Dipping a toe into the future

[rax]

So I've given in and dipped a toe into the future, which for most of you is probably the present. I'm planning to actually swim, or at least float. Help me out here:

• If you're using Twitter, I'm user raxvulpine; let me know so that I can follow you! (Or just follow me, and I'll notice and follow you back.)
• If you're using Facebook, you can friend me by clicking here. (I gave in because my UMass Boston friends are sufficiently from the future that they don't even use email.)
• Expect me to actually write up book reviews and such more frequently now.
• You can be my LinkedIn not-friend-because-that's-not-professional-enough-but-I-have-pink-hair-so-who-cares here. Thanks, jadia .
• Do I need to care about Dreamwidth?
• I've refreshed my personal website. I'm actually not embarrassed by it now! Yay!

What social technologies or mumbledy-whatevers am I missing? I'm going to be going to conferences and talking to people and want to be able to jump into networking with people and not seem like some sort of hopeless luddite. Eventually I will need to write some Javascript to automate the news bits but for now I think this is OK.

Comments

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

Twitter: Somewhat puzzled by this phenomenon, I asked a friend why he enjoyed it. The answer was that it amounted to a level of social interaction between emails/journals/blogs and chatrooms/channels/MUCKs. Which I can understand on an abstract level, but, sadly, even LJ is often too fast-paced for me to keep up with. So I won't be getting an account.

Facebook/Myspace: These have always struck me as far too sleazy to use. I don't recall which did it, but the notion of elevating one portion of your reading list into best friends seemed indicative of the sites' overall approach to social networking: a highly manipulative one.

Dreamwidth: I got an account, following Cyn ("befitting" there, and a dozen or so successive names here). So far I have been impressed by a few small improvements over LJ, including the semantic change from "friends list" to "reading list" -- not important in an objective sense, but important to me, given that I place a lot of emotion in the word "friend". But the thing that really perturbs me about LJ is the fact that (for non-users) it runs ads on my damn journal. So, here are highly personal entries that take me hours, days, and in one case a year to write, commercialized without my explicit approval, and with my implicit approval only because of the huge damn inertia (a justified inertia, I'll grant) of the friends with histories here. (Tragedy of the commons, right? An act which no single person would approve, a community will readily approve.) I really hope it catches on among my circle of friends, but since I can't reasonably expect more than a small fraction of them to seek me out on Dreamwidth if I stop posting here, I'll still double-post for the foreseeable future.

Oh, right, you're a graduate student too! How are you finding that? For my part (I'm working towards a PhD in physics), I find it draining but worthwhile. Whenever I hear stories from friends about the discussion sections they lead in the humanities, I feel a mixture of envy and relief: envy because the physics equivalent entails far less creativity and involvement (but a considerable amount of mastery of the subject, mind), and relief because the physics equivalent is, as a result, far easier. :>

[rax.livejournal.com]

Facebook is totally manipulative and I am approaching it with my guard up, but it is actually the only way I can maintain friendships with a bunch of people I am not prepared to sacrifice solely based on their technology choices. :)

LJ: I guess I just don't see ads at all, between adblock in firefox and using w3m half the time anyway? Due to my own technology choices, that one doesn't affect me, though I can see how it would be frustrating. (And I agree on the "friend" thing.)

"Draining but worthwhile" is totally how I would describe my graduate studies. The creativity and involvement is wonderful, the tons of effort to what end is sometimes nervewracking. I mean, what do you do with an MA in English? (I don't particularly want to teach high school.) I'm considering a PhD at some point but that would be another 4-6 years of school and, well, that's lots of school. :) Sometimes I wish that "mastery of the subject" were something that felt attainable in my field at all...

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

I hope to stretch out my stay in graduate school as long as humanly possible. My favorite living philosopher, Stanley Cavell, spent thirteen years in graduate school. I consider that a good thing.

Okay, so I'm just about alone in that opinion, but I do love being a student.

Actually, "mastery of the subject" may be misleading way to put it. I can solve almost any freshman-level physics problem, plus explain the principles cogently and even teach them somewhat well. I can still do most sophomore-level problems, but odds are even whether I can actually teach them. And for anything of a higher level, the gaps in my knowledge prominently outclass what is present. I've mastered the basics, but may never master the entire core material, and can't reasonably expect to do more than master just one contemporary subfield... perhaps not even that.

Hopefully it'll be reassuring: yes, mastery is possible in the humanities, although you have to take the term "field" a bit narrowly. I have had the fortune of professors (most notably, one in writing/reading and one in philosophy) who demonstrated such mastery by their quality in teaching, insight and engagement. It's a shame those professors are never adequately appreciated. :P

It's a shame that physics has some big advantages in teaching over all of the humanities. In physics, a professor can (and should) set up a memorable demonstration of its principles in front of a class, a display of pyrotechnics, gadgetry and/or electricity. In the humanities, the teacher has to set up that same kind of demonstration inside the student's head.

[friode.livejournal.com]

The security of your most protected entries is limited in part by the weakest security of any computer of any of your friends or readers or whatever who have access to that entry (along with their willingess to send their lj passwords to third parties that claim to convert their own journals to pdf or whatever).

And yeah, reading list has some appeal. I sometimes feel like some people on my lj friends list would be more accurately described as acquiantances.

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

Heh, I have a thing for writing only public entries, so the security matter doesn't bother me.

"Reading list" is, oddly enough, the exact term that I adopted after finding after realizing that I had to force back my misgivings about "friends list" every time I said it.