Who are you?
I’m the author of The Final System, a near future technothriller about AI, due out in May from 47North. I’m an academic librarian who teaches about information literacy—including, but not limited to, AI literacy. And I’m a husband and father.
What is this?
So blogs are back, huh? I never liked the Twitter/X era of social media. (Actually, I don’t like social media at all, but that’ll have to wait for another post on this, um, pretty-much-a-social-media site.) Partly that’s because I’m naturally verbose when I write. But it’s also because ideas need room to breathe.
I read a long post on Substack yesterday that I pretty much entirely disagreed with. But the length of the post allowed me to engage with that author’s ideas in a far more human way than if they had been expressed in 280 characters. LLMs not withstanding, language is how we humans primarily communicate, how we express ourselves—including expressing our common humanity—to each other. I disagreed with that post, but I appreciated the human behind it, and they helped me understand why they thought that way.
As an academic librarian with a keen interest in information literacy, I’ve viewed with dismay the tendency of the Twitter-sphere (including each "I’m Twitter for enlightened people” copycat) to reduce complex and nuanced ideas to headlines and outrage. Twitter is one of the many ways our technology has been interacting in unforeseen ways with our humanity—and not, I would argue, for the better.
That intersection, the one between us and our technology, is something I’m very interested in, both professionally and personally. I’ll be exploring some of that here.
All that is to say: hey, I like blogs! But don’t worry; I’m not gonna get all heavy or pretentious on you here. There are enough pundits out there with strong political opinions. I’m not interested in that.
So what can you expect when you subscribe?
1. Infrequent posts
At least, I hope so, because my severely limited free time really needs to be spent on writing fiction, dadgummit!
2. Stuff about writing and the publication process
When my book is published on May 5, that’ll represent a major life goal checked off, and a major milestone in my writing. But in many ways I’m still a beginner, learning as I go. Sometimes I might think other people might find what I (think) I’m learning interesting.
3. Musings about information literacy, technology, and humanity
Like I said, I’m fascinated by the messy intersection between the information we are surrounded with, which is usually delivered to us via technology, and the ways we, as humans, act and interact.
4. No paid level
Ain’t nobody gonna pay me for that, so I won’t even ask.
So yeah! Join me and follow along!