Born-Digital Badassery

In a way, I am a born-digital scholar. I did not “cross-over” to the internet or public discourse. I have developed my academic and writing career within the internet. I have never considered my scholarship separate from the public sphere and that has worked out for me. Love it or hate it, my work is better because I argue online, hash out half-baked theories in public, and constantly consider the effect of my research questions on real people and real social problems. That is how I ended up a sociologist with a hundred thousand followers, a National Book Award finalist with a podcast, and an essayist that writes across almost every medium.

I have been writing for an “audience” for almost 15 years now. My first public audience was a discussion board for Def Poetry Jam. Seriously. I posted very bad spoken word poetry and judged the very bad spoken word poetry of others.

I missed MySpace because I had a job by then. I was just a skosh too old. I did not have a Facebook account for the first year or so it was an option because I went to the wrong kind of college. There was a real prestige hierarchy of .edu email addresses for a long while over there. I locked into LiveJournal because it was democratic and it was functionally a public diary.

The first time I joined Twitter, I could not figure it out. I lost my first, best username (“Tressie”) because I never logged back in. A year or two later, I rejoined as @tressiemcphd because my Blogger account introduced auto-posting. I eventually migrated that blog to wordpress and…