The idea of a web presence troubles me, which is my official excuse for not having had much of one despite studying and teaching about webbish things for many years. Web presence of the sort I mean goes beyond passive mentions on the odd site connected to professional and personal endeavors, and it goes stale in far less time than has passed since I last maintained my own sites. This troublesome presence involves active participation in the communities and lives maintained both in connection to offline doings and in the absence of such connections, i.e., in pure virtuality, whatever that means.I don’t object to an existence that diverges from the physical while still implicating it. The trouble is one of intellectual real estate. Real presence, or immaterial presence that matters, seems to call for a partitioning of the brain, a dedication of space for which I seem to be at a loss. In other words, web presence is just one more thing to obsess over, and do I really need more obsessions? Probably.
By Andrew
L. Andrew Cooper specializes in the provocative, scary, and strange. Works include book-length stories Noir Falling, Alex's Escape, The Middle Reaches, Records of the Hightower Massacre [with Maeva Wunn], Crazy Time, Burning the Middle Ground, and Descending Lines; short story collections Leaping at Thorns, Peritoneum, and Stains of Atrocity; poetry collection The Great Sonnet Plot of Anton Tick; non-fiction Gothic Realities and Dario Argento; co-edited fiction anthologies Imagination Reimagined and Reel Dark; and the co-edited textbook Monsters. He has also written 35 award-winning screenplays. After studying literature and film at Harvard and Princeton, he used his Ph.D. to teach about favorite topics from coast to coast in the United States. He now focuses on writing and lives with his husband in North Hollywood, California.
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