The summer always starts with this overwhelming, absolute feeling of potential, like there’s just tons of open space ready for development.

And so much less of it is needed for recovery as it used to be, when I was doing debate full time and when I was teaching high school all those years ago.

So what am I doing with it? There’s a lot of reading and writing to be done for sure. But there’s a lot on my mind in terms of the future.

Podcasting and Netcasting

I’ve always liked Leo Laporte’s advocacy for the term netcasting vs. podcasting (or broadcasting) as it captures the sense that the internet is a medium that both allows and forms/shapes the kind of things and audiences that will interact with them.

Podcasting – which is more bout a particular kind of offline device for listening to music – only captured a particular moment in time when mobile internet devices were expensive and failed regularly to maintain connection. It’s no longer the case that most people don’t have access to an always connected, cheap device for consuming content.

That being said, the principles of netcasting are pretty clear to me: Keep it short and engaging, low bandwidth and high quality. I restarted my old podcast In the Bin with this in mind and having a good time making it.

My other podcast, Republic of Sophistan I sort of stopped making and I’m not sure why. Now I’m figuring out what the relationship is between these two podcasts, if any. I think that most of the Republic stuff could be good YouTube content too, so that’s a problem. A good podcast is about 45 minutes; a good YouTube video less than 10. So that’s a bit of an issue.

YouTube for me will continue to be more riffing about my courses and direct instruction for online education. Sophistan should be more longer pieces of speculation or even “publication” in some way about rhetorical ideas. In the Bin can be about argumentation and debate. At least, that’s where I am at the start of July.

Public Speaking Trouble

Public speaking is a joke pretty much everywhere it is taught because people who should know better teach it as an adjunct to good business practices. Instead of a deeply transformative experience, speech communication rhetoricians primarily use it as a way to roll their eyes at the concepts of the politically good that 18 year olds nervously offer in their assigned speeches. Public speaking is seen in terms of boring, alienated, irrelevant labor by the majority of speech communication professors, and students see it as a waste of money and time. We should be working to prove the students wrong, not right. We have to figure out a way to get people to teach public speaking in a way that matches their teaching of rhetoric in higher-level or graduate courses. Rhetoric cannot be a servile art for 1000 level courses, and the major force behind worldmaking in the graduate seminar. It should be the latter all the time.

Looking to writing composition is just embarrassing to me, where the people know better and show it. They don’t consider themselves superior to their students, but fellow travelers in the difficulty of getting feelings and thoughts into words. Still reading a bunch of this and really considering making a large case that public speaking should be in the hands of composition scholars. It’s just wasted in most NCA-oriented departments.

In addition to this is the continued thought experiment of “online public speaking” or “public speaking online” and which is appropriate. Do we want to teach a Chautauqua circuit style, city council, 19th century town hall model of public speaking and just put it online? Or do we want to teach public speaking using contemporary technology like GoPros and podcasts? Nobody really thinks about this stuff as much as they should. I have a stack of essays about online and oral teaching that I think could help me conceptualize this in some new ways across the board for my courses, but not sure what the big pay out will be.

Public speaking should be the course that others turn to for advice on how to model a Zoom class, or a class where the in person and the paper exam give way to the spoken and the addressed, but due to our failure as a field to do anything but think public speaking is a waste of our precious time publishing in Quarterly Journal of Speech so 10 people can glance at it, we have little, if anything to offer. The pandemic should be a time to reassess this.

Working with students on topics of vital political importance where the answers are not known, but good minds can distinguish between the convincing and the unconvincing, and the swapping of terms that resonate for different audiences should be the course. More to come on this, as I think through it.

The early start time and truncated semester seem odd to me too, not sure how I’m going to adapt to that, but spending some daily time working on courses is a good way to address that question. Perhaps the only way. I’ve never taught the same class the same way more than once, and now I can’t even do it that comfortable way, as I must reimagine the whole approach. It takes time to offer an educational/learning experience, or teach, at least it does for me.

Writing and Studying

I am trying to write more, but it’s hard to get motivated to write an academic article as I really just don’t feel an audience of less than 100 people is worth the effort. Scholarship has a place, but it should not be the entirety of what a field does. Nor should it only be accessible to other scholars. There should be multi-iterations in various spots for it. But this work is not recognized or rewarded.

I’m trying to put together a popular press book at the moment, and hope to have something done on it in a week or so and see if anyone wants it. I do miss walking around and jotting things in my various notebooks, but perhaps once the virus is handled that part of my life will come back.

That’s good for a general update. I’m trying to post a lot less on social media just because it’s becoming clear to me how self-serving and non-engaging those posts are, even if you are a “good person” and keep people from the “other side” on your friend’s list. Normalizing spending more than a minute reading about an idea is something that is never advocated on social media, as it undermines the form. So I anytime I want to post on social media, i try to write it down and post it here. I hope I start to actually put more time into it.