Introduction to Alex Mashny

Hello again!

If we haven’t met before, I’m Alex. I’m a returning fellow to the DRC, and I’m excited to be back. I’m now a third-year PhD student at Michigan State University, am halfway through the exam process, and am still really, really interested in digital culture, technical communication, and circulation. Last year, when I introduced myself, I mentioned last year that I was taught growing up that things that get posted online are always “out there”. Who knows where my passwords cracked from databases or from key loggers have circulated to?

Last year, I also talked about my past with technology, to explain to you how I came to be here. This year, I want to look backwards and forwards, since things – like last year’s intro – can circulate endlessly on the internet and be found with just a few clicks. I’ll look backwards, first: when I joined WRAC’s PhD program in 2022, one of the first faculty mentors I connected with was Dr. Bill Hart-Davidson. I read his work and saw him cited in writing studies scholarship during my MA, and he was enthusiastic in mentoring me, helping me learn and grow as a nascent PhD student with a lot of ideas about how to study stuff that happens on the computer but with little experience actually doing so (technology is basically magic, after all, and I’ll never really understand it). As we talked, he suggested that I learn a bit of coding for both teaching and research purposes. I’d only learned a little bit of coding before, and hadn’t done it in years, so I wanted to take the opportunity to learn something new. Bill had a few suggestions for me, which I hastily scrawled in my Notes app. The one that Bill emphasized most, however, was PHP – a language I had never heard about before.

Attempting to learn PHP has been a lot more difficult than saying I wanted to learn PHP. When it comes to technology, I grasp the big picture easier than I do some of the technical aspects, like coding and algorithms. I’d always been told by friends who were that coding languages are a sort of grammar – if you understand the logic, it’s easy to do. Coding is not a binary, mechanistic process, like I assumed. I’ve learned a lot about how old code can still hold something together years later, or how different people handle the same problem. It probably doesn’t help that I rush and make simple mistakes since I am usually more interested in how content on a platform like X/Twitter circulates than I do the code that enables it, even though I know that understanding the mechanisms behind it is important. I’m not much closer to explaining what parts of X/Twitter’s code or Reddit’s backend cause things to circulate (or fail to circulate), but getting my hands dirty still helps me think about digital platforms and circulation.

I’m still interested in the intersections between technology, people, and culture. These days, I’m especially interested in the ways that tactical technical communication is used in order to be disruptive in digital ecosystems, as well as the ways that the body and culture intersect with technology. I’ll soon be published in Xchanges with Nicole Golden about tactical technical communication and social justice pedagogy in the classroom, and am thinking a lot about culture, acts of protest, and how memory circulates on digital platforms, as well as digital ethics.

You can email me at mashnyal@msu.edu. I have an X (formerly Twitter) account at @alexmashny, but I’m not active on there as much these days.