I’ve been noticing that Stumbleupon, the web service that directs participants to interesting sites, has been directing more and more visitors to this site, sometimes more than 100 a day.  For several years, Stumbleupon has been directing some days several hundred visitors to my original evolutionary theory site, serpentfd.org.  I’ve never been able to quite figure out what Stumbleupon is, and yesterday I drilled down a bit after finally joining the group, telling the application my interests and starting to follow where the site directed me to go.

I soon discovered that the reason my original evolution site, posted in 1998, gets so much Stumbleupon traffic is that it has been both a featured site in the evolution section and a site that receives five stars.  The review section of the site gathered almost 30 comments in almost six years; some of those who commented were confused, but many seemed impressed.  I was astonished that my site received respect.  I’m just so used to feeling invisible.

A recent email from an author whose work I deeply respect, his books having introduced me in the 1970s and 1980s to such concepts as sociobiology and matrifocal society, noted the near impossibility of my being accorded respect or notoriety in academia.  He emphasized that if work does not appear in peer-reviewed journals, it is invisible.  Though he expressed enthusiasm and respect for what I am doing and recommended publishers to approach, he made it clear that if I expected anything but rejection, I’d be fooling myself.

My experience agrees with his advice that to believe or behave as if an amateur could significantly impact academia is a delusional proposition.  Nevertheless, there is a world outside academia, though unique theorizing on biological, human and social evolution occurs almost exclusively on journal pages.

This is a little like dreaming of becoming a commercial airline pilot and flying tens of thousands of people across the planet in the course of a single year.  Academics are able to carry ideas to thousands of colleagues in many countries, pilots of commercial airliners, so to speak.  Airline pilots are required to speak English to fly a plane.  It’s as if I can’t speak that language and so can only fly small, noncommercial aircraft.  I get to take friends and friends of friends to interesting places across the world.  My experience is not curtailed.  But my ability to share the experience is limited to those, like me, that fly planes for free.  This world of the amateur is rich in experience.  But it is a different world from the one traveled by the professionals.  I can go to as many places.  The folks I travel with share my passions.  But we are not pilots by vocation.  Our ability to help others move from place to place is limited.

I am in a somewhat unique position as an evolutionary theorist operating outside academia, often theorizing on the connection between social and biological evolution, while actually engaged in the profession of enhancing the ability of clients and colleagues to achieve communication goals in this new horizontal, barrier-destroying, diverse and transparent world.  I am not a professional evolutionary theorist.  I am a professional web developer, a social media application developer seeking ways for enhanced information access and digitally encouraged relationships to effortlessly transform the social landscape.  In a very strange and interesting way, my life is becoming about the ability of the potentially transformative ideas that I describe to compel transformation through the actual medium that the ideas seek to explain.

I am an evolutionary theorist who describes modern technological communications/social structure transformations as outcomes of very specific biological processes.  It seems congruent with my creative process, my nonacademic station and my reverence for the explosion of the commons that what I create be offered for free, with no copyright and no citation encumbrances creating barriers to the distribution of the ideas.  In other words, I am feeling an attraction to taking the nonidentity paradigm described by my theory, a process that I hypothesize is necessary to an ability to theorize, and giving myself up totally to the web.

If academia is about forming an identity around the respect accorded for work produced, the web is about allying with nonidentity as the individual forms idea alliances with other individuals.  Academia is about the individual.  The web is about the community.  My evolutionary theory is about the power of environment and community to inform evolution.

Two things have propelled my thought in this direction.  One is the respect accorded my work on Stumbleupon, compliments from strangers, nonacademics.  The other thing was respect offered me by an academic whose work I respect, respect that was accompanied by advice to not knock on an academic’s door.

I embrace that advice.  My life’s work is to share, not to educate.