140 characters of resistance.

It's not hard for me to admit when I'm wrong. In fact, I suffer from a chronic lack of confidence in my opinions, so believing I'm wrong is actually my default setting. With that said, I want to admit on these pages that I was wrong about Twitter and its usefulness in my life.

I started out using Twitter for purely academic purposes; I was conducting research for a paper about how the 2008 presidential candidates were using Twitter to communicate to their "followers." At the time, Twitter bored me. I didn't get it. I didn't think the candidates were using it in any particularly interesting way; it was as if they'd simply been handed a "Politics Web 2.0" starter kit and Twitter fit nicely in the Microblogging compartment. My guess at the time was that voters who were aware of and using Twitter didn't need to hear from Hillary Clinton that she'd be making a speech at their local Barnes and Noble that day; they probably already knew. Of course, this was just a hunch, and while many innovative research papers have been predicated on a mere hunch over the years, this paper in particular needed some quantifiable data to back up my theories, so instead, I looked at how often (and to how many followers) the candidates tweeted.

After I finished writing the paper, I still saw no use for Twitter.... and then a funny thing happened: people I really like started to use it. All of a sudden, I used Twitter all the time! I didn't always post what I was doing (after all, I hold fast to my contention that my friends can't possibly care about the contents of my breakfast), but I sure started reading it a lot more often. I even signed up to receive tweets on my cell phone so that I could hear up-to-the-minute news from my friends as they walked through their lives in boston and DC.

So, I would like to admit that I was wrong. Like many things in our lives -- especially communication technologies -- a narrative needs to exist for why we should incorporate a new habit, some compelling reason to nudge us in another direction. For a long time, that narrative just didn't speak to me.... and then one day it did.

(I would also like to take this time to state for the record that I think Twitter will be dead within six months, or at least left in a shallow roadside grave once a better / shinier new technology comes around.)

http://twitter.com/boobasket

Twittered Out.

For one of my final papers, I decided to look a bit more closely at Twitter, the micro-blogging service that's sweeping the geeky nation. I first heard about Twitter last year when a friend sent me an invitation to join (not that it's a club, but he thought that telling his friends personally might encourage them to accompany him on the Twitter journey). So, I checked it out and read all about how Twitter would allow me to keep my friends abreast of every facet of my daily minutiae (except they phrase it a bit more appealingly). My immediate thought was, "um, why in the world would my friends care?"

You see, Twitter works kind of like those silly Facebook status updates. But it's like a status update (called a "tweet") that you can write from anywhere--your phone or instant messaging service or simply through the site itself. I seriously wouldn't be surprised if by next week, they figured out a way to send tweets via carrier pigeon.

Twitter is very straightforward. In fact, compared to other technological devices, it's remarkably unassuming. It works by prompting you to answer the following question (within a 140 character limit): "What are you doing?" As you can imagine, this yields a wide variety of responses, but as you can probably also imagine, few of them are actually very interesting.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm often surprised by how entertaining/informative those silly Facebook status updates can be. I just can't imagine why my friends would ever want to hear little bits about my life in real time, especially when I'm (rather impersonally) telling all of them at once.

"Boo is writing a paper."
"Boo is pacing."
"Boo is eating cereal."
"Boo is looking at photoshopped pictures in which the babies' and men's heads have been switched! http://manbabies.com/1"

See what I mean?

Anyway, for my paper, I decided to look at how presidential candidates were using Twitter in their campaigns. And do you know what I found out? Their lives are just as boring as mine! Not surprisingly, Obama and Clinton use Twitter to alert their "followers" (people who sign up to receive their tweets) of upcoming press appearances, or to remind them to register to vote. McCain, however, likes to tweet attacks on his opponents. My favorite was: "Barack's people ask vulgar question of McCain http://twurl.nl/s0kcuc"

I should take a step back from my criticism for a moment and say that I absolutely understand how Twitter can be useful. After all, it's helped to free someone from an Egyptian jail, report an earthquake in Mexico before the USGS got on the case, and organize activists.

In other words, micro-blogging serves its purpose. I get that. And I think it'll be interesting to see if it ends up filling a gap in investigative journalism or allowing organizers to keep a step ahead of the police trying to shut them down, or making conferences run more smoothly than they typically do. But as a service that supposedly offers some value to my life, I just don't see it.

So, I think I'll keep my tweets to myself for now.

an unlikely source of cruelty.

I just looked up from my frozen, immobile, panoptic cell in the library to see a ladybug crawling on the window right next to me. clearly, it's taunting me. I've never before felt any venom towards a ladybug, but today, when it's beautiful outside and i'm indoors, trying hard to care about my last final in grad school, I just want it to fly away and enjoy the sunshine/greenery out of my line of vision...

dispatch from the bowels of the library.

In the past 72 hours, I have...

consumed:

coffee
cereal
the media

thought about:

collective action
how much i dislike belle and sebastian (and why)

counted:

caterpillars on the sidewalk with my niece
to 10 before i lost my cool

wrapped:

my head around Heidegger (result: a half-baked final paper)
my eye socket around someone's shoulder (result: a black eye)

liquid love.

a little known fact about me: I like to take pictures of the beverages I drink while I'm studying or spending time with beloveds. I do this for several reasons: I love coffee and tea, I love drinking them with others, and taking pretty pictures of them in cups reminds me of what was going on at the time -- who was sitting across the table from me, what I was reading, who I was creepily checking out, so on and so forth...

Since I have to get a new phone, I will be losing all of these pictures, so I decided to keep them here for a while.
As you can see, there are some differences among them: sometimes i drank tea. sometimes coffee. sometimes americanos. the pictures also represent different places: dc. boston. school. cafes.
But there are also some common themes: sunshine is one. colored mugs is another. deep appreciation for hot beverages and good company is a third (though my shitty camera phone doesn't always capture that one so vividly and though one of the beverages pictured below is iced).

uhh...

I just fell asleep in the shower. no joke.
also: I haven't eaten spinach in 3 days.

in search of glue.

I really want to be sleeping but my brain has been humming for too many hours and now I can't shut it off.

contents of the hum:

I've been putting some pressure on myself these days -- a bit of it is due, and a bit of it is undue--and I guess I'm trying to sort out how to attend to the due parts (the undue will always persist regardless of how much attention I throw its way, and really, I should be focusing on why I put undue pressure on myself, not what that nagging, vague force is compelling me to do).

You see, this program I'm in resembles, in some ways, scattershot pellets shot into a dark night from a well-intentioned rifle (where pellets = my academic courses of study and dark night = my future). This is the nature of interdisciplinarity, and I get that. Not only do I get it, but I also signed up for it and it's a little late in the game to be complaining about it.

However, now in my last semester, I'm craving a way to tie it all together. I want to weave the last four semesters into a pretty french braid. As a useful corollary, it's Week 6 of my classes which means I'm supposed to be thinking about what I want to work on for my final projects. But all I can come up with are loosely linked concepts that I care deeply about and want to cohere into a larger idea that makes my motor rev. (Oh, how I want, so desperately, to rev.)

Here, in no particular order, are the aforementioned half-baked concepts:

• collective action -- the power of mobs
• social capital as a byproduct of virtual activism (in other words, just because we can't always quantify the benefits of online political movements doesn't mean that their effects are moot)
  
• the (un)importance of transparency/authenticity in building trust

In other news, I realized that I am addicted to spinach. see also: caffeine and songs about robots.