This marks the first post of this relocated blog. I get to feel all special for finally doing the 1999 thing and registering my own domain.

As far as already-present content goes, what comes before this post is an import of content from my Blogger blog. I kept most of what populated that blog, but did cut some of the more unrelated content from when I started writing there in 2009. Most of the earlier stuff had to do with class-required topics from one of my first University of Michigan-Flint classes, a course on digital rhetoric and new media in the classroom. The blog went silent for about a year until I resurrected it and refocused it as I began work on my MA thesis, an ill-fated and presumptuous answer to questions of the author’s fate as the ebook/ereader market exploded. I’ve maintained it sporadically since.

I intend to keep to mostly the same topics here, and because any blog relaunch or relocation wouldn’t be complete without empty promises to write more, I’ll vow to post more entries on more topics. That brings me to my thoughts on how I’ll choose what I include here.

When this blog launched for that UM-Flint class three years ago, my instructor and now friend James Schirmer introduced us to a term for a condition I had not realized was definable: multiphrenia. This term describes the sense of personality fracturing we experience as we engage with an ever-increasing number of social environments, particularly digitally. As Schirmer explained then, the multiphrenic self is constantly choosing which self to be in which venue. We experience great pressure to craft unique personas for each place, be it Facebook, as instructors online, in emails to students, in emails to faculty, on Twitter, in online games, when writing for blogs, or any other digital space we inhabit. One of the greatest assets of a digital life – the ability to seriously consider what we say before we hit “submit” – can turn against us as we experience anxiety over how we will be perceived once our text appears on someone else’s screen, so we fracture ourselves into our different aspects.  To see how we dissociate these facets, look no further than the methods Facebook and G+ offer to sort our connections into groups or circles. By enabling the sorting which information is sent to which group, we’re encouraged to be different things to different people online.

It is this identity stratification I’ve decided to resist. This blog will be refocused with this in mind. One of the causes for the large gaps between my posts in the past (not the cause – I can tend to be lazy, too) was my apprehension over what I was including. As you may see from the post before this one, I recently experienced the gut/mind/soul-wringing process of gaining admission to a PhD program (I was accepted to Georgia State’s Rhetoric and Composition, by the way). In the months between summer of 2011 and April this year, I’d had many notions to post on any of several topics, but I always froze when I asked myself one question: what if someone from the admissions committees at one of my schools decided to take a look at me beyond my application materials? Was I comfortable putting myself out there more and more, especially if it was more off topic? In retrospect, I realized I obsessed to the point of talking myself out of submitting several posts I enjoyed writing because they were unable to be reconciled with the image of Roger the hopeful academic. For better or worse, the personality compartmentalization worked out and I made it to where I wanted to be. I think that should end now. I’ve recently made the decision to integrate my Facebook and Twitter selves. Including this blog in the same person is the next step in the reunification of my online self.

If for some reason you end up being a reader of this blog, you may want a little about what to expect. This is how I’ll organize posts from this point forward:

• 8900: These are posts responding to weekly topics for a Fall 2012 course on the subject of computers and composition. I’ll keep them around all semester. At the end, I may delete some or all of them, but I anticipate keeping at least a few if I think the topics have a broader applicability to what I prefer to write about here.
• For Good Measure: Generally off-topic, more personal writing about anything and everything.
• Probably Cats: I’m a cat guy. So much so that I even outed myself as a hopeless cat guy to one of my ENGL 1101 sections. These posts have a high probability of being cat-related.

Anything not falling into one of these headings can probably be assumed to be vaguely related to my professional life: composition, writing center stuff, pointless academic philosophizing, digital selves or rhetoric, and writing. Read on, dear friends. The great experiment begins!