Through the power of the Web, and because of the power of the Web, I force anonymity on my communications students. We use pseudonyms and hashtags to create virtual classrooms of masked strangers. It’s a privacy exercise and a creative exercise too. Some take it seriously, others not so much. Some avatars are easily revealed, while others are as strong as a spy’s.
I’ve retweeted a joke a few times now over the semesters. I post the latest movie poster from one of the cinematic universes in Hollywood—for The Avengers or X-Men or even Star Wars—and I say some version of “that’s us,” that’s our class.
It’s a masquerade ball in The Interactive Courses.
Sometimes though, I teach on the ground, which just adds another layer to the art and artifice. We meet in person in a physical classroom, yet the students remain disguised to the world online. At the beginning of my first class this past Wednesday, I thought it would be hard to explain this inconsistency to my new audience of lifelong learning students.
Then one student broke out his personal portable router and another asked about using her Virtual Private Network (VPN) and I realized the issues are the same, regardless of the audience or location.
The more I teach this course and refine my lectures and modules—and the more they expand with each new student body and each new day of the world experimenting online—the more I realize I’m teaching students lessons of balance more than I’m giving them lessons of practice.
I already wrote how best practices only get students so far. What’s the best practice when the lesson is about privacy versus communication? Privacy is important. It’s even dangerous to give up. Yet you can’t communicate honestly without revealing something.
Think of the situation. Students walk into my classrooms—virtual or brick and mortar—with avatars and firewalls, yet all of them have something else in addition to the tight security.
They have something to say. They have books, manuscripts, memoirs, services, prototypes, stories, works of art, galleries of images, and ideas. They want to learn how to connect with an audience, not just professionally, but personally.
No one sees the irony.
They want all this privacy and yet they want to share their work. I understand it’s the flow they want to control. They want to regulate what honesty gets out and what honesty stays hidden, but that’s not always possible.
The viral virus is consistently a good metaphor for ideas because if you really want to communicate with the world, you want to infect it. It is a biological act. You must contaminate others—it’s a power struggle to be sure—but you must also let go of what you create as others contaminate you in reverse.
Authors who change their audiences’ thinking also find themselves changed by those audiences. Creation requires both parties to yield, and both are afraid of how they might change.
We will never settle this tension, this paradox of conversation, this interactivity. We want to control the narrative, but to share our story and absorb the stories of others is to give up control. How much you infect and are yourself infected is not solved by any best practice.
It is a personal decision of how much you risk and how much you don’t.