Spot the Difference

I know the changing roles of technology in our lives and societies has become cliché; still, this anecdote is just too bizarre not to share.

As some of you will likely have noticed, I've started posting reaction papers I wrote for my class on Literature of Modern Germany. The reason: I have a few German(-speaking) friends who read this blog and the reaction papers are basically written just like blog posts. Why not?

So here's how the story goes. At the bottom of all my emails, I have a link to my blog - among other things - just to discretely recruit unsuspecting potential readers. This has led to a wonderful variety of people mentioning to me that they've checked it out - and apparently sometimes even liked it!

But today, when I received an email from a senior administrator at Mount Allison (yes Graeme, I've learned to be vague enough to maintain people's anonymity) with whom I'd been corresponding about university politics, and at the end of the message I read: "I've been enjoying your blog, by the way, and particularly enjoyed your analysis of Der Vorleser," I couldn't help but think how uncanny the whole situation was.

Here's this apparently really important administrator I'm little more than acquainted with, whom I was unaware could even read German, who enjoyed a one-page "analysis" of an albeit popular German novel that I wrote for an undergraduate German Literature class at American University in Washington, DC.

Of course, it's flattering, but that's not the point. The point is that no situation remotely similar could ever have happened ten years ago.