I’ve been in one of my quiet moods lately – plenty to think about and contemplate, but nothing pressing to say. But if you have a blog (and a million emails to answer) it is hard not to feel pressure from the imagined audience or potential respondent to say something, just to mark presence (kind of what I’m doing now, using my favourite cure for writers’ block – writing about why writing seems difficult).

Which got me thinking again, if not talking, about the idea of ‘presence‘ or of ‘becoming real’ as a key element of social communication. Offline, some of the greatest communicators are great not because of their verbosity, but because of the sheer energy and warmth of their presence: online, the only way to mark presence in both the temporal and [meta]physical sense is to talk…and talk, and talk, and talk. For the last few weeks, my students have had to engage in a class discussion via a chatroom, which seemed to encourage the reticent to speak, but by the students’ own admission led to a whole lot of talking without a lot of listening – participation for participation’s sake. Which in turn reminds me of an ongoing worry I have about where and how and for whom the read-and-write (as opposed to read-only or write-only) literacies are going to emerge in new media. Where ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ are not to be taken literally [pardon the pun] but are metaphors for catching and leaving traces of all kinds.