WHY GET PUBLISHED ON THE NET – PART THREE

I dedicated to the last two posts to where one can get published on the net and also wanted to press home the message that getting published is dead easy; it doesn’t require that you be a great connoisseur in ICT or an expert with international renown in the subject area around which you wish to talk. Assuming we all have enough knowledge of our native language, even being a language expert is not a precondition. There is now one more aspect that I wish to explore, and this has to do with the justification of why one would want to get published at all. This is a very wide domain of thought, but I would like to offer the following reasons. I am inclined to tease out those reasons into a number of motives that often overlap but that may have separate existence: personal, social, epistemological, representational.
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Personal reasons 
The first impetus for getting published is simply the sheer joy of it. Here, I wish to share a personal story. 1999 marked the first time at which I sought to publish poetry online. I came across a site maintained by a young man where he published his poetry and invited other people to publish theirs. I can’t recall the title or the URL, but you can be sure that the first time ever in my life I saw one of my poems published on www, I was more than excited. I probably congratulated myself a number of times! I frequently shared musings over the guy’s poetry on the site, and he too was keen on commenting on my and other people’s poetry. Back then, that was very exciting. Even now, as I publish on Blogger, I find it extremely rewarding and no less exciting. The knowledge that you are (or will be) reaching out to people all over the world still has something of a magic touch to it: you are not writing to some professor who will be assigning a grade on a commentary whose life ends the moment the grade is assigned. Unlike essays, poems or thoughts you that wrote on scraps paper which were condemned to the dustbin every time you moved house or cleaned your office, what you write on the net is for the most part kept in active memory, and can be easily retrieved once it’s archived.
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Social reasons
The importance of being earnest, to use Oscar Wilde’s acclaimed title, and the importance of being taken earnestly by the other are additional motivations to get published. In effect, what this is saying is that I think I got something worthy of sharing. This is a process of enrichment for the originator and equally for the target recipient or participant, as we now wish to refer to the audience. I will speak in my next post about the theoretical and mental values of composing, but for the moment, the point I am making is that writing assumes a meeting of minds, an encroachment in the sense these are two worlds, the originator’s and the target participant’s, both coming together for a while, a collision, an encounter, a mental handshake if you prefer a voguish term. I am rather fond of images, so I will say that the originator, though publishing stuff on the internet, and through being read, viewed or heard, has given themselves the chance to emerge, much like a plane emerges on a radar screen, on the mental or representational theater of a reader/participant.
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As a result of this process, the originator will have been recognized, at least for a while, and will have been given a name. The originator is thus no longer Mr./Ms. Incognito, but is an identifiable person with a name, a face, and a story. Simply put, when you publish and get noticed, you are nudging your CV one point upward. This doesn’t mean that the originator has become a full-fledged expert all of a sudden. Nobody can claim expertise on the strength of one or many encounters. This is a process, but this encounter is a step in the direction of developing a respectable say in the matters under consideration. And it feels good to develop a profile of a knower or an authority in one field of another.
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Epistemological reasons
There are other reasons why a person should want to get published. One of these is that getting published is a way of sharing one’s representation of reality, and I mean this is a very serious sense. What does it mean that a person is giving expression to one’s view of the world? This will bring me back to two views of reality in epistemological discourse (see Crotty, 1998). There is one view of reality as something that has always existed, independently of the viewer, of experience, and the knower. In this sense, reality antedates the person; it exists in an objective world, quite apart from our individual or social awareness of lack of awareness of its existence. The example I like to borrow from Crotty is that trees, mountains, forests and the universe exist quite apart from our awareness of their existence. Against this essentialist definition of reality is another definition which carries a more human touch. This is the view that reality is what a person, any person experiences. Thus, we needn’t require that researchers hide behind an experimental toolset to conclude that today’s weather for instance is not convenient for fishing. It will be left to the senser themselves, the person, the experiencer, with their knowledge and intuition, to categorize reality as they see it. This specific understanding is one of the directions I am trying to convey as one reason for wanting to get published. When you get published, in any form, visual, audio, video, graphological, what you’re doing is to offer your perception of the world around you to exist side by side with other perceptions. Which perception will make it into textbooks and will acquire for itself the knowledge tag, I don’t know, but what is important is through a certain process of creation, you will have contributed to human knowledge and to the documentation of that knowledge. Unlike the limited volume of a paper journal where people fight for space, the internet has enough room to accommodate everyone. In this understanding, everyone is a knower, and as such, they are entitled to publicizing their own versions of reality.
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Representational reasons
The other aspect that is closely related to this notion of representation of the world is what I would like to call self-representation. This only slightly differs from the point above by making what amounts to a statement of the obvious. Okay, well, listen to this tautology: no person is in better position to represent him/herself than the person him/herself. I hope that upon examining this somewhat vacuous statement, we will find that it isn’t totally devoid of substance. There is the traditional Arabian adage, that only (s)he/who treads on an amber will be able to feel its heat. Fair enough. Now, supposing that I had strong views about a particular topic, for example, the need to reconsider the curriculum in light of Information and Communications Technology developments, and supposing that I didn’t take the initiative of publishing those views anywhere, I would imagine it relatively difficult for someone else to translate and convey the ideas I had about this issue in the manner I personally perceive them. In other words, and without wanting to contribute another empty statement, not even the most sophisticated machine or person will be able to scan my brain to faithfully render, reflect or account for the dimensions of the issue under consideration. It is in this sense that engaging in the act of self-expression and self-represenation is a salutary exercise.
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Remaining on the sidelines and failing to engage in the act of publishing means that somewhere or other, there is a vacuum, a vacuum of expression, meaning that there was an issue that one should have written about but fell short of doing. A natural law is for vacuum to get filled. Someone else would thus take charge of representing my case. There is a strong chance that the representation made by the second party of my own case will not square well with how I personally envision the matter. Even if that person were to be actuated with the best intentions, it will be likely that the person concerned whose case is being debated comes out dissatisfied, because the author, the writer, the expresser will have presented the issue from an angle of view that does not do justice to the person on whose behalf this representation is being made. My provisional working assumption here is that the writer or representer is not embarking on misrepresentation in the first place. When that assumption is wrong, when the person who has taken initiative to represent someone else who shuns the act of writing is a person whose business it is to misrepresent that person, the result is going to pretty grim. The fact of the matter is that the moment a person fails to represent themselves before the world, they will have to live with the consequences of being ‘unrepresented’, ‘under-represented’ or misrepresented.
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CONCLUSION
I think I am going to leave off it here for today. Let me just summarize. I began this story by sharing ten ways to get published on the internet. What this means is that it getting published on the newfound space of the internet is easy and not taxing, averaging a computer and an internet connection. Getting published is not a random or erratic act. What I did in this specific post was to talk about some of the reasons for wanting to get published. I mentioned in particular the gains to be made on a personal level as a result of this process. I also spoke of the social value of sharing, in a world where the term ‘sharing’ has become more like an auxiliary or a helping verb. I alluded to the goal of contributing to knowledge making as additional motivation for publishing. Finally, I tried to explain the representational and self-representational values of any acts of publishing. In my next blog post, I wish to address myself to the kinds of gains the writer is likely to make at the level of mental representation, a sort of a theory of writing or publishing. Stay tuned.
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Ali H. Raddaoui, University of Sfax, Tunisia
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REFERENCES
Crotty, M. 1998. The Foundations of Social Research. Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process. Sage Publications.