In the early days of social networking,
most online participants were pretty self-consciously anonymous. This tendency
was equal parts self-protection and self-indulgence.
The former was a natural reaction — if you
had no idea who anyone really was online (and a lot of people were pretending to
be someone else for very suspicious reasons), the best defense was to not be
yourself, either. The latter, of course, was a way of getting something for
nothing — if you couldn’t be yourself, it was fun and exciting to re-create
yourself as someone else — older, smarter, better-educated, even a completely
different nationality or even gender. In a real sense, it was “dancing with
yourself” – you were creating a personna with which you could play. It was a
perfect reflection of the overwhelming majority of the social-networkers back
then — tweens, teens, and young adults, who were, in fact, trying to create
themselves in real life at the same time. But it was a great deal more
self-serving, a little less purposeful, and a whole lot more self-indulgent.
There’s nothing really wrong with all that. But the overwhelming majority of “dancing” we do in our professional and educational lives is with someone else. That is, we select a partner, and we coordinate our moves and steps to fit what that partner is good at, or interested in. We certainly have our own flair, abilities, and personna, but that doesn’t solely define the purpose, or even the character, of the dance.
Writing is like that — when we write, we certainly want to be creative, skilled, individual, maybe even flashy. But in so-called real life, we’re most likely writing for a purpose, and that purpose requires that we attend to someone else — our audience. If we’re writing an advertisement, we have to know who might want the product, and leverage their other interests to create this new one. If we’re a newspaper reporter, we should know the reading habits and abilities of the audience of our report. If we’re simply applying for a job and writing a resumé, we’ll have no chance of winning the job unless we incorporate our future employer’s interests into our story. We do this by opening up, watching, listening — stepping out of ourselves enough to become aware of the person we hope is watching us, to learn what they’re like, what they want, what they hold as important.
As teachers, we have to be aware that writing online brings with it some challenges. Our students have their own habits — habits they developed long before we (or any other adult, for that matter) decided to watch. They will tend to be brief, and will feel justified in purposeful misspellings and Internet slang. But even more important, when writing online, they’ll naturally stop caring about audience, since the audience can be, well, anyone and everyone. The results at best self-indulgent, disconnected, and at worst, embarrassingly inept and even, perhaps, insulting. If you don’t know your partner, you’ll be constantly in danger of stepping on toes.
This is not to mean that online writing in a social context has no purpose, or can only produce terrible results. All writing (on or off line) takes place in a social context, but good writing is self-aware, consciously recognizing that context, and leveraging it for increased effectiveness. Like all things in education, there has to be a “smart person” in the room, guiding and critiquing the student to focus outside of himself. With such guidance, the student will improve, as will the massive amounts of content almost all young people produce online every day.
Dancing with someone else is almost always a lot more enjoyable, as well as being much more valuable. Besides, I really can’t say I ever liked that Elvis-like snarl….
