Using new technologies to continue age-old dialogues.
“Why did you come here?”
The erudite Alan Harvey, Director of Stanford University Press, poses this question during my job interview. To my ears, the question sounds nearly as chiding in his English accent, asked in earnest, as it did when I asked it of myself a week ago, after moving to Silicon Valley.
Here’s the context: I’m applying for a job with the Press, which Alan describes as one of the few remaining publishing houses in a state whose dot-com bubble gutted the industry of much of its human capital before subsequently bursting. He points something else out to me, something of which I am already acutely aware: I hail from an unlikely but robust mini-mecca of indie publishing: the Twin Cities. So, why would I—a newly minted English major—move to a valley so tech-oriented that it takes its handle from the computer chip?
This is the usual tension of tech versus text, is it not? The trope has been so frequently deployed so as to be a cliché at this point. Journalists and Op-Ed columnists publicly dissecting the utility of print culture at the dawn of a digital age would have you believe that conventional books, academic dissertations, the humanities and liberal arts studies are rendered obsolete in a world where binary code surpasses the alphabet as the most common way of transcribing our communications and nuance and complexity are sacrificed to the 140-character-limit caprices of Twitter.
But is all this partisanship really necessary?
Ultimately both mediums—from scholarly tomes to Apple iPhones—are geared to connect minds and generate conversations. After four years at a liberal arts college something that left a deep impression on me was how the ideas that percolate in the academic mindshare have a way of guiding tomorrow’s daily reality. They have the power to shape the way our political leaders think (Mearsheimer), recalibrate the way we perceive our society, its subjects and its structures (de Beauvoir, Said), and draw attention to emerging challenges, or alternately, to problems too long ignored.
Far from undermining these conversations, technology presents an unprecedented opportunity to add dynamism to academic discourse. Social media, for example, collapses traditional barriers to access (class, race, geography)—a trend aptly noted by this recent San Francisco Chronicle op-ed—making rapid dissemination of new ideas possible and broadening their purview by inviting people into the conversation who could never access it before.
This is why I wanted to be a part of SUP and why I was excited about this new role in particular, a role that embraces social media and its possibilities. I wanted to not only take part in these conversations, but broaden them. (At least, that’s the answer I wish I had been cogent enough to offer during my interview. As it was, I parsed together a few emphatic statements about really liking books and left the interview exasperated with myself, nerves jangling and fingers crossed).
I’m thrilled to join the press, where my role (appropriately) lies at the cross-section of technology and publishing. In addition to handling digital distribution to University Press Scholarship Online and tuning the Press’ online presence on the website, I’ll also be tweeting, blogging and facebooking on behalf of the Press, our authors and the multitude of ideas with which they engage the world. I hope you visit us on Facebook and Twitter and join in on our conversation.
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