Oh, hey; hi.
So this is a Necromedia blog. I’m sure James and Nathan will throw down on this in short order. I just wanted to post this to get my feet wet and (hopefully) get in the habit of updating often or on a semi-regular schedule. I won’t be able to attend every class, so there’ll be some supplemental/non-project posts from time to time, just to keep my head in the game. So if I appear to be spamming, it’s mostly because I’m trying to make up for what I lack in embodied presence with some virtual presence.
I actually agonized over what to call the blog, if you can believe that. I wasn’t sure how I’d finangle myself into a group, so this was set up a bit early. Obviously, a significant portion of the class (and our projects) will be spent exploring how technology interfaces with human mortality. So on the one hand, the blog is a cheap pun on “Terror Management Theory” that is rather germane to the act of keeping this blog in the first place.
We’re all in an MA program. There is something in academe that has prompted us to sacrifice a not-insignificant amount of money, time, energy and attention to the moloch of graduate studies. Whether we want to admit it or not, this course is a small part of our own personal hero projects.
On a personal level, this is something I’m keenly aware of, enough that I’ve come to view my time in graduate studies as a pharmakon of sorts, to borrow the intent of the SLSA conference this past September. On the one hand, being engaged in the academic community gives me some kind of intellectual nourishment that I don’t otherwise receive from my day-to-day activities. On the other, it’s caused me to alienate family, friends and coworkers in more instances than I can count.
Furthermore, I have trouble with academic blogs. I think they’re a cool idea, but actually writing them fills me with a unique kind of dread. I’ve tried to dismiss this anxiety as just relict devotion to the essay form, where my thoughts were never shared until after they’d been honed, refined, edited and chewed over for weeks at a time. There’s a very real immediacy to blogging that runs counter to everything I know about academic writing. It’s frustrating, too, because it leads to situations where I’m writing about something but haven’t fully formed any kind of coherent opinion or argument, so it results in my posting a link and saying “Here’s a thing” and then trying to explain the nebulous causality that led to the post in the first place. It’s beautifully absurd. Non-academic blogging always has this staunch self-evidence about it. “I’m writing about this because this is the Internet.” However, the humanities has had this weird blind spot so far as the Internet was concerned for so long. I remember being in undergrad and having professors that honestly seemed to be hiding, hoping the Internet might go away if they ignored it long enough.
Ultimately, that, too, comes down to a fear of errors. A fear of sharing my thoughts and having them deemed “wrong” or erroneous or loaded with foul Western assumptions.
So that, at least for me, is where the title came from. A fear that my hero project is “wrong” at a foundational level. That, by thinking, and perhaps thinking wrongly, I will infect my existence with self-replicating existential errors, like bad code that will one day crash and leave nothing behind but corrupted data.
On a happier note, this theme is kinda garish. I like it.
Error Management 
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