Hey there. My name’s Collin Gifford Brooke, and I teach rhetoric and writing at Syracuse University, where I also chair the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition. My speciality is digital rhetoric, which you might gather from the book I’ve written and another that I co-edited. I happened to begin my PhD studies at the time when Netscape Navigator was released, so my career has run in parallel to a pretty eventful time in technological development. But my interests have also diffused across a pretty wide range of topics, to the point that I’m not sure that I’d even describe myself as a specialist any longer.
I blogged (seriously) for several years, back when blogging was a thing (the early 2000s), and it played a key role in how I processed the world, both as a reader and as a writer. As social media began to take over, though, and as big tech began to consolidate its grip on our economy and culture, my blog faded away.
I spent a number of years trying to recapture that energy for myself, without much success. As I grew older, and struggled with my health, I ended up needing to devote more time to self-care. One of the things that I realized was that I needed to be more intentional about doing the things that brought me joy (as opposed to meeting others’ expectations about how I spent my time). When COVID struck, I was already spending more of my time at home, but with the help of some friends, I began something that I’d never successfully managed in my career—I joined a writing group and started to write regularly. It rekindled that early blogging energy for me, to my surprise.
In late 2022, I decided to put out a shingle on Substack. I originally called this site Commonplace Brooke, in large part because commonplace books are a largely forgotten—and underrated—chapter in the history of the relationship between rhetoric and technology. Well before we developed computerized versions, commonplace books were a place for writers to store a range of information: observations, notes, quotes, ideas, and anything else they wanted to retain close at hand. They have a long and venerable history, one that survives to the present day in all sorts of ways.
I read like a fox but write like a hedgehog, which creates an internal tension that I managed to unlock for a while when I blogged regularly. So part of what I was after here was a way to collect my notes, bookmarks, and half-baked ideas and turn them into something a little more longform. For the first couple years of this site, I was pretty coy about whether this work would lead to something more formal, but I’ve stopped pretending in that regard. I’ve turned more towards book reviews and multi-post series on topics, with the goal of working towards a book manuscript about rhetoric, technology, and democracy. That’s when I changed my site’s title to Brookeshelves.
I still use this Substack as mostly an inventional space. I tend to write here in a way that I’d characterize as “downhill.” In other words, I’m constantly collecting bits and pieces, and when they reach a critical mass of overlap, I’ll write about them and through them to see what I’m thinking. I don’t typically plan out my posts in advance, or worry about things like formal structure. I write here to figure out what I think, not to polish things I’ve already thought through. So there’s an inevitable amount of messiness involved.
The Plan
At this moment (summer 2025), I’m about 30 months and over 150 entries into this site, so there are some patterns that have emerged (see my 100th post for details). I typically post once or twice a week, though this will vary depending on the demands of my day job. I tend to switch back and forth between individual posts and short arcs (3-4 posts) on topics of interest (or book reviews). I rarely ever know where an entry will end up when I start it, which is part of what I enjoy about writing. And while there are a few kind folks who have paid for subscriptions, I don’t paywall my posts. I’m just happy to have people reading my writing, and (occasionally) responding to it.
So welcome to Brookeshelves, and thanks for the visit.
-cgb
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
