size of your ostensible followership and what kinds of actual traction do you get with these two spaces? Personally, I have found that while, there may have been more likes on Twitter and there may have been more retweets and things like that, given the number of followers that I had over there and the number that I had on Mastodon, Mastodon engagement was infinitely higher and it was of infinitely better quality because people were really engaging with the content in a different way than Twitter. And at some point, some of the stuff that I was posting had no idea if it was even getting out to the vast majority of people who were ostensibly following me. So I am trying to find ways to convince my own colleagues to like yes, everybody's on academia.edu but it's terrible, don't use it and here's an alternative and similarly with Twitter, right? Like yes, everybody has been there and it's easy and it's shiny. The good news is the new management has made it less shiny and has done us all a big service by breaking a whole lot of things. So the move to Mastodon has become a whole lot easier for functional platforms that are like still presenting themselves like Instagram as being the best place to share this stuff and create engagement is a lot heavier lift to get people to see the ways that their content is being either misused, the ways that their work is being filtered, the ways that in fact they're contributing to the problem rather than sort of helping to build a solution. And practicing what she preaches, Kathleen's blog post of a talk was a half an hour and the comments section of that blog post was 45 minutes. So you're living the dream right now. Kathleen, thank you so much for a great talk. Thank you all. We do have sessions coming up. We have a 15 minute.