For anyone reading this who doesn’t know, I teach a class every winter term at Miami on the topic of digital identity. It changed departments with me, but the core concepts are the same, and one of the things I find most interesting about it is that the early work each time unearths an intriguing reality: there’s not really a stable sense of what an academic should be.
Let me elaborate a bit on what I just said, since it might seem like a “duh” moment for some of you. One of the things I do with that course– something I think 90% of people on the internet could use– is teach the students to look at how they present themselves and to try to look like what they are/want to be. For example, if you want to be a professional game designer, you should have presences in certain places, follow certain people, put up certain types of tweets, etc.
But I start them off by having them shine a harsh light on the digital me. Not because of my ego. Actually for the opposite. I have them start with me because if they’re going to make any sort of gaffes or social faux pas, I want those things to happen looking at a profile that is safe. I don’t care how they comment on the things I’ve done and posted because I become a teachable moment.
That said, I always get split reactions. Some students are shocked by how forthcoming/real I am online while others are puzzled by now I don’t seem like a professor. I certainly do things with my social media and with this website that I don’t encourage other people to do. I do things that if I had a different job would be damaging to my public image. Like sending game requests to my Facebook friends, or being too PDDA (public display of digital affection) with my wife. There’s a picture of me on Facebook drinking gravy from a straw, for example. FYI, I didn’t actually drink the gravy.
This leads back to my original point. I actively curate my digital identity, but I curate it with the attitude that I want it to look as much like the real me as it can. And the real Phill Alexander is basically an introverted-extrovert (look it up, it’s real), a total nerd who is part of numerous strange little communities and often represents as contradictory.
I know how to look like a political scientist, from my training. I know how to look like various kinds of writer, again, from my training. I know how to look like an ubernerd because I’ve been one for almost 40 years. But you know what I’m uncertain of…
What does a professor look like? What does an academic look like? I know the stereotype, and I’ve seen people try to enact that stereotype. They end up looking like enormous jerks in digital space. I’ve known others who have just refused to try to shape any sort of specific identity and instead assume a grown-up version of what a teen’s social media profile and web presence might look like. Then there are others like me– as I don’t consider myself any sort of revolutionary leader in this trend– who try to curate the hybrid and multiple life of the academic by looking hybrid and multiple.
I don’t wear a suit unless I absolutely have to IRL. I didn’t even wear a full suit to my wedding (which was live-streamed on the internet, btw), as I wore khaki shorts and throwback Jordans with my sport coat and tie. I reference popular TV shows and movies in my classes. I teach with Dungeons and Dragons because I played it most of my life. I wrote a book about World of Warcraft.
If you walk into my office, you’ll see academic books with dense theory in them (Baudrillard, DeCerteau, Derrida), but they sit next to a set of card games and a number of Funko Pop figures. My degree hangs on the wall next to an REM poster, or it will once I put it up again in my new office. Right now it is sitting on my desk next to my computer. I have a huge Alienware laptop and a tiny gold MacBook.
That’s who I am. I’m not ashamed of any of it. I wear Nikes with purple and neon yellow highlights to work most days. 80% of my wardrobe consists of shorts and graphic t-shirts with comic characters, game images, and/or bands on them (the rest is button down shirts, slacks, and hoodies).
It wasn’t that long ago that I was on the academic job market for my first time out of grad school (well, five years ago– that’s not long to me, but it was a while). My first try at getting an academic job, I was advised by some people to try to look a certain way, talk a certain way, project a certain type of ethos. People were critical of my dress, of the fact that I sometimes ramble on (like I have in this post :P), that I embrace too many different ideas in my research.
That job search was horrible. I can see why easily now. I wasn’t authentic.
I started acting like myself and landed at Miami. I now feel like I fit pretty well into the program in AIMS. I think if people look at me– online or in the real world– they see what I am.
But my behavior in virtual space isn’t really a template for anyone, and other academics have the same problem. It’s a fluid, confusing space for a young academic professional.
I can theorize about why. I think a great deal of it is driven by the fact that the academy is a monolith, and the collective sense from academia itself is that an academic should look, act, be a certain way. There’s a lot of hegemonic heteronormative white masculinity happening in the academy. Most academics, particularly the elders who are full professors, are experts on one thing, and they are voracious about their one thing. That’s awesome, in its own right. I deeply revere some of the experts I’ve met. And I know how to look like an expert in one thing.
But the new generations can’t do that. Or we shouldn’t, I guess I should say. We aren’t in a world that needs experts in things like Chaucer or the political history of Japan. We need people who can critically combine ideas and theories, to know how to do things and make things with intelligence.We can’t prepare students to be people who are experts in a single thing; there aren’t jobs for that. Not even in the academy. Seriously, look at academic job listings. A digital humanist who is interested in issues of feminism, ecology and archival research? That’s the new reality of what schools are looking to find. I think it’s awesome.
So to circle back, again, there’s a person like me. I’m early-ish in my academic career, but if you put my profile on paper, I’m a Game Design/Game Theorist who is equipped to teach all manner of writing. I do digital rhetorics, visual rhetoric, and cultural rhetoric. I’m Cherokee, and I attempt to integrate that worldview and methodology into all of my work. I’m also a trained political scientist, though that takes a serious backseat. I know how to appeal to those individual audiences. But the appeals clash. A theory head wouldn’t enjoy the causal nature of a game designer. Gamers are off-put by the thousand-d0llar words that are common in rhetorical scholarship. Political scientists do a lot of intuiting with their “harder” statistical social science and are all-but-obsessed with what other people think and say (in a good way, but still). The Cherokee aspect is particularly difficult, as Cherokee are listeners first and speakers second, and we are by nature deferent to our elders. Try being a young scholar who won’t interrupt anyone who is your elder; it’s a tough balance.
The logical plan of action for me, after trying to figure out a way to accentuate one of the “hats” I wear was to just make my digital identity as close to the real me as I could, “warts and all” as the cliche might go. Sometimes I stick my foot in my virtual mouth. Sometimes I go for a joke that isn’t funny to some people. Sometimes I get mad, and I vent my frustrations in digital space. But I do so with a certain care.
I show people what I am, but not all of what I am. I show people what to expect.
Maybe, in the end, that’s what the new academic has to be. Just… real.
And with that, I’m off to humble brag about plumbing adventures and to marvel at the political landscape.