After lurking around the blog-world for far too long, I figure it’s finally time for me to get one started of my own. Seems like a trend for me – in 1992 when I first logged on to CapAccess (the original Washington, DC-area freenet) I spent a few months just reading other people’s posts before starting to write my own. When I started surfing the web, it took me months before I started writing my own web pages. I lurk, then I join in.
More about me: I’m going into my sixth year as a PhD student in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. My dissertation’s a social history of the VCR and home video in America in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and if you read this site regularly I’m sure you’ll hear far more about it than you’d ever want to.
Right now, I’m counting at least three reasons for starting this blog:
1. I’m a student of media technologies. It seems kinda wussy to study them and not use them, especially since I’ve been trained in a field that values experience and ethnography over pure theory.
2. I’m a teacher of writing, and I’m debating whether to incorporate some sort of blog function into a course I’m designing for next spring. If I do decide do to so, I’d rather know the software and general process backward and forward. Plus, I’d look like a tool if I asked my students to start blogs and I hadn’t started one myself.
3. Like I said, I’m working on my dissertation. Over the past few years of grad school I’ve developed some bad writing habits, including linguistic bloat and a massive ability to procrastinate. I figure that the more time I spend typing words on a screen (whether dissertation-related or not), the easier a time I’ll have overcoming these bad habits, or at least working on them.
So welcome.
Comments
One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.Excellent! Another STS person in the blogosphere!
But what the HELL ARE YOU DOING BLOGGING AND NOT WRITING YOUR DISSERTATION??? Are you nuts? Back to those chapters, man!