About Alexander
How I Became an Academic
My life has been fairly eclectic for someone who made a career out of being a professional student. A direct explanation of my bookishness is that I’m the progeny of an academic economist and a high school librarian. From this alone, it seems all too obvious that I would become an academic. It’s true that I have followed some parallels between my parents’ careers, and this is unsurprising since across documented history, kids grew up to do something similar to what their parents did. However, many seem under the impression that academics are often people who have never seen the world outside of books or data. Yet, this is untrue in my case even if it’s often true of other academics. So, when I say there are parallels in “following” my parents’ footsteps, its more a matter of chaos. For example, my dad didn’t gain the title of “professor” until I was nearly 13. As he once put it, he got his PhD through “a series of near death experiences attempting to do other jobs” along the way, beginning with a cow that kicked him through a cattle gate at the Carroll County Livestock Sales Barn. You could say I have benefitted by learning from a lot of my dad’s mistakes about work place safety more so than following his “academic” steps.
Also like my father’s first job, I worked for my grandfather – or as my sister and I call him, “Pawpaw” – as cattle farmhand in rural Georgia, just south of Appalachia in a place that didn’t get broadband internet until nearly 2010. This rural spit of land he worked upon is called Corinth – pronounced KARR-inth by the locals – where Pawpaw swears it never rains enough because of what he calls “the KARR-inth split”: where atmospheric pressure and land elevation seems to split the rain clouds right before it reaches his farm. Despite primarily focusing on digital technologies and their relationship to culture, my first job was about as disconnected from that world as it could be. My second job was a brief moment as as an assembly line worker for Sony Packaging before I fell in love with barista/bartender work. From 2011 until 2025, I have worked on and off for about 8 years in drink service industry and still cover shifts occasionally.
During the time that I was doing these jobs, I was also a high school or full-time university student. As a university student, I began as an architecture major at Southern Polytechnic State University (now “Kennesaw State University - Marietta Campus”). It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say I spent more time playing prog rock with my friend Chris Bradley (who is now a professional session musician), playing chess, and managing a tree climbing in a club I co-founded. For insurance reasons, our tree climbing club had to be called a “cross country runners club.” Additionally, for legal reasons, I named the club “The Running Hornets that Run” because apparently “The Running Hornets” were already an established club. But we were a “cross country runners club,” hence the doubly assertive name choice. Eventually, the club did become more about cross country running than climbing trees. Despite transferred to The University of West Georgia (UWG) shortly after, I later found out that the Running Hornets that Run gained the status of a full-fledged collegiate cross country team. So much for climbing trees, I guess.
After having completed my B.S. in Economics and a minor in Fine Art, I went on to do an M.A. in Economics at Georgia State while working for swanky coffee shops in Atlanta. If anyone remembers Octane (probably most famous for hiring the guy who’s the face of the Hipster Barista meme or their product placement in the movie Baby Driver) I worked there briefly, but mostly I worked at Condesa, a third wave coffee shop and bar in Old Fourth Ward, and the historic JavaVino cafe and wine shop in Poncey-Highlands.
During my time at Georgia State, I decided to spend a couple years dedicated to learning mathematics. Initially driven by a pragmatic interest in pursuing PhD in Economics, I quickly abandoned the more pragmatic aspects and fell in love more theoretical aspects of mathematics. Eventually, I found I liked mostly anything theory or philosophy related. Around that time, I picked up a copy of Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication as well as a copy of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and found a strong interest in how knowledge is developed across noisy information transfers of all kinds whether they are academic articles, citation networks, grants, digital images, interactions with technology, or even everyday objects in the world. My M.A. advisor, Paula Stephan, found herself explaining to me that I had managed to transform myself into an information scientist, studying something closer to science of science or science and technology studies without formal training. Despite her best attempts to guide me into becoming an “Economist of Science,” she suggested I look into Information Science programs, which at the time were nonexistent in my home state of Georgia. I had never heard of an “iSchool” until then. This turned out to be a life changing realization for me. Ultimately those “noisy information transfers” theoretically generalized into what I called “memetics” in my dissertation. While my research may not show it, my trajectory of interest has almost always been an epistemology and the information dynamics of culture, starting from Thomas Kuhn and Claude Shannon and continues to propel me forward through a variety of other academic terms.
Hobbies Outside of Academia
In academia, a good chunk of my time is unsurprisingly spent writing, so I’ve developed a fascination with the tools of writing. During my M.A., I got sucked into the common mathematics undergrad debate over which pens are best for mathematics notes. My two-cents? A good solid choice for lefties like myself are the Pilot Precise V5s although many of my right-handed friends continue to insist upon Pilot G-2s. They are wrong. Lefties know better than to choose a gel pen. With continued frustration with gel smears, paper pulp clogging roller balls, and lefty-angular tension destroying felt tips prematurely, I found myself in the frustratingly expensive hobby of fountain pens. Counter to what many fountain pen enthusiasts argue, fine and extra-fine nibbed fountain pens are an excellent writing solution for lefties who carry around brass book darts. Those things can clean the nib of a fountain pen in less than second. With a well-designed nib and good writing form, a fountain pen is the simplest solution to every handwriting problem I’ve had (except for architectural drafting and occasionally losing them).
My pickiness with writing tools has extended to keyboards, their encodings/decodings, their firmware, word processors, and typesetters also! While hobbies, I sometimes feel the pull to write something about the overlaps of these spaces and memes. ASCII art, video game hacking/modding – originally called “phreaking” in the Computer Demoscene in adoption from what the landline phone hackers called themselves – and emoji/emoticons occasionally appear to carry a uniquely connected techno-political history of what digital humanities scholars call “cultural techniques.” Occasionally, you might see me blog about some of these topics because I find them to be immediately practical ways to learn things about the technologies right below your fingertips, but also because I find them fascinating to think about in relation to the history of inscription and documentation. The history and technological aspects of these tools are highly interesting subjects that almost never get discussed in detail anymore outside of niche discussions in cultural heritage, digital humanities, and specialized online forums.
Speaking of, while being involved in memes and their relation to information science and technology research, I’ve developed a strong interest in niche online cultures, tinkering with computer hardware, and open source operating systems. My peers have noticed I have an endearing relationship with half-functioning technologies and reuse of these technologies. My YouTube recommendations today are mostly people talking about ChipTune and black midi music and people using the game Line Rider to produce fan-made music videos. I’ve always had a hacker-adjacent attitude, as would be expected of anyone from a farm family. Ask any John Deere tractor owner about their position on “right-to-repair” if you don’t believe me. You’ll find that they are open-source software and hardware advocates. Like me, they tend to believe that things are only broken if they can’t access what’s wrong. As such, they would be just as quick to say most of our contemporary technologies are broken from the start because you can’t tinker with them. Many varieties of academic subjects related to hacker culture, open source development, development of networking technologies, technological reuse, simulation/emulation studies, video game studies, and even networked art that extends to histories before the internet have always fascinated me.
I also have a love of fiction despite not having as much time for it as I did from K-12. I have a special affinity for all things TRON, Blade Runner, Star Wars, and animation. Speculative fiction is a special interest for me for lots of reasons. As a technological extension to that interest, I also love studying digital art, data art, and art pushing the boundaries between analogue and digital media. Although, it’s not all “sci-fi” and “technology.” I have spent a little time writing comedic fantasy fiction. While I have not been able to spend as much time doing so, I occasionally get the itch to write comedic fantasy: subtly blending the banal of existential reality into mystically exaggerated absurdities.
I also spend a good bit of time reading philosophy and research outside of my immediate area of work, and I spend a good bit of time updating Wikipedia about these and all of the previous subjects mentioned.