Google me: Can I get a witness?

I was wondering if my other blog showed up when someone might Google me. Under “images,” these are the ones that popped up.

When you Google me--this is what you get.

I’m the one in the middle. NOT my favorite photo by any measure, the smile doesn’t seem as genuine as I like, and I have on the dark corporate blazer thing–no accessories at all. My eyes look beady and criminal. Dull. No wait, I don’t look so very bad with shifty beady eyes–or at least, it could be a lot worse. Interesting grouping, though, don’t you think?

I cannot understand how such an arrangement could happen. But then I watched this talk at Ted.com recommended to me by my friend Trish–the talk is by Eli Pariser: “Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles.'”

"Beware Filter Bubbles" from Eli Pariser

You must watch this talk about invisible editing of the web to filter information that is tailored to your search result. Google and Facebook personalization… different people get different things, so the internet believed the people I was linked with are these folks in this particular filter bubble. Kinky.

Good lesson on how we request and share information from or of the interweb/cybersphere and beyond–it’s a question of convenience, perhaps, but whose convenience? Transparency is the thing  we need to help us learn and grow from the experiences of many.

Rhetorical savvy isn’t just about what we are creating on line for our readers, for ourselves, it’s also about what the life of the text (or image) takes on after it leaves us and lands in the hands of strangers. Or how it takes flight. Watch something with rhetorical velocity take off.

Then, duck.

Daffy Duck (free for personal use)

 

Monster advice about WAC blogging

Blogging about WAC can be something you do for every class you are taking… right?

Use your blog to write about what you’re learning in other classes, draft papers here, think through issues, practice thinking about other subjects. Use your blog to write about our WAC class and your readings and when you are assigned blog posts, sure, but also use the blog to think through whatever else you are learning or reading. Do you write poetry? I write haiku. Like this:

Watched Kick-Ass today.

Appalled by the violence.

My new favorite film.

Use your blog to write anything. (Now what I want to learn is how to eliminate the open lines between the haiku lines–it looks awful like this.)

Do you want to muse about a song that makes you think? Do it in your blog. What does music have to do with writing? Compositions… composing. Listening, reading, rhythm, rhyme, pacing, control, intonation, inflection, so on. Be open to the WAC connections, and the WAC connections will come to you.

WAC is the first love

Of my academic life,

But it’s not the last.

If I could choose anything I might do for a few years, with no consequences and all expenses paid, I’d go to Japan and study haiku. I even think in haiku sometimes, though you’d never know it from most of my writing life… I can really ramble, no limits, no censors, on and on and on. Perhaps this is why I love the six-word memoir genre so much–I only get six words to say something.

I teach writing; students teach me.