About

I’m Gus Andrews (also known as Gillian, but that seems to be falling into disuse).

I spent most of 2008-2010 on my dissertation, looking into why people make major mistakes on blog comment threads. Like thinking they were speaking to Oprah or Bill Gates when they were writing on some poor blogger’s site, or giving strangers their AOL login information in hopes they could cancel their accounts.

A common response to my research has been “Aren’t these people reading?” That thought, coupled with my experience writing online, and my frustration with the self-congratulatory attitude of some bloggers, inspired the title of this blog.

I’ve been blogging since 2000. It’s been a humbling education in how invisible and yet public your online presence can be.

I’ve been discovered by hordes of teenagers asking me to teach them to do a dance I didn’t know how to do.

I’ve had a lawyer/former classmate insist I scrub a comment about her off my site because her new employers (the U.S. government) wanted her to “sanitize her web presence.”

I’ve had to dig out from under 1.5 gigs of pure-text comment spam, in the great blog-software exploitation deluge of 2006.

This blog will be home to my ongoing thoughts about topics related to my research, publishing, and eventually, teaching. Likely themes:

I want to make media (both new and old) more transparent to the public.

I want to know how we know what we know as communication technologies change.

I want not to forget the role of the physical body in human-computer interaction, or the impact of that interaction on the body.

Here’s my interactive resume and a more printable resume. And here’s a short list of my non-academic publications.