Right, back again after a 14 month hiatus. No I wasn’t in prison, I was busy at work. But this year I’m on sabbatical and so it is a time to try out new technologies and think about how I and others learn them, how they get appropriated to new uses and how we might do redesign to Make Things Better. Currently I’m at UC Boulder visiting Profs Palen & Fischer:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~palen/Home/Welcome.html
http://epic.cs.colorado.edu/
http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/
The EPIC group put on a local disaster just for me – very hospitable.
Now, I wonder, why did it take me so long to get back to blogging? Was it really that I was just too busy? Am I afraid of writing? Am I afraid of computers? They don’t seem very convincing reasons. Reflecting on one’s thinking is, I find, very informative – though you have to be careful about self delusion. Reflecting on one’s motivations is even more tricky.
I *think* part of this reluctance to post is more about that jumble of concerns about how one presents oneself in public. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman appears to be the book everyone invokes on this topic. I haven’t read it. I’ll add it to the ever growing sabbatical to-read list. But Wikipedia is as usual a great crib:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life
Also of course as a professor I have the luxury of outsourcing bits of my brain into a borg-like distributed cognition. I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Ben Gross on his thesis: Online Identifiers in Everyday Life. Ben read Goffman (so I don’t have to?). Anyway what I find really intriguing about his thesis was not the point that people worry about how they present themselves online in ways analogous to how they present themselves in Real Life. Rather his work shows how all those complexities can be bundled up in something as tiny as your email address. There are subtle degrees of prestige and meaning in what you choose and what you can get as an email address. Consider drunkenfratboy@stateUalumni.com, johnsmith6545324432432@gmail.com, ohmygodivehadthisemailaddresssiceiwaslike16-andnowitseemsabitinappropriateforacorporatelawyer@hellokitty.com
Ben notes “I repeatedly heard the phrase “I got my name” when people described why they signed up with a particular service”. I laughed when I first read that. Yes, smugly, I got my name in both Gmail and Illinois domains, but some random Twidale scooped me at Yahoo, dammit.
Having a rare or unique name is now something of an advantage in the internet world, and even makes up for all thos irritations of misspellings and mispronunciations.
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~palen/Home/Name_Pronunciation_Guide.html
So if even something as tiny as your email address conveys a whole bunch about you, your importance, how early you were in getting in to the online world, how much you care about such things, just imagine the problems with Second Life and indeed WordPress.
Going into Second Life for the first time some years ago I had a body image crisis. Not just revisiting that endless teenage angst about “what should I wear? Will I fit in in a way that people will notice me – but not too much?” But also the virtual plastic surgery problem – shall I look like a 20 year old or try to look a bit more my age? Second Life does not do balding well. Bald yes. But bald as in “I could have a beautiful head of hair if I wanted to – this is a fashion statement”. Not bald as in “It mostly fell out except for a few odd clumps”. SL also does not do distinguished wrinkles well. You can aspire to look like Justin Bieber, but not George Clooney or Sean Connery. Hmm I wonder if there is a research project in avatar wrinkle rendering? In SL white Tshirt and jeans subtly means “My Mom dresses me” (because those are the default clothes Mom-SL puts on new avatars). And we all know what that means.
So circuitously back to blogging. I’m now in that teenage girl at a new school / university mode endlessly trying on new wordpress themes. I can’t wear that blue thing you gave me. Just too dorky. Will the other bloggers take me seriously in brown? I don’t know. It’s all so complicated.
I want to go back to programming – no-one cares what a computer scientist wears in RL.
