I missed my first chance to be a talking head in the newspaper! The tech report for the Buffalo News called Canisius looking for someone to talk to about flash mobs and social technologies and they ended up directed to me. Unfortunately, the stuff that he’s writing the article about is happening on Saturday, when I won’t be available to chat with him. :^(
A while back I contacted one of the major theorists upon whose work I’m basing my dissertation to request the text of a keynote speech he had given. He wrote back quite quickly and promised the book chapter that the speech was based on (still in manuscript form) soon. We bounced e-mails back and forth a bit and I hadn’t thought much about it in probably a month. Got another e-mail from him yesterday saying he didn’t want to keep me waiting and included not only the text of the chapter we had discussed previously but also drafts of numerous other things he’s working on, and welcomes my comments, corrections, and suggestions on them all.
WELCOMES MY SUGGESTIONS! As if! (OK, probably he’s just being polite - but he certainly didn’t have to do a core dump of work-in-progress on me!) Though, as Trine points out, perhaps I’ll know I’m ready to submit when I am finding holes in his work.
I was just running around the library picking up some materials to look at both for my dissertation and for the abstract that Mark and I are working on. One of the items I wanted was Sidney Aronson’s 1971 article “The Sociology of the Telephone” (International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 12(3), 153-167). This article isn’t available online; Canisius does have the journal in bound periodicals. Since it can’t leave the library, I had to photocopy it. Not only did I have to photocopy it, I had to do it single-sided, since the machine that has duplex capabilities was non-functional.
It had been quite a long time since I’d made a single-sided copy of a journal article. The Internet has spoiled me.
When I posted yesteday afternoon, I was barely functional, having been up since 5, barely eaten (a breakfast sandiwch and a coffee at the airport, a ginger-ale and 2 bags of peanuts on my flight from BWI-BDL, a Luna bar and a diet coke, and a small bag of Raisinets), and done the defense. Now I’ve had food and sleep and the company of good friends, and I can say more about the academic bits, mostly in list form. Read the rest of this entry »
(should come in a shot glass…)
As I sit here outlining the conclusion to my dissertation proposal, I’m suddenly realizing that, yes, I do have something unique to contribute to sociology and Internet Studies.
Man, that feels good. Especially since I HATE writing conclusions.
I just discovered that The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was not in my Bookends library. Those who know me well will be shocked and appalled by this.* I take it as a sign of how little I have actually gotten accomplished in the past 2ish years (since my HD crashed in early September 2004), because I KNOW that it was in my library at that time.
In other news, I learned a few days ago that my review of Viviane Serfaty’s book The Mirror and the Veil has finally been published at RCCS. (It seems that other reviewers were even more behind deadline than I was!) I was especially interested in reading her response to the reviews; I haven’t had a chance yet to read the other reviews.
*I have, in fact, been known to literally bounce with glee when I get to discuss Goffman.
We’ve all heard that you can write your dissertation in 15 minutes a day.
“You can do anything for 15 minutes” is a mantra from the ladies at Flylady.
While I clearly need to put in more than 15 minutes a day if I’m ever going to actually finish this thing, I’m combining these concepts and doing my work 15 minutes at a time. I have the ProdMe Widget for my Dashboard. When I’m working, I have it set to alarm every 15 minutes with “You can do anything for 15 minutes” as a text reminder.
I like having that little bit of encouragement four times an hour, and if I do get distracted, it’s guaranteed not to last longer than 15 minutes.
And now I expect that my 15 minutes of Internet-time are just about up. :^D
I just sent a first draft of my dissertation prospectus to my advisor. It’s a very, very first draft, but it’s off!
This day has been a long, long time coming. Read the rest of this entry »
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