Desperately Seeking Salem

Every teacher will tell you that one of the boons of the profession is the vitality of the classroom.

You can have a real clunker of a class, with disinterested students and hours that feel like days, and then you can have a class that just bubbles with energy and enthusiasm.

The latter kind of class really sustains me. I leave them boiling over with might. (Then I go home and try to get to sleep when I really should have used that mojo to just keep working…)

I’ve had two of those mighty classes now at Clockworks Cafe, and that has everything to do with the excitement that people in this community have about blogging, whatever their current knowledge or abilities with the medium.

Our first free class there became an exercise in the limits pushed by the new journalism as we all struggled with the presence of one silent camera (thanks, David!).

This last one? Well, this one was all about what happens when you put your name behind what you say.

What does it mean to blog as a person and not as an anonymous entity?

One of the students in my class was interested in writing a blog to share her political views, since she had already accumulated quite a few readers of her opinions through the email list that she was serving. This student was intent on staying anonymous to protect herself from the evil whispers of her neighbors and her fellow Salemites.

My response? Don’t do it. If you can’t put your name behind what you say, then don’t say it in a forum that everybody in the world could possibly have access to (disregarding the digital divide).

I’ve paid the price for my comments in a very real way before. Months ago I made some snarky comments about the closing of the scrapbook store on Hawthorne Boulevard. I don’t hate scrapbooking per se, I just hate the idea that you have to buy a bunch of Leeza Gibbons junk to scrapbook. (For the record, I have three from my days living in Germany).

Then one day I was hanging out near the dessert case at Christo’s, holding my baby in a sling, when I was approached by a woman who pretty much told me off for being so mean.

“Those people lost their livelihood!” she said.

“It’s just an opinion,” I told her.

She was actually pretty nice about it. (Strangely, she thought she had read the comments in the local paper. That’s another lesson in blogging. If your site looks good, people might think you’re a legitimate news organization…).

But back to the idea of anonymity. What bothered me most about my student’s desire to go anonymous was her fear that her comments on her blog, if connected to her name, might affect her children and how they are received in Salem.

So my answer to her is this. If you want a blog to serve an audience of people who already know you and your opinion, sure, run an anonymous blog. But if you want a successful blog that engages people who don’t agree with you as well as the ones that do, readers who would likely refuse to have anything to do with text that might as well have been written by a random Internet troll (and this is most readers), then put your name where you mouth is.

And then be prepared to stick your foot in it.

Mark your calendars. Clockworks Cafe has put out its roster of classes (PDF) for its free summer session.

I’ve had a lot of interest in my blogging class — we’ll be doing the same intro to blogging at the cafe on July 12 at 6:00 p.m.

See you there!

Just to be clear, I won’t be there to walk you through the nitty gritty of working with WordPress or blogger. This class is all about engaging an audience and conceiving a successful blog project. If there is enough interest, I’ll likely be offering a four-week class on the same subject next fall (for a fee, of course).

Now that I’m done with self-promotion, time to rant. I’ve been hearing through some sources that some of these free classes have been woefully under-attended.

How under-attended?

Some classes have had zero people show up.

ZERO!

Now, you can look at this a few ways. You could blame the gorgeous sunny weather for enticing people to barbecues and late days at the pool with the kids. You could say you didn’t know — but then, if you’re reading this, you probably did. You could also guess that in the marketplace of ideas, not all of the classes are as in-demand as others.

Or, you could be as cynical and say, as we heard last night, “That place might actually be too cool to fly in Salem.”

So I’d like to suggest something. If there is something you want to learn — say, SEO, from Rob McGuire! — get in touch with the people at Clockworks and let them know where your interest lies. That way, the class offerings can be more market-driven and we can have a packed cultural center.

In other words, Blogging: Yes! Kazoos… maybe not?

Lots of expertise in Salem, but there’s no need to be an autodidact.