Digital Ecstasies: Going Public with the Personal

Andrew Kinney Ohio State University at Mansfield Tumblr creates unique opportunities for students to go public on issues of personal significance: acceptance, difference, and identity. My project samples student documentaries and extends them in a series of recorded conversations. Digital ecstasies, then, describes my experiences working with students and student work; and it investigates how Tumblr allows us to challenge traditional assumptions about the personal, the public, and the student-teacher relationship.

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Gabby’s documentary focuses on dreadlocks and how others conceptualize the somewhat competing values associated with dreadlocks. I think one reason I react enthusiastically to her work has to do with her ability to toggle between the analytic and experiential. She’s invested in both the celebration of her roots even as she actively seeks to understand how others view the ethnic, geographic, and musical values associated with dreadlocks. It’s difficult not to be caught up in that celebration. Why shouldn’t we be seduced by student writing?

Read the rest at “Loc Nation.”

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Jessee’s project documents Steampunk and the role specific instances of that sub-genre play in her development as a writer and person. She describes overcoming life’s challenges by gaining access to online Steampunk communities and how that sense of acceptance is transformative. 

You can see her work at Static Perception.

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My name is Arrik Brown. This is my project it is about three gay college students. This documentary is about their everyday life, how they grew up and how their past influenced them to be a better person. Read the rest of Arrik’s work, “A Story about Three College Students.”

I react viscerally to Arrik’s project because of the risks he takes and the positive example his work sets for readers of his work. Arrik is already out to friends and family, but this documentary makes him visible on campus in ways he’s not used to. The overwhelming positive responses Arrik receives (both on and off Tumblr) has been rewarding, he reports. 

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Jessee talks about her connections with Steampunk and its acceptance of difference. Her documentary works to challenge the normal/abnormal binary by drawing on performance artists like Steam Powered Giraffe and reflects on the strength she draws from Steampunk as an online community. 

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Arrik talks about identity: "being gay is part of who I am, but it's not all of who I am." We need "room to grow," he explains. We shouldn't reduce ourselves to one aspect or quality.

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Gabby talk about what her dreads mean to her and how to negotiate their complex symbolism. 

My connection to her work and its representation of ethnic and cultural identity (despite my whiteness and baldness) may have to do with a universal yearning for freedom or rebelliousness. 

It’s also possible that the ethic of freedom she describes is something I sense is lacking from the teaching of composition.  

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Am I Allowed to Feel this Way?

What does it mean to identify with student writing? To be visibly affected? 

In documenting my affective reactions as a reader (and viewer and listener) of student work, I mean to do more than merely feel. 

My reading of their work feels reparative. Our conversations feel sustaining. 

I'm reminded of Eve Sedgwick's description of reparative relationships: "It is one another immediately, one another as the present fullness of a becoming whose arc may extend no further, whom we each must learn best to apprehend, fulfill, and bear company" (149). 

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DocumentaryProject2015.docx

This is the prompt I use for the documentary project. We compose most of the project using phones, classroom computers, and whatever devices students already have access to. We focus typically on a specific person, place, or object. Then we use Tumblr to share our projects. We tag posts #osumdocpro2015 (or, last year, 2014). 

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What's My Role?

"We need to develop a theory of reading student texts which takes into account our reading of the students themselves, of our own unconscious motivations and associations, and, finally, of the interactive and dialectical nature of the teacher-student relationship" (Tobin 335).

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Spigelman challenges the narrative/argument and expressivist/social binaries, suggesting academic argument would benefit by further blending these genres. She provides ideas for evaluating uses of the personal in student academic writing. However, she only seems to imagine print/alphabetic text. My students’ use (and my ecstatic reading) of Tumblr further blurs the public and personal, the experiential and academic. Indeed, my own experience using Tumblr to build this project speaks to the enjoyment (and challenge) of showcasing student work, featuring student voices, and analyzing my own personal responses to those same student writers.

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Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

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Acknowledgements

Brown, Arrik. “A Story about Three College Students.” Documentary Project. Tumblr. Oct. 2014. Web. 16 Mar. 2015.

Lee, Jessee. “Static Perception.” Documentary Project. Tumblr. Oct. 2014. Web. 16 Mar. 2015.

Spigelman, Candace. Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse. Carbondale: SIUP, 2004. Print. 

Tobin, Lad. "Reading Students, Reading Ourselves: Revising the Teacher's Role in the Writing Class." College English 53.3 (1991): 333-48. JSTOR. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.

Woodberry, Gabrielle. “Loc Nation.” Documentary Project. Tumblr. Oct. 2014. Web. 16 Mar. 2015.

Thanks, too, to my wonderful spouse, Athena Kinney, who supports me in too many ways to cite; 

Colleagues and friends, Susan Delagrange and Carolyn Skinner, who encourage and support teacherly scholarship and scholarly teaching; 

Past and hopefully future collaborators who share my interests in the personal and digital media, Sally Chandler and Debbie Williams;

Writing center consultant and Tumblr expert, Ashley Van Hesteren; 

And my tech guru without whom student conversations would not have been recorded, saved, and edited and without whom I would not be able to do the fun part of my job, David Au.