York Prep Seniors Interview Author Barrett Swanson
On October 18th, seniors in Dr. Marzoni’s English 12-2 class hosted a Q&A with Harper’s contributing editor and University of Wisconsin-Whitewater creative writing professor Barrett Swanson about his essay for the magazine’s June 2021 issue, “The Anxiety of Influencers.” The essay covers Professor Swanson’s time visiting a TikTok “collab house,” Clubhouse FTB (short for “For the Boys”), in September 2020, and his experience, as he puts it, “educating the TikTok generation.” Students asked Professor Swanson to expand on some of the ideas about social media and higher education presented in the article, inquiring about the role the pandemic has played in TikTok’s rising popularity, and critiquing what they perceived as a mischaracterization of FaZe House, an incubator for e-Sports gaming. The interview was an overwhelmingly positive experience for at least one of the students, Amir Pezhmanian, who asked, immediately after the bell rang, “When can we do this again?”
