KSU anthropology professor Mike Wesch reports back from a Personal Democracy Forum at Lincoln Center, borrowing the phrase "critical optimism" to describe the crowd of "amazingly creative and concerned global citizens" he met there -- a pretty good description of Wesch himself, and of Paul Jones at UNC, whose Facebook post pointed me to this video of Wesch's talk. Coincidentally, Wesch starts out talking about the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which Paul may have assigned to a class I was in a dozen years ago.
"They were all continually trying to figure out where we are, where we might be going, and the possible downsides and dangers of new technologies so we can use the new technologies to serve human purposes. In other words, it was my kind of crowd."
While this was a more general blog at first, since 2009, Boblog has been for occasional writing about music, part of trying to differentiate my web writing spaces. My other blogs are JHeroes (old-time radio's portrayal of journalists) & Other Journalism, a general-purpose writerly blog, successor to stepno.com/oldblog. When I was teaching, they all sometimes served other purposes.
I have worked for two newspapers (one full time for 11 years), several magazines, four software companies, and six colleges and universities, counting part-time, freelance and student jobs. See stepno.com.
