L. Andrew Cooper's Horrific Scribblings

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.