sparkle motion

For awhile now I've wanted to divert my online writing energy into different directions. It would be nice to fight less. Generally at this point I have a policy where I only post something critical of someone else if it passes the "can't sleep" test. If I have something critical to say, oftentimes I can't sleep well until I post it. If I'm not moved to that degree lately I just drop it.

I would like to write a blog called Interfaces of the Word, after Father Ong, and make it a blog about writing. I find people are very dismissive of what I do academically until they actually hear what it is beyond the field's name. I would love to talk a bit about the empirical research that is ongoing, both in terms of the large, traditional educational research about broad policies, but also recent scholarship in eye-tracking and brain scans. The exploration of the unique neurocognitive processes that go into the use of specifically written language is, for me, very interesting. More often, I could write about style, and what I perceive in the trends in Internet and blog discourse, highlight writing I like, point out bad writing, do a technical discourse analysis of a specific blogger, etc. There's a lot of research out there that people don't even know exists and I think a lot of it would be of interest to the broad blogging audience.

The question is always in what form and what forum. I don't know, it never seems natural to just take this here blog and change its focus. And starting a new thing seems alternatively invigorating and exhausting. I would like to stop fighting.

Perhaps the ultimate issue is that I just don't know if anybody would be interested. That's funny, because I've never cared much about that in the past; independence tends to trump traffic. But I wouldn't want to invest myself in something new if no one was interested. This blog has always been a service to myself. I would like to change that somewhat. Another issue is that, like a lot of academics, I am fearful of writing about topics related to my research interests online, for a variety of professional and social reasons.

I don't know, we'll see.