The Terrible Twos and the Trusting Threes

Today, Virtualpolitik celebrates its second birthday. Two years and 681 postings later, I'm sort of dumbfounded to be coming upon this anniversary.

It's been an exciting year. I gave awards! I even got an award! I went multimedia! Best of all, in July, I joined the Sivacracy blogging team.

I know there's been a lot of press about how blogging is supposedly a huge distraction from scholarship to be avoided by the impressionable young. But I 'm not sure that that's necessarily true for everyone. Despite my natural sloth, which makes me inclined to spend all day watching YouTube and playing Tetris on my cell phone, somehow I managed to have a really productive year. In academic speak, I published four peer-reviewed single authored papers and two jointly authored ones. I also gave something like thirteen talks. And I finally sent off my book manuscript about the virtual state and its discontents for review! As if that weren't enough, I've enjoyed planning for the next cycle of the Humanities Core Course with humanist visionary Julia Lupton. Stay tuned for more on her Design Alliance.

But now I realize that, as I'm entering my third year, I'll need to learn all the things that any toddler would, as I educate myself about the social practices of blogging. For example, as a lone blogger, I think I have a tendency toward parallel play, and sometimes I'll admit that I have difficulty sharing links with others. And I still throw tantrums about really bad web design and game development, particularly when it is paid for by the taxpayer for a federal agency. But I'm learning to put my toys away when I'm done with them by organizing my posts and putting my metadata in the right place, so I think there's hope for more maturity to come.