The Internet is like an all-in-one machine. It can copy, fax, print, and scan.

Mostly, we copy and fax, I.e., link and publish, reproduce and broadcast, stuff that’s native to the web. We can also print — take information on the net and make it operable in the physical world.

But SCANNING! Whether you’re bringing something offline online, or porting something from one sphere into another, that act of translation turns out to be genuinely synthetic. It’s the surest way, short of actually being traditionally creative, to add value.

This is why I love Wikipedians, ultra-fans, crowdsourcing translators, Google Books AND AAAARG.org, and folks who read and translate from one intellectual/cultural sphere to another. These are the h2g digital humanists, the 21st century equivalent of my man Aldus Manutius, who translated critical editions of once-lost Greek texts and put them into cheap print editions.

Information might want to be free, but that’s only true so long as scanners are willing to do the work.

Pulling ideas from books, pulling in longer print articles from less known publications, talking about real events, extensive synthesis, finding old articles/posts that are still relevant, interviews with people, etc.

I’m never going to be a Kottke or a Doctorow or a Sterling so I’m going for being a primary source that the aggregators link to.

Mind you, I regularly fall from this lofty goal.

But thanks for the comment, Tim. Sometimes it’s the encouragement more than anything else that helps. So, yeah, thank you.

I used to be more ‘unabashed’ about academics on this blog, and I wrote posts about what I was thinking and didn’t really hold back on the theory-speak. But as I started to become frustrated with how small the readership was – a situation that hasn’t changed, mind you – I started to dial it back, trying to phrase things in more straightforward language without dumbing it down. Eventually, I just started to blog about things that were separate from my academic life in an effort to ‘appeal to a broader audience’. That, it seems, has been a mistake.

Part of this had to do with the fact that my web life and my school life actually did used to be quite separate – I would write about the web and tech here, and poco at school. Now that my diss is about tech/subjectivity/representation – i.e. the things I used to be most excited to blog about – it’s become harder to just spit ideas out, as I felt suddenly under a lot more self-scrutiny – and I’ve instead taken to posting music I really like. That may not make sense, but it’s what was going on in my head.

But I think you’re right – it’s time to get back to it and find a way to merge these two now not-at-all-disparate areas of my life. I mean, most of my ‘readership’ are academics anyway, not to mention that being able to write about complex ideas in clear, straightforward language is often a sign that one has a good grasp on them. So yes, that seems like an excellent suggestion. I think I’m gonna pick up a Sony Reader soon, so I think that will help with the AAAARG pdfs too.

You’re done with coursework and exams, right?

If that’s the case, then the incentive and discipline structure you’ve responded to your entire life is gone. You’re looking for something to replace it. The ethos of the web has replaced it.

You need to find a way to reconcile the two. Download some theory PDFs from AAAARG and (gasp!) read one or two of them, right on your computer. Blog about them. Tweet quotes from what you’re reading! Blog your half-formed ideas.

Look at what Ta-Nehisi Coates has been able to do with his history reading, whether of the Civil War or the Labor movement. Those are some of his best posts — way better than his thoughts on the Cowboys.

Trust me. Once I started doing this, I became 1) a better, more popular blogger — because I was offering something nobody else was, instead of just responding to the hot link of the moment — and 2) a better researcher, because I was finding more material, as people brought it to my attention.

You can do it, Nav. It’s not exactly threading the needle. It’s better than that.