Your post sparked some thoughts, which I posted here.

Cheers,

Bill

I guess I’ve just been having this weird problem trying to reconcile the distinction between my online (free/open, idea-driven, sharing, reflecting, meritocracy, etc…) and offline (project-driven, budget-driven, bureaucracy, etc…). It’s feeling more and more tempting to just spend more of my time in the more rewarding and enriching online “world” – but that’s not very healthy, especially when the online stuff doesn’t pay my mortgage, etc…

Real life is just a bunch of people thrown together that a forced to perform in order to justify their economic existence, what we call the day job. Online, we’re here because we enjoy being here, its good here, there are like minded people here dicussing higher ideas than what is daily lives. This is truly a free space built on ideas and nothing else, there are no rules, there is no can’t, there is nothing but freedom.

I don’t know that we’ll ever get all the way to this in higher education itself, but part of the reason I became a professor is because I sought exactly this kind of community, and valued (and wanted to be part of) the effect such communities can have on societies themselves. When “day job” starts to encompass the very intellectual activity of a university, and my interactions with colleagues becomes politicized, fraught in many directions, and one in which the greater good vanishes from sight, I begin to despair of the possibility of such community–and wonder when the online world will become its own version of that despair.

A gloomy thought, my friends, but it seems that human beings always bring the serpent into the garden with them…. I hope I’m wrong, and I must say with D’Arcy and Sami and Lanny that the online community is where I most often go to get my batteries recharged.

Now, after I write a blog post, I go to sitemeter and look at who else has referred to it. So I find D’Arcy’s post and the comments of Sami, D’Arcy, and Garnder. The collegiality is great and that we can connect this way certainly has a power to it, but now I’ve not moved onto something else. I’m still living in my post and my online life. I’ve gotten narrower.

I think the effect of getting narrower is something like that of a drug addiction. We’re looking for the next high. And so many other things pale by comparison and are not as intense.

In the first post I didn’t mean to disparage the day job – I think it can be good and interesting (or not, it can go either way). I meant to say that our patience is no longer there because of this always on thing that D’Arcy pointed out, so we’re more likely to feel irked by the irritants in that job and less likely to be thankful for the fun and engaging things about the work.