Epistemographer

So, I find it interesting that I’ve felt like I’ve had almost nothing to write about here for the past few weeks (give or take a sporadic post or two here and there).

When I used to keep a journal, I found that I could chart how generally content I was as an inverse relationship with how much I was writing. That doesn’t seem to be what’s at play here, however (though I am relatively content these days, with the exception of a gnawing panic about how I’ll be paying rent come June)…I actually have an urge to write here, and even have a sense of the kinds of things I’d like to write about, but I simply haven’t had the time.

Instead, a whole lot of other things are crowding out my free-thinking “blogging time”:

• 1) My dissertation, which I’m not blogging about because I already spend a big chunk of my day writing the damn thing to begin with. Plus, you can just check the sidebar to see how that’s going, anyways.

• 2) My class, which I’m not blogging about because my students might read what I write, and no real good can come of that. There’s all sorts of fun stuff going on on the course blog, but I won’t link to it from here (though Google seems to have already found the course website anyways).

• 3) Books I’m reviewing for Publishers’ Weekly, which I’m not blogging about because they’re paying me for my reviews, and I’ve never quite figured out how to negotiate the anonymity of those reviews.

• 4) Job search progress/angst, which I’m not blogging about because verious potential employers might be reading, and the market is bad enough without me whining about it in public (or showing my hand to anybody who might still be deciding on my application).

• 5) Thoughts about potential travel plans with Jenny once we both graduate, which I’m not blogging about simply because we haven’t made firm plans.

The five things above seem to take up virtually all of my time that I’m not spending sleeping, and since it doesn’t seem wise/worth it to write about any of them, my blog lies fallow.

On the bright side, I’m very much looking forward to reinventing this space once I finish the dissertation (argh – I’ve become one of those people who says “the” dissertation” rather than “my” dissertation!)…I found that hearing Jay Rosen talk about blogs inspired me to think of what I could do, that I haven’t been, and I look forward to having the time to explore again.

Today, I went to an Information Law Institute lunch at NYU. The lunches, coordinated by Helen Nissenbaum, bring together an interdisciplinary crowd of people from NYU and elsewhere in the greater New York City area, including one or two of us from Cornell when we can be in town.

The speakers were Anil Dash, of Six Apart fame, Michael Weiksner of E the People and Jay Rosen of the NYU Department of Journalism. Jeff Jarvis was on the side of the room and did a good job of blogging the whole thing, so I won’t bother recounting the details (if I’d known that there was a live wifi connection there, I’d have brought my laptop and done the same).

I also managed to get in one of the only questions/comments, about the difficulty doing the day-to-day identity management that’s part and parcel of being an interdisciplinary scholar while maintaining a blog (sort of a variation on the necessity of envisioning your audience and writing for them). Sadly, there was little time whatsoever to actually discuss these and other issues – the speakers ran a good hour and a half, and barely managed to get ideas on the table, much less have a discussion to chew them over. Someday, it’ll be really fascinating to teach a semester-long seminar on blogging (which apparently is happening at NYU in the immediate future).

I walked away with the same thought that seems to pop up whenever there are a bunch of people talking about blogs in one room: everybody seems to agree that blogs are interesting, and most agree that they’re a Big Deal, but the “blog” as a technology seems to mean different things to different people. For Dash, blogs are fundamentally an outgrowth of the personal journal, while for Weiksner they’re a tool to organize activism and for Rosen they’re essentially another medium for thinking and teaching. I’m not saying that these different meanings don’t overlap in all sorts of Venn-diagramy ways, but there’s still an awful lot of interpretive flexibility around the blog as a technology (as opposed to its technical details).

The abstract for a session I’m putting together with Jofish Kaye for the 2004 Society for Social Studies of Science meeting (in Paris):

Hackers and Tinkerers: Amateur ways of doing technology

From computer hackers to ham radio operators, from audio and videophiles to hot rodders, enthusiast cultures have often proved integral to the lives of technologies. Such cultures tend to exist at the fringes of mainstream technological practices, and their members explicitly define their activities in opposition to traditional understandings of productive work. This panel aims to explore the issues at play for this unique (and crucial) category of users. What is at stake for amateurs who claim technological expertise outside the norms of a traditional professional identity, and what does this mean for our notion of expertise? Who are these amateurs; how and why do they cohere as distinct communities, and how do they maintain this group identity in the face of more popular understandings of their chosen technology? What role do these amateurs play in the broader technological landscape?

Looks like a fun bunch thus far, and we’re still waiting for a few others…if you happen to be interested and are doing relevant work, drop me a line…

I’m about to go home for the night. I arrived on campus a little more than 12 hours ago, and with the exception of a productive and positive meeting with my committee chair and a brief excursion to pick up Chinese food for dinner, I’ve been sitting in this same damned chair the whole time.

Grading papers took ages; I need to re-evaluate this whole “online papers” concept, at least for the purposes of grading. I hadn’t realized that it would be so difficult to note small grammatical things online, the sort of detail that one might just circle with a pen and annotate with an “Awk.” I might try creating PDFs of student papers and annotating those for the next assignment, or maybe I’ll just kill some trees and print everything out…