So…

I got a scholarship.

$25,000 a year, tax free, for the next three years (maybe 3.5 if necessary), starting May 12.

I certainly didn’t see that one coming.

Food for thought

Why academics should blog

(I’ll try say something about it later!)

Writing back?

I’ve been thinking a lot about diaspora for the past couple of days, and wondering whether it would be incorrect of me (or perhaps even politically incorrect of me) to consider blogs – not all, but some – as a form of narrated diaspora.

Wikipedia – that reliable of all hallowed sources *smirk* – suggests:

the term diaspora carries a sense of displacement; that is, the population so described find themselves for whatever reason separated from their national territory; and usually they have a hope, or at least a desire, to return to their homeland at some point, if the “homeland” still exists in any meaningful sense.

Now, we (the bloggers and other users of the digital world) have hardly been forced from our homes and into this strange new online world… or have we? What’s it like, trying just to get by in life without engaging with computers and other technology?

Can I argue that there does indeed exist online a diasporic culture, and therefore a whole genre of writing (perhaps, nay probably, subconsciously) related to this longing to return to the offline world? Or, equally importantly, a genre of writing by people navigating and attempting to deal with and understand the online world they find themselves a citizen of?

According to Wiki, the term “diaspora” has connotations of a scattering of peoples… and that’s certainly what happens online. Offline, we operate in family groups, in social and professional circles. Online, we’re on our own. There are networks, of course, but when it comes down to it, it’s just you and your blog on one side of the screen, and your readership – perhaps of three people, perhaps of hundreds – on the other. What better to do than to write about your life – partly as a means of engaging with this readership, but partly also as a means of attempting to understand yourself, and what the hell your life means.

Certainly worth considering. Now don’t steal my ideas.

(This is a future apology to myself for citing Wikipedia, but shit – it’s late, your work was due hours ago, and this is only an idea, after all).

PhD update – month two/three

I’m already being slack with updating this blog, which is terrible, because – given that I’m researching blogging – it’s probably important that I keep some sort of online record of my PhD experience, if only because one of the problems with Internet Studies is that the field is so dynamic and is constantly changing, and in three years time I might want to remember what the online world was like (and what I was thinking/writing about) all those years earlier.

So – an update. I met with one of my supervisors*, M, last Friday, and as usual it was a session that involved me sitting there brainspewing all kinds of random crap in her direction, and her looking at me with a visage that kind of said, “what the hell are you on about?!”. I’m having an immense problem articulating myself at the moment; this much I know. I have no doubt that my inability to say what I mean has to do with the fact that I still don’t quite know what I mean, or what I want, from this experience.

Anyway, I want a scholarship next year. I missed out this year (at Curtin – I did get one at UWA, but frankly, I’ve spent more than enough time there already, so I turned it down), and my best chances of getting a scholarship next year lie in me a] being accepted to present at a couple of conferences this year, and b] having had my candidacy approved by the time that scholarship applications are due in late October. So, just because I’m completely mad, I’ve given myself a deadline of July 17 to have my candidacy application ready to send off to the Committee. July isn’t so crazy, except for when you consider the fact that I’m only studying part time, and have to hold down a three day a week job, and I seem to have developed a bit of a thing for exercising which takes up at least one hour of my day every day. On top of that, I’m generally quite lazy and unmotivated, so the next few months will definitely be interesting. I somehow have to kick my proverbial arse not only to study, but to make sense of the stuff I am reading, in order to get myself that scholarship. Curtin offer $10,000 to recipients of the Australian Postgraduate Award on top of the nominal sum of around $20,000 that all recipients receive, which is a pretty damn fine incentive to try get one.

My “uni days”, then, involve a lot of writing in my little notebook** and asking myself questions along the lines of “Why are you doing this?” or “What does this even mean” and “How do these themes fit together” and “Where are you going with this?”. I ask myself an awful lot of questions along those lines, actually. I also do a bit of reading – about blogging, about the Internet, or about other things, such as phenomenology (say it three times quickly) or Manuel Castell’s theories of the network society. Coming up with a focal topic for my thesis is incredibly difficult. In it’s current incarnation, my thesis will be a study of the narration of self through blogging, interrogating positioning (place and space), belonging (how we negotiate our on and offline environments in an effort to “fit in” – or not), and nostalgia (with elements of diaspora and other discourses of longing/”writing back”), with a particular focus upon the ways in which Perth bloggers narrate their lives online. My question & objectives are due in to M by the end of the month, so I’m not stressing too much yet, but I’m still feeling a little overwhelmed. Is it meant to be this difficult?

Finally, today, after living in this house for over four months, Boy and I finally got around to re-arranging the spare room (sort of), so that it now contains a couch and a desk for me to sit at and study. The desk is a little small, and it seems to have been built for a left handed person (the space in which to spread stuff out is on completely the wrong side), but it’s pretty damn cool to have this study space at home. The downside is that the window looks right into my next door neighbour’s house, as our property is a lot higher than theirs, but seeing as I’ve seen my neighbours about three times since we moved in, I don’t anticipate that it will become a huge problem (although they may be staring at me as I write this, through the strange tinted windows).

* For the record, I have two supervisors – M & H. H is on study leave for the first six months of my studies, and M will be on study leave for the next six… which leaves me in the interesting situation of actually having a one month period where I have no supervisor on campus, whilst I’m feeling like I’m up shit creek without a paddle.

** In case anyone gives a shit (and I’m absolutely sure you do not), I do the vast majority of my notetaking/thinking/questioning by hand. I write in pencil on large Moleskine (“mol-eh-skee-nah”) soft ruled notebooks, because a] I hate having to read things back on computer screens; it hurts my eyes, and I miss things, b] the paper is off-white, which is very easy on the eyes and looks pretty damn cool, c] Moleskine notebooks are the shit, and d] I actually really enjoy reading my own handwriting, which I find quite artistic. In Western Australia, Moleskine notebooks can be purchased at Borders on Murray St or Luxxe on King St in Perth, or at Planet Books on Beaufort St, Mt Lawley. The size I use costs $27 for three, 192pg notebooks. Check out Flickr to see what people are doing with their Moleskines (I absolutely love browsing this group).

A title, for now.

Current working title of my thesis, as of about ten minutes ago:

In words and pictures: Narrating self through blogging, and other online discourses of being.

I like it. But I’m sure that will change…

Conference – Interrogating Trauma, December 2008

I received some good news yesterday – my abstract has been accepted for a conference in December! Entitled Interrogating Trauma: Arts & Media Responses to Collective Suffering, this will be my first conference, so I’m pretty happy. The deadline for abstracts has been extended, so I’m guessing they haven’t quite got enough applications yet, but of course I’m hoping it all goes off without a hitch.

I’ll provide a link to my abstract once the conference website has been updated – I’m not sure of the protocol re: publicising work at this stage.

The conference is to be held in Perth, Western Australia, and is being hosted by Murdoch University and Curtin University of Technology. Deadline for abstracts is May 15.

Introducing…

Welcome to the academic and the fool. As you’ve probably guessed by the fact that there is very little movement or information here, this blog is brand new, and won’t officially be “launched” (and when I say that, I mean I won’t officially link to it elsewhere) until there’s a bit more going on. I have a bad track record when it comes to keeping up a second blog, so there’s a strong chance that this will die long before the world gets the chance to discover it.

Hi. My name is Erin, and I’m a PhD student in Internet Studies at Curtin University of Technology, and I’m addicted to the Internet. Not in a perverted or sex addicted or socially-inept-but-somewhat-comfortable-as-a-ghost-in-the-machine kind of way, but more in a cultural sense, and in the sense that there is no way I could ever give it up completely. But of all the addictions I could possibly have, this is one of the better ones, rights?

I’ve been online since 1996, and whilst I’m hardly a pioneer, per se, I’m certainly well aware of my way around this place. Having been online for so long does, however, mean that I sometimes find myself completely overwhelmed by the direction in which the Net is heading. Twitter? Facebook? Stumble Upon? YouTube? RSS? Whaaaaaat? What ever happened to the good old Java chatroom that took a horribly long time to load? Do chat rooms even exist in their old form? What about mIRC? Are people still using mIRC and ICQ?

I’m sure they are. I’m not anymore. For those who care, I am on MSN and Facebook. I also blog, and have done for around nine years now, in some form. If you’re quick, you’ll realise that I’ve just credited myself with blogging before the term had even been coined, which would – ultimately – make me a full of shit geek-wanker, wouldn’t it? But I have. Only back then it wasn’t blogging – it was online journalling, and I was on LiveJournal. I’m not going to provide the address to my old LJ because it’s simply too embarrassing and, in an effort to cover my tracks just as my last blog started to get a decent readership, I went and made most of the posts private. I just logged in, and it says my last post was 123 weeks ago… but I assure you my last proper post was actually on July 15, 2002. I was particularly emo.

In terms of blog-blogs, I’ve been keeping my current one – And this is what I think: – since September 2004, although it was hosted at Blogger until quite recently, and had a different name (two, actually). I blog because it gives me something to do. I blog because I want something to remember my life by. I blog because lots of things make me laugh, or make me shake my head in confusion, or make me angry, and I have an inkling that they might be things that other people appreciate, too. I blog because I love reading other blogs, and I like getting to know bloggers and their worlds.

This blog is about my research. My main reason for starting it is so that I don’t fill up my other blog with crap that will probably only interest a couple of my readers. Many posts will be cross-posted: the ones that I think the ordinary public might find interesting. I wonder if I’ll manage to keep it up?