Epistemographer

Rubber ducks lost at sea being tracked by scientists:

“Remnants of the lost armada of bath toys, which also includes frogs, beavers and turtles — nearly 29,000 in all — are thought to be streaming down the New England seaboard right now. Although there are no confirmed sightings in the Atlantic yet, oceanographers who have documented the movement of flotsam and ice from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic Ocean are confident some of the ducks ended up over here. A breakaway flotilla of ducks is expected to make landfall in Britain soon as well.”

As a sort of last-minute thing, I had dinner tonight at Otto (Mario Batali’s new Enoteca/Pizzeria), and wound up having one of the best culinary experiences of my recent memory. By the end of the night, the four of us at the table had tasted seven cheeses, five seafood antipasti, five cured meats, assorted mushrooms/figs/olives, a salad, a plate of fried smelt, a prosciutto and arugula pizza, a damned good bottle of wine and a dish of assorted gelato (chocolate, hazelnut, and coffee), not to mention other garnishes like the honey with flakes of black truffle or the brandied cherry sauces that accompanied the cheeses. Staggeringly good meal.

As a scholar who’s sensitive both to historiography and contemporary media criticism, I’m well aware that for the vast majority of the world, those who don’t get to go into archives or interview historical actors firsthand, history only exists in the telling. We labor to make our work transparent, extensively documenting our work in part so that others can follow in our tracks, check the same sources and confirm (or rebut) our conclusions. In the end, though, this kind of fact-checking is simply too much, so the audience for history places its trust in the storyteller, assuming that what is seen or read is true unless offered evidence to the contrary.

That’s why this is so damned disturbing. In essence, you’re seeing a reframing of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, through an extremely partisan lens, rewriting actual spoken dialogue and re-editing the sequence of events for dramatic effect.

Let me be blunt: This. Is. Not. History. That. Should. Be. Toyed. With.

Two quotes from the story, which you should really read in its entirety:

“This is the story of DC 9/11. Screenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd had access to top officials and staffers, including Bush, Fleischer, Card, Rove, and Donald Rumsfeld‚Äîall of whom are played by look-alike actors in the movie (as are Cheney, Rice, John Ashcroft, Karen Hughes, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and Paul Wolfowitz). The script was subsequently vetted by right-wing pundits Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, and Morton Kondracke.”

“There are, of course, precedents. ‘One of the original aspects of Soviet cinema is its daring in depicting contemporary historical personages, even living figures,’ Andr√© Bazin dryly observed in his 1950 essay, The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema. It was one of the unique characteristics of Stalin-era Soviet movies that their infallible leader was regularly portrayed, by professional impersonators, as an all-wise demiurge in suitably grandiose historical dramas. So it is with DC 9/11, where documentary footage of the collapsing WTC is punctuated by the pronouncements of Bottoms’s Bush…That Bottoms is reconfiguring his role in the Comedy Central series That’s My Bush! (a gross-out sitcom canceled a month before 9-11) provides a uniquely American twist.”

The mix of documentary and fictionally re-enacted footage is a dangerous, dangerous combination, and I don’t believe that the viewing audience will on the whole be sophisticated enough to draw a distinction between the two (especially given the verite, news-footage look which the creators of this program appear to be going for).

No writing recently, in large part because I haven’t been online very much lately. Came to a conclusion as I was driving up to Ithaca with Jenny last Wednesday that I need to rein in my online grazing, and I’ve noticed that as I’m reading blogs less and less, I’m feeling less of an urge to write here. I’m still mentally composing posts, just not feeling as much of an urge to bother writing them up at my computer. Reading blogs reinforces my desire to write in my own blog, and the opposite holds as well. Which leads me to two very interesting research questions that might be asked:

1. How many blog links are to other blogs, as opposed to external sites. In other words, how incestuous are the links within the blog community, as opposed to other online forms?

2. Do more frequent/higher volume bloggers tend to post more external (to the blog community) links, or more links to what other people are saying? Or is there no correlation at all?

Another interesting point that I’ve been noting lately is that the less I’m plugged in on a persistent basis, the less I feel like blogging. When I’m in Brooklyn, sitting at my desk with my Wi-Fi up and running, I feel a much stronger urge to write here than I do when I’m grabbing my e-mail on the go, running from city to city or meeting to meeting. On one hand, it’s a question of time, but there’s more to it than that – it’s as if I ease in and out of acquired habits based on my context (in particular, the peristence of my Internet connection).

I’ve been thinking about writing something on this for a while (I’m finding that I’m mentally writing blog posts to work out ideas, but once I write it in my head I don’t bother to write it out when I’m actually at a computer), but it took Alex Pang to actually jolt me into doing it.

Alex writes:

…will [blogging] matter in the academic job market?

At a micro-level, it might: graduate students who blog might find that they have higher professional profiles than those who don’t, and perhaps have become more fluid, faster writers. But at a macro level, I suspect it won’t.

I’ve been wondering about this quite a bit lately, and on a broader level wondering what I should do with this space once I hit the job market in earnest this fall. There aren’t really any precedents to follow here: I can think of hardly any PhD students in my field who blog, much less who have been out on the market while doing so…hell, the closest thing I can come up with are those (usually anonymous) columns that show up in the Chronicle every so often.

So, should I be keeping a low profile here? Considering the information that’s already out there, plus the links to my personal site on the right, my cover’s pretty much blown – there’s no chance of the anonymity of Invisible Adjunct, for example.

Then again, it’s not really anonymity that I’m concerned with – it’s more the management of my identity as I go through a job search. I’ve read my Goffman, and I’m well aware that the different self-presentations that I’d offer to my family, my friends, my colleagues, my advisors, and prospective employers all could come crashing together in this space. As of yet, this hasn’t been a problem, in large part because I haven’t tackled an issue in which I’ve emphasized different aspects of myself.

To be blunt: right now, I’m open to both academic and non-academic jobs. There, I’ve outed myself. Both worlds seem appealing, each for its own reason, which I’ll go into some other time. The point here is that even this simple declaration is something that could get me in trouble if some hiring committee happens to read it…I’ve seen enough job searches to realize that one person asking “Is he serious about an academic job?” or “Maybe we should focus on other candidates who’re more devoted to academia?” could mean the difference between being short-listed (or at least long-short-listed) and the circular file. There’s a part of me that feels that I’m in a precarious position, straddling multiple possible disciplines (I might apply to departments from History to Sociology, Communication to American Studies, not to mention the Writing in the Disciplines positions or the possibilities in Information Technology areas, and those are just the academic jobs!) – that part of me reasons that I’d be better off micro-managing my identity, tailoring it to each job like a cover letter.

On the other hand, there’s a small part of me that thinks, essentially, screw it. Let’s have some fun with this, and put it all out there. Let any potential employers/departments/etc. who decide to look up my website or Google my name come across all the different hats that I wear over the course of a different day, all the different projects I work on and all the different interests that I pursue. I wonder if that would make me more appealing or less so.

In the end, of course, any such move toward “openness” would just be one more attempt at identity-construction – rather than being the social historian of technology, or the web coder, I’d just be the guy who’s interdisciplinary, and who flaunts it in order to distinguish himself from the rest of the pack. Either way, this blog is another way to try and market myself to employers. No way around that…the question is how I can make it work in my favor, rather than making me seem like a dilettante.

Alex also writes:

But most of academic life proceeds on the assumption that you already DO know everyone you need to know. The indices of social and professional status are very well-understood: they’re pedigree, publications, public performance, and buzz. As a graduate student, your identity gets defined by where you’re doing your Ph.D., who you’re working with, what you’re working on, and a general sense of how good your work is.

The last sentence is definitely true – though there are several different ways I can spin myself, my committee is still made up of Ron Kline, Bruce Lewenstein and Trevor Pinch, and I’ll have the same conference papers and publications. On the other hand, it’s the quality at the tail end of the preceding sentence that seems relevant here: “buzz“. The sociology of the academic job market would be a fascinating study in its own right, and one chapter would most definitely be on “buzz”: who’s the hot candidate this year, who’s promising, who’s got the inside track on the most-coveted job (this seems particularly relevant in a field like science studies, where there are maybe a handful of jobs posted in the discipline itself any given year). So, I wonder, how might a blog be used to create buzz?

Interestingly, this is much more obvious outside the academy – my friend Kevin Smokler has talked about how one can use the web (and blogs in particular) to build and enhance one’s reputation as a writer, &tc: in short, to create buzz. While I’d agree with Alex that academics “live in a small world that’s already very efficiently sorted and classified its members,” I’d argue that one might benefit from shaking that world up by importing strategies from other cultures (in particular something like freelance writing) rather than strictly playing along with its norms. I’ve had this on the brain tonight: I’m reading Rosalind Williams’ Retooling, which deals quite a bit with issues of professional identity and technological change that seem to bear on the notion of blogs and academia.

In the end, I don’t have any answers yet, so I’ll throw the question out to any academics/postacademics/nonacademics reading this: short of getting Instapundited or Slashdotted, how do you think I should use this blog as I’m applying for jobs and figuring out what to do post-graduate school?

As for me, I’m going to go get some sleep. More on this in the next few days, as I mull it over myself…

…and none the worse for wear, with the exception of the produce in the refrigerator that didn’t survive the blackout. Ew.

Had a great weekend down in DC, and got to see tons of family and friends. Friday night, my parents got a bushel of crabs and invited over the family for dinner.

Now, I believe that there was other food there (I vaguely recollect burgers and chicken and hot dogs, not to mention a salad and other sides), but all I remember is several hours of good conversation and crustacean-picking. The crabs weren’t terribly large (most were “medium” males, for those in the know), but they were cooked just right and suprisingly full of meat. Props to Camerons.

Saturday, I went to a museum with friends I’ve met in the past year or two, had dinner with friends from college, and then went bowling with friends from high school. Though hectic, it was a thoroughly satisfying day.

[Photos courtesy the newest addition to my already-laden cargo pants]

And what better gift than to be out of town (in DC) when a massive power outage hits both Ithaca and New York City?

As if the now-omnipresent phenomenon of reality TV weren’t enough, the newest reality series of the summer (NBC’s The Restaurant) comes complete with a handful of unofficial, unsanctioned websites and blogs by Rocco DiSpirito’s eager young staff. There’s newly-departed Topher, gimpy-armed Gideon, as-of-yet-barely-seen Uzay, and badass-with-a-new-moped Lola.

The idea of reality TV “stars” commenting on the ways in which their on-screen personas were shaped by editing is nothing new (though I’d have to defer to my friend Amber for links to the message boards populated by Amazing Race and other reality TV castmembers), but there’s something particularly…well, intense…about the websites by and for The Restaurant‘s waitstaff. Considering that they’re mostly aspiring actors and actresses in New York City, and that according to the first episode of the show the first step in the hiring process was a resume and headshot, we really should expect more flat-out self-promotion from these folks, and they don’t fail to disappoint.

My favorite part is watching an episode, then reading the comments by various castmembers (usually posted within hours of the show airing), and trying to piece together a sense of what might really have happened from the Rashomon-like fragments of narrative. The only thing I’m sure of is that the French guy is a good guy.

…2 great pieces on NPR’s All Things Considered, one on book camp for grownups and the other on a library’s worst nightmare (scroll down for this one).

Okay, this has to stop. Seriously. Every time I sit down at my computer, I find myself compulsively clicking through the list of about four dozen blogs in my “Favorites” menu (most of which I still need to add to the blogroll on the right). Moreover, when I do finally start working, I’m interrupted every so often with a vaguely OCD-ish need to check every blog to see if anybody’s posted anything new (and as much as I hate the dude’s politics most of the time, Glenn Reynolds’ posting frequency doesn’t help matters).

The problem seems to be that my daily internet reading is no longer limited to newspapers/magazines, which generally work on a daily news cycle at most (yeah, I know that online newspapers update through the day – hell, I worked at one – but we’re not talking about a constant stream of new material). Instead, I’m stuck with a bunch of blogs, updated frequently and at unpredictible schedules by lots of people whose writing and opinions I like and admire. I already know that I have compulsive tendencies when it comes to news (witness my near-pathological media consumption post-September 11th), and the whole blogosphere thing isn’t helping one bit.

Any suggestions/comments/12-step programs for dealing with this? Today I discovered that Trillian has an RSS plugin, which is only going to make things worse…