This week, between workouts and the return to teaching, I have been drafting a post about my newly founded obsession with tumblr. I should get to publish that later this evening, but I wanted to quickly point out the site inspired me to create my tumblr account in the first place: Downton Abbeyoncé.
I’ve been a Downton Fan since last March when I first watched the series on my iPhone and while I might not know everything about Beyonce, I know enough to say the combo of these two are brilliant, fabulous and hilarious.
Here are my favorite creations:
and
If you do go subscribe to this tumblr, be warned that some images may contain Season 2 spoilers, but you can quickly remedy that by tuning in to Downton on PBS every Sunday night!
When I was leaving the gym yesterday I overheard an instructor saying how packed the classes will be once all the students come back to town. We were already a group of 50 but the number is bound to rise since we get two waves of new years’ resolution-ers here due to the academic calendar. Classes [university, not gym] don’t start for us until January 23 thanks to the “Winterm” session.
So it hit me: Why not put the same amount of effort into my blogging as I do at the gym in turbokick and zumba? I average 6 classes a week there but only managed 2 unique blog posts here last semester? WTF?!? Although I did sneak in a few posts over at the graduate course blog, how can I even call myself a blog researcher? Yes, the Catholic guilt crosses over to academia quite nicely, doesn’t it?
The thing is, I have wanted to blog about some new teaching methods and reflections, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t like to go public much anymore. Being on the tenure track means I’m constantly evaluated, and while I’ve received “Above” rankings every year and, so far, have successfully jumped through a number of Promotion hoops, I haven’t wanted to jeopardize things, either by accidentally ranting about students and committee work or expressing my honest opinions on the political scene in Wisconsin.
The fault also lies in social media. Even though my Twitter updates aren’t protected anymore, those posts are more dialogic as are my Facebook posts where comments and “likes” offer me instant response. In fact, now that Facebook won’t be importing the links to these blog posts [their effort to get users to post Notes], who knows how much traffic this blog will receive. But there are things I want to post about…things that show the world who I am and what my interests are.
Primarily, those things are pop culture-y, so it’s a good thing I’ll be attending the national Popular Culture Association conference this April. I’ll be on the Virtual Identities and Self-Promoting panel, but more on that later.
Til then, I have tons of tv & music things to post because they’ve shaped my 2011 & made me smile, none more than this LMFAO performance.
Battery is dying on the laptop, but you can expect to hear more from me soon cuz “I-I-I-I work out” and blog this year!
SPEED: the Internet inspires speediness; it is one of the key features of Internet communication. And this speed inspires certain behaviors and qualities.
REACH: partner of speed and one of the axioms of communication technology. Digitized discourse travels quickly and it also travels widely to reach thousands, even millions, quickly!
ANONYMITY: sometimes you really never know who is at the other end of an electronic text. In cyberspace, the identity behind what you see floating on the screen is not always what you imagine.
INTERACTIVITY: online communications technologies allow you to talk back. Interactivity inspires us to consider—access to the inner circle [everyone can be part of the discussion and step through the screen], capacity to talk back [form communities of common interest], a two-way presence online [the lure of an audience of millions], ecommerce and connections to the customer [ways for customers to interact with each other and with customer service], privacy [more interactive a site, the greater the potential for privacy problems]
I mention this tonight to call attention to the first two traits. The speed with which news of Steve Jobs death has spread across Twitter and Facebook is astounding. And many of the “RIP” messages and memorials exemplify the reach he and Apple products have had over the years.
Apple.com now looks like this:
with the following call on http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/: “If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email rememberingsteve@apple.com.”
Google and Wired already have tributes up as well, but I’m most interested in seeing what Apple does with the emails it receives. Online memorials & crisis communications are very interesting to me…I’ll write more on this as the news emerges.
I’m in London right now and that’s me at the Sherlock Holmes museum.
I’m glad I took the time to do that yesterday because I won’t have much free time to run around today. Why? Because I’m STILL formatting my paper for the Oxford Internet Institute. [That's why I'm in the UK and I can't wait for the conference to start on Wednesday. Fellow SDP 2007 alums and I present on a panel called "Early Career Scholars and Web 2.0."]
Let me clarify. The paper has been written for some time now, but with all of the electronic sources, e.g. blog posts, blog comments, wiki edits, listserv messages, emails, I’m pulling my hair out. Of course, I did this all already for my dissertation, but I’ve had to switch to the Harvard Reference System. That’s ok, I know we all need to adapt to different style guides from time to time, but it’s especially frustrating when articles actually published in the journal are different from what the “Instructions for Authors” document says. This site has helped me most.
Sigh. Blame it on the jetlag.
It’ll be finished and uploaded to the Social Science Research Network in an hour or so, but I needed to vent.
P.S. Don’t get me started on how, as an autoethnographic research study, I will prepare the version that removes “all information identifying the author.”
With the new semester quickly approaching, I knew I needed to get back to blogging, especially since I’ll be requiring blog posts, as opposed to discussion board posts, of my grad students in ENGL 745, Communication Strategies for Emerging Media. More on that later…
When I saw this tweet from @blogher, I felt my prayers were answered:
“Before this morning, I only had ONE of these. Not anymore! A Blogger’s List of Must-Have iPhone Apps: http://t.co/BW6h7Ba”
So here I am, blogging from the WordPress app! I’m not sure how formatting and hyperlinking will work exactly, but let this serve as my test post with more to come!
Kickstarter is a site I first heard about via Twitter from Amanda Palmer and her hubby Neil Gaiman and now there’s an amazing NOLA project that needs your help to reach its goal:
What is Kickstarter? Here’s how their FAQ describes how they fund creative projects:
We believe that:
• A good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide.
• A large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.
Kickstarter is powered by a unique all-or-nothing funding method where projects must be fully-funded or no money changes hands.
This will be my first kickstarter pledge, and I know it won’t be my last!
I know I need to do a total overhaul of this site…I’m trying to figure out if it should focus on teaching and become more of a portfolio than a blog, but I’m also waiting to hear about a grant that I applied for. If I get that grant, my dissertation research will be back in the spotlight. Given that it’s on NOLA Bloggers, it would make sense to keep this a place to reflect on that and link to my NOLA blogger peeps (and tweeps).
However, given the state of our nation [don't get me started on the state of my current cheesy state], no one has heard from the grant agency. See here for the most information I’ve been able to find, with my favorite sentiment being, “It’s aggravating, to say the least, but my summer stipend application is hardly the most important thing hanging in the balance as our Congressional leaders play politics with the future of this country.” True, but I still want them to show me the money, honey! And sooner rather than later!
While finding that relieved my anxiety, this NYTimes piece on blogs waning relieved me more. I am not alone in thinking that Facebook and Twitter are better spaces to receive feedback AKA instant gratification. As the article states, “Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.” That is exactly what I’ve experienced over the past few years and I think it will only continue.
However, I don’t think I’ll ever abandon this space. Like I said, it just needs a new focus and I’m thinking the summer will bring that, whether it be in the form of quick book reviews, travel pictures, or new teaching and research projects.
Ever since I was 4 years old, I’ve had a white cat in my midst. The first was Max, who was deaf. Then came Duchess. Then the queen of them all, Trina, who after 13 long years of living in NOLA sadly didn’t survive Hurricane Katrina.
After Trina died, it took me awhile to adopt one of my own, but when I took a chance [and a long drive] to the Tampa SPCA [which isn't in Tampa at all but Largo, FL] and saw Sweetness, I knew I had to have her. Sweetness is a diva, and I love her. I’ve even made her into a LOLcat:
She’s a much better traveller than Trina. My parents took her to Mississippi for the summer of 2007 while Andy and I eloped/honeymooned in Australia, and when we moved to Wisconsin, she flew on the plane with me. Airport security was interesting to say the least.
***
Now that we have a house of our own, we have more space to share. And while it didn’t make Sweetness happy at all, after browsing the E.C. Humane Society webpage, we couldn’t resist adopting Vito [the grey] in February of 2009 and then Tommy [another all white] in September of that same year. You can see all three in this video. Not sure why YouTube uploaded without audio, but oh well. The point is you see how athletic my Tommy was:
He was only 5 years old, so you can imagine our surprise on Saturday night, after a full morning of running around and afternoon napping, we found him unresponsive on the couch. Poor darling. We still don’t know what exactly happened, but when we took his body to the vet on Sunday morning, she said that he in no way suffered. He went in his sleep, and as my friend told me, “Tommy is gone to kitty heaven, he has many friends there, he is watching you via telescope and hoping you are not too sad.”
As you know from previous blog posts this year, we have little Dexter now who is still a goofy kitten who chases his tail, and that has offered us much needed joy during this sad time. It’s weird to say, but the house feels empty now with only 3 cats in it, probably because Tommy was the most curious of them all and followed us everywhere. We miss him so much and finally today I think the other cats started to notice, which breaks my heart even more. But I will always remember his silly bathing poses and love of his brothers.
Naturally, Sweetness wanted nothing to do with him…her loss!
Let’s try this blogging during the semester again…
This Spring I’m teaching 4 online courses and 1 hybrid, which meets twice a week but video of those meetings is “captured” so I can send a link to the online students. It’s my third time with this system and I think I’m getting it down.
I think.
Instead of assuming student behaviors when finding and viewing the links, I’ve made it clear from the get go that I’m aware my practices might differ from others in the department [many of these students have taken classes that utilize the ECHO captures for a number of semesters]. So in addition to posting the link to the captures under the LINKS tab in D2L, I email them with it as well, offering context for what was covered and what to pay attention to for next time. What’s most important is that they don’t delete these emails! I know it can be annoying to have to look outside of the course management system for stuff, but email isn’t going away as far as I’m concerned, and the more literate one becomes by creating folders, using filters, and flagging “to do” items, the better!
My confidence with teaching this seemingly “split” course has also grown as a result of my Directed Study student’s research project on student and teacher perceptions of the system. Indeed, I’m hyperaware of its ins and outs these days. I have to review and send over his IRB paperwork today too, so let me hurry up with this blog post.
The theme I’ve chosen for this hybrid course, which I neglected to mention earlier is an undergraduate course in Rhetoric/Style/Argument, is truth. As I did last year, I started with showing the SNL clip of John McCain approving ads to get students seeing why so many people define rhetoric in a negative way, as lying, manipulation, etc. But this time I also showed this interview between Stephen Colbert and Sherry Turkle to see if my students could identify the argument(s) AND if they believed there was a clear winner:
I’ve purchased Turkle’s book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other to be able to review her data and thus assess her longer argument, so I’ll try to post a review of that in a few weeks. While I know she was dealing with the character of Colbert, the first time I watched their interview I felt like he won. What do you think?
And will you leave a comment here, via Facebook, or Twitter rather than come tell me your answer in person?
After the PBS showing of Stephen Sondheim’s birthday concert I began composing an “open letter” to this great man, brilliant lyricist, and musical genius. I’m still writing that and will share soon, but until then, enjoy this interview with him on the Colbert Report!
Whenever I start leaving comments on my students’ blogs, it takes much longer than I planned because I start searching for links to share with them.
Recently they were assigned the following under the heading of “AGENCY, AUTHORITY & TRUST”:
• Qualman, E. 2009. Chapter 2 in Socialnomics.
• Paine Schofield, C. B., & Joinson, A. N. (2008). Privacy, trust, and disclosure online. In A. Barak (Ed.), Psychological aspects of cyberspace: Theory, research, applications (pp. 13-31). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Albrechtslund, A. (2008) “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance” in First Monday. Available Online: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2142/1949
Recommended:
• Zittrain, J. “Meeting the Risks of Generativity: Privacy 2.0” in The Future of the Internet & How to Stop It. Available Online: http://yupnet.org/zittrain/archives/20
• Caplan, S. (2005) Social Skill Account of Problematic Internet Use. Journal of Communication 721-730. 55(4)
Their responses to these readings have been great, thoughtful, and engaging, and they made me think of these two videos also on the topic of social networking and digital footprints, one more lighthearted than the other:
I leave you with those for tonight because I’ve got 10 more students’ blogs to read, but wanted to post before I forgot!
This one should have been the first because it discusses and then lists all the things that have been keeping me distracted from blogging, but oh well…
Now that I’m past midterm, I have to say that this semester is flying by! October was a blur of grading 40+ freshman papers every week. Yes, I said EVERY WEEK. Silly me thought that repeating the same reader response/research reaction to various chapters in New New Media would be a good idea. I probably should have spaced the first 3 of 4 essays [750-words each] out better, but I was pleased to see the majority of students improve from essay to essay.
What pleased me most were their group presentations and collaboratively written papers. While I think a few students would prefer not to work in groups [I was one of these students as an undergrad], 9/10 of these papers were very well written, fully researched, and properly formatted in APA.
That’s another thing. I’ve switched to using APA style this semester, which has me scrambling to various online resources to double-check everything. Most helpful has been this UW-Madison site and the PDF Documenting Sources in APA Style: 2010 Update
The reasons I switched from MLA to APA are simple: the Learning Community I’m teaching in is linked with an ICT course that already uses APA and the graduate school at UW-Stout requires all Master’s theses to be formatted in APA. Soon we will be ordering all graduate faculty and incoming graduate students hard copies of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition, but until then, the online resources will do.
Keep in mind that all of what I just listed about grading was only related to my 2 face-to-face courses. Total, I’m teaching 5 this semester…
My online 101 students also wrote individually-authored researched responses and group papers on New New Media, but that class has dwindled to 13 active participants.
I’ve already written about the graduate course this evening, and I do have ideas about incorporating their technology literacy narratives into a journal article to answer this call, but here’s a laundry list of other things that have kept me busy:
submitting a proposal to grants.gov for an NEH Summer Stipend {fingers crossed!}
flying to NOLA for a 40-hour stay to rejoice in Matthew and Mandy’s wedding
convincing fellow Tech Comm faculty to road trip to De Pere, WI in June to attend THATCampLAC {Yes, we know we’re not a liberal arts school, but given this meeting’s location and our recent addition of a DH concentration, I think it’s a great opportunity to learn from others who “must build stronger off-campus networks” as well as discuss technology and pedagogy}
I was recently awarded a $100 Emerging Technology grant to explore my use of blogs in the graduate course, ENGL 745-Communication Strategies for Emerging Media. If you recall, I also earned one of these grants to explore using Twitter in ENGL 101-Freshman Composition, with the final report posted on this site under Twitter Research.
Below are excerpts from my grant application:
During the Fall 2010 semester I have required my graduate students (ENGL 745-Communication Strategies for Emerging Media) to maintain a blog as a reading journal. I had originally thought to have one course blog where we all contributed, but I realized there may be repeat entries on the assigned readings, so I opted for students to create individual blog spaces so they can share their responses and comment upon each other’s posts. The added value of writing in a public space such as a blog is that students need to consider an audience wider than their instructor and peers.
Given that our Masters of Science program in Technical and Professional Communication is in its first year, my ultimate intent is for these graduate students to include posts about other courses they are taking this semester and/or continue to blog throughout their time in the program.
As a blogger, Internet researcher, and teacher, my career is focused on engaging students and remaining relevant. With this said, I hope to draft a chapter-length paper that analyzes the reach of these graduate student bloggers’ public discourse and the evolution of their identities as young academics. Based on their end-of-the-semester reflections, I also plan to speculate my future pedagogical use of a blog space over a D2L-based discussion forum.
Because I am also a faculty member in the newly revised undergraduate Technical Communication program, this project will greatly aid me when teaching courses devoted to digital humanities, not to mention enhance discussions about conducting research in virtual spaces.
I look forward to sharing my research findings with those here at UW-Stout interested in digital storytelling, public writing, and social software; doing so will let me generate new connections both in my home Department of English and across campus.
Here are the titles I ordered with the grant money:
Because Digital Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Online and Multimedia Environments
Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press
Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters
Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies)
Digital Literacy for Technical Communication: 21st Century Theory and Practice
Anyone have other titles to suggest for future reference?
So not only do the Pet Shop Boys have a great new compilation out, with a fabulous single called “Together,” the video for it features everything I love: waltzing girls in petticoats, hip-hop dancing boys, folk-dancing moves in a club, and a rehearsal to performance motif!
Not to mention a bench-sitting Chris and dog-on-leash standing Neil. SIGH…SWOON…SIGH
I’ll try to give an update on my teaching, grant possibilities, and Dexter kitteh later, but I’m swamped with freshman papers to grade before I head to NOLA for a wedding this weekend. Til I do “get my blog on,” enjoy the brilliance that is Stephen Fry.
As I mentioned in this post, ever since I started the 4/4 teaching load I’ve neglected my blog, offering only embedded video and a quick comment or two and rarely a “long thought.”
This semester is different though because I’m finally requiring UW-Stout students to blog, specifically my graduate students and my 1 directed study student, so I’d like to be able to lead by example.
In fact, I’ve been talking blogs with the 101 students too as we work through the chapters in New New Media, but they are only required to microblog via Twitter. This post isn’t really about that exercise, but in case anyone is curious, here are the guidelines I give them:
Whenever reading is assigned, students will be required to post at least 2 questions or comments about that text to their timeline. Shared at the beginning of each class period, we will
reference these tweets as a means to generate discussion.
While not required, I encourage you to use this microblogging social network as an informal journal about technology, as a way to communicate with each other, and as a quick way to ask me questions when outside of class.
As your teacher, I will use the site to post announcements, extra credit opportunities, and share links relevant to our course focus on social media trends, so it is important that you check in on a daily basis.
I have to say, I’ve been impressed with the questions/comments they post at the beginning of class as they often take us through the entire 55-minute class period. FYI only 1 student continues to tweet after class…but I digress.
This post is about how all of this thinking about and requiring student blogs has pushed me to step back and return to Jill Walker’s definition and to also think more about what going public with reader responses means in terms of audience, format, and design.
If you check out the ENGL-745 blogroll on the side you can see my students’ responses to readings such as “Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy,” “The Social Media Release as a Corporate Communications Tool for Bloggers,” and “Learning with Weblogs: Enhancing Cognitive and Social Knowledge Construction.” Nearly every grad student was either hesitant or curious about blogs, and only 1 had maintained a blog already, so offering these readings early on about the use of blogs for educational and workplace purposes prompted them to reconsider the medium they had only stereotyped in the past. While there are still a few skeptics, one thing for certain is that they are all realizing how whitespace, images, link, and embedded video can add value to their responses.
Actually, another thing I’ve realized in reading their responses is how many of these MS in Technical and Professional Communication students are also teachers, so I’m glad to have started this course with an emphasis on technological literacy. I’d assumed more would be tech writers in non-academic settings, which is unfamiliar territory to me, but this way we can all reflect upon our own teaching/writing/reading/researching with new technologies and then work our way into the “Work and Play in a User-Generated World” section.
I really hope these grad students continue to blog throughout their coursework because I know how beneficial it became to my research and how connected I became to other academic bloggers, but I can’t and won’t force anything. If they do continue, though, I hope they make their blog space their own.
All week I’ve had a list of stuff to blog about, primarily how I’ve been teaching with and talking about blogs to undergrad and grad students, but a grant application distracted me.
And then I met this guy.
In brief, my fabulous friend Fabulous Lorraine found this lil guy Friday morning while walking the dog. I “innocently” went over to have lunch and meet the dude, but long story short, brought him home.
His name is Dexter; he’s 4-5 weeks old. The vet weighed him in at 14 oz. on Friday, but I think he’s put on a couple this weekend, heehee.
I can guarantee many more pictures, but here are a few from Photobooth.
A major benefit to being done with the dissertation is that I can pay more attention to pop culture. Otherwise stated, I don’t have to feel guilty for watching television.
I’ve already mentioned my love of Don Draper and MadMen, but there are all sorts of shows that I’ve recently discovered. Thanks to DVDs and Netflix’s “Instant Queue” I have access to entire seasons at once. These shows include Burn Notice, Boston Legal, Veronica Mars, The Big Bang Theory, Criminal Minds, and True Blood. Thanks to the internets, I even won Season 3 DVDs of Burn Notice just by leaving a comment on this post. It was offline for awhile but I’m happy it’s back up because I want to use it as an example of “if you answer the assignment, you will be rewarded.”
The most intense show I’ve started watching this year is Dexter. Again, thanks to Netflix we quickly went through Seasons 1-3. I remember reading all sorts of tweets about Season 4, but didn’t seek it out. Once I heard about its dramatic finale, I asked around and was pointed to a site, which shall remain nameless because I’m not sure it’s all together “kosher,” where hubby and I watched all 12 episodes over a 48-hour period. Yes, it’s that good and John Lithgow is that creepy!
With that said, this will be the first season of Dexter where I’ll have to wait week-to-week for a new episode. That might have worked for me with True Blood this summer, but I’m not looking forward to it this time around!
This trailer alone sends chills up my spine
but this conversation with the writers makes me all the more impatient!
I’ve been teaching for 1 week now, and much of my planning and reading for my ENG 101 class has been related to literacy, particularly “What it means to be literate” nowadays. Teaching on a laptop campus has its challenges, but the best part is projection in every classroom. That way, I can show videos and ask students to livetweet responses/comments/questions OR I can ask them to close their laptops and, even if for just a few minutes, focus on only 1 screen.
We don’t get into the YouTube chapter of our textbook New New Media for a couple weeks, but I’ll be interested in hearing how students seek, watch, produce, and incorporate video into their day to day lives, whether for learning or entertainment. I wonder how many will already be familiar with TED and/or other video sites like hulu or dailymotion.
Do you have any video sites that you visit more frequently than YouTube?
In case you haven’t noticed, ever since I started my job at UW-Stout in 2008 I’ve hardly blogged. The dissertation [on blogs of all things] consumed me and even though I defended in March, formatted in April, skipped the Tampa graduation in May, and finally received the diploma in the mail in July, I took the summer off from anything over 140-characters.
Sure, I traveled to NYC, TX, and Italy, and could write volumes on those trips. I even taught a summer course and scored thousands of AP essay exams in June, but I just couldn’t bring myself back to reading blogs until a few weeks ago.
Now, though, I have some fresh new research and publication ideas, which I will post on later this week, so beware: I’m totally throwing myself back in to blogging!
It helps that every course I’m teaching this Fall has a technology emphasis:
ENGL 101 is using the textbook New New Media and while these students aren’t required to blog, we will be relying on Twitter [in class only] to generate questions and reactions of assigned readings. 1 section of the 3 is dedicated to a Learning Community called the Google Generation, and I’m excited to see how these students connect our reading and writing to that assigned in the Information and Communication Technologies course they go to immediately after mine.
ENGL 495 is a brand new 2-semester capstone course. I have 1 very diligent student, and this semester we’re focusing on research methods with the final project being a proposal and pilot study. I’m having him purchase Research Confidential and Internet Inquiry as well as read a bunch of PDFs that either discuss methodology or put mixed methods into practice.
ENGL 745 is a brand new graduate course in our brand new Master of Science in Technical and Professional Communication program. Students are reading Socialnomics as well as 40+ journal articles/book chapters [including some from Always On, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and Convergence Culture], all with the goal of “interpreting the ways emerging media and digital technologies affect writing, rhetoric, literacy, and the discipline of technical and professional communication.” If anyone has any suggestions for more tech comm-y texts that I should include, please let me know!
Aside from academic posts, I can tell you already that I’m also going to share my opinions on various TV shows since I’ve become quite the fangirl. Between watching stuff online, via Netflix, and now with cable at home, I’ve got quite the list of favorites. To close this post, I’ll share 2 swoontastic pics of my man, Don Draper. Please note, I don’t have a crush on Jon Hamm. It is only Don Draper that makes me weak in the knees.
I have had the great fortune to see Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball twice now. Once last December in NOLA and then this week in St. Paul. [Thanks again @fablor!]
Both times were amazing and I truly love her music, but despite her appeals to her fans AKA little monsters to be themselves and her donations to the ReGeneration fund, at both concerts she gave a speech that totally contradicts those beliefs:
“…there is one thing I hate more than money and that’s the truth…I’d like a giant dose of bullshit any day.”
What? After all her promotion of equality, being who you are and not feeling ashamed or insecure, why would bullshit be the choice? Wouldn’t authenticity trump that?
I should put my scholarly researcher hat on and theorize/analyze this further, like they do at the FABULOUS Gaga Stigmata blog, but for now let me hear your thoughts on the matter.
