Morning flight to Chicago. The anteaters will have to deal without me until Monday because I have some very important meetings to attend…

I have a strange habit. When things get really stressful, I start fantasying that I am somewhere else. This is nothing unique, but in my case, studying technologies that actually allow people to be somewhere else, it expresses itself in slightly strange ways.

When writing the literature review for my thesis, for example, and having spent so much time researching virtual communities, I decided that I should do more than read about them — I should live in one too! And so off I went to LambdaMOO, one of the most famous text-based virtual communities.

Sitting in my DC condo, I would slide my LambdaMOO existence off to one of my screens, while continuing to typing away in Word. A quick glance to the terminal with its black screen and white text was enough to remind me that somewhere else, some portion of me wasn’t enduring the pain of writing a thesis. This worked, kind of, but not for very long. (more…)

A couple links for your Friday fun. Some new, others fall under the “in case you missed it.”

From the “technology is so cool” department: 10/GUI

Dear mouse, you suck. Monitor, you too. See what happens when one goes about “rethinking the desktop to leverage [new] technology in an intuitive and powerful way.”

From the “let’s create an infrastructure no one needs” department: Project ‘Gaydar’

At MIT, an experiment identifies which students are gay, raising new questions about online privacy.

From the “Jed just really likes flash mobs” department: Madonna Celebration flash mob in Shinjuku, Tokyo

I particularly love the ballet girl at around 1:50. For CCTers out there — musicals and utopia? I think so. For Megan, who says networks are “unhuman”?

(via Towleroad, and omg, I just found another — in case you want to know what one look like when a drag queen takes control.)

And just because I am running around at UCI Medical Center this morning: Computer detects abuse before doctors

Victims of domestic abuse can hide the truth from doctors, but they leave clues in their medical records that a computer program has now learned to follow. The program could save lives by acting as an early warning system for domestic violence, flagging up possible cases of abuse to doctors months or even years before they would otherwise be detected.

When considering “What is an author?”, Foucault describes writers as hollow shells destined to shuffle around drafty apartments, stare vacantly across town squares, and presumably come into the unknowing ownership of a large number of cats.

Alright, some of that is me. He does say:

..it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the writer. Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author.

Given the number of papers I am writing this week, I might be putting this to a literal test. However, I just received some exciting news that is deserving of an interruption: Digital Technologies of the Self is out, and along with it, my chapter on craigslist Missed Connections.

Image courtesy of Yasmine Abbas's hand, and the helpful birds on Twitter.

You can find information about it on the publisher’s site, and it has even shown up on Amazon, where you can (as I have – tehe) sign up to be notified when they have it ready to be shipped to your eager hands!

What is the book about, you ask? (more…)

… it will probably be a miracle. Between multiple workshop papers, annotated bibliographies, and literature reviews, all due… well, now more or less, this is a whopper of a week. Thanksgiving in Chicago is on the other side, and I can only imagine I will have plenty to be thankful for. Provided I make it through this week.

In the meantime, please enjoy what I am declaring the cutest profile picture on Facebook:

David Fourel — I have no idea who you are (or how I even ended up on your profile), but bravo!

Tonight Judy Olsen presented in my research methods on what she calls “the ten questions.” Apparently originally deployed on PhD students at the School of Information and the University of Michigan, these ten questions are designed to structure your research and (apparently) make graduation day arrive sooner. While they do structure research into a certain type of academic work, I do like the narrative they create. Without delay, here they are:

1. What is the problem?
2. Who cares?
3. What have people done about it? Why is this not solved?
4. What am I going to do about it?
5. What am I REALLY going to do? (A.K.A., how are you operationalizing this?)
6. What will/did you find?
7. What does this mean?
8. Who cares?
9. Where are you going to publish this?
10. What are you going to do next?

I am not exactly how this might map on to my attempts to problematize identity (ahem), but I am curious to try. Hold on, this might be a bumpy ride…