David Pogue reviews David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect (which I haven’t read), in which he, Pogue, takes Kirkpatrick to task for shoddy writing in the beginning of the book, which is about the formation of Facebook, but praises him on the end of the book, which is about privacy issues and the future of Facebook. Standard review so far, nothing objectionable. But in the third-to-last paragraph, he says:

It’s odd, though, that a book this carefully considered completely misses another possible Facebook effect: in an age in which one click establishes a new “friend,” young people may be losing the skills to build real friendships and negotiate real social encounters.

Now, I haven’t read Pogue in awhile, but I thought he would be savvy enough to avoid such stark, simplistic either/or logic. Does he really believe that the ease with which one can “friend” someone on Facebook negates meaningful real-life relationships and compromises the ability to interact socially? I expect this from people less versed in social media, but Pogue should know better.

I find this sort of thinking in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows as well (which I talk about at Attention Theory). There is no middle ground here. Either we friend people on Facebook or we have real-life friends. Either we  pay attention to our Twitter accounts, or we read books and contemplate ideas in isolation. It is as if we must choose one type of media for life, as the various media represent some sort of zero-sum game for our attention and our cognitive ability, as if we could not choose to switch between them at will, depending on the context, the current need, or the goal we are trying to reach.

What is getting missed here are choice and force of habit. We choose how to interact with people and things, and these choices can become habit. We can forgo IRL relationships for Facebook friending, we can stop reading novels and other long-format works in favor of Twitter and blogs, but we don’t have to just because these new media exist. These media are not stealing our brain cycles like a parasite, nor are they causing irreparable damage to our brains or to our sense of social purpose. They are tools, like any other.

I recently ran across Jonathan Franzen’s 1998 essay on privacy “Imperial Bedrooms” and was struck by some of the similarities of his account of privacy and the current debate about facebook. In the essay, Franzen is talking about Ashcroft’s invasion of privacy and the simultaneous uproar and lack of real concern. People aren’t really all that concerned with privacy, he says. . We increasingly bring our private lives into the public sphere via cell phones and other media, and our obession with television speaks to a yearning for an end to privacy, at least for celebrities, and insofar as we want to become celebrities. The extent to which we bring the private into the public shows how we value and view privacy. Franzen is not as interested in the private sphere as the public: “”what’s threatened…isn’t the private sphere. It’s the public sphere”  (48¹). The commons is not a place of communal activity, but a lot of private bubbles that spill over into those of others.

“[T]he networked world…ugly spectacle of privacy triumphant” (50) What is facebook, then, but a private public sphere (or a public private sphere?). On Facebook, we broadcast some what,at one time would have been the most private details of our lives to the world, depending on our ever-shifting privacy settings. In other words, we input personal details into a corporate-owned database, in exchange for a a sort of community, however we choose to define that through our friend-adding and privacy-setting practices.  I understand the outrage when those settings get unilaterally changed, but do we expect anything better or different, and do we pay attention to those settings in the first place?

How can we expect privacy or get outraged in the inevitable event when facebook decides to sell our information to advertisers? Facebook is out to make money, and their product is our information.²  Put differently, we are facebook’s product, not its customers.

Many have no conception of the potential audience of our online activities, nor of the longevitiy of these posts, and many, for better or worse, don’t care. Franzen’s assertion that the public sphere is in danger takes on new light when we think of social networking sites, which might be thought of as new public spheres, except that they are, in the main, privately owned, much like shopping malls.

In an attention economy privacy is poverty. Instead of asking how much privacy we should be able to expect, we might ask how much we really want?

1. from How to Be Alone essay anthology
2. as a side note, what is it about advertisers, anyway, that causes such revolt? Shouldn’t we be happy that our ads are getting more targeted to our perpetually insatiable desires?

• Excellent organizational skills obtained through years of teaching, as well as through writing a massive document, as well as juggling publications, departmental service
• Superb writing skills, if I do say so myself
• Tech skills that likely surpass those of other applicants. Word processing, social networking, database searching, blogging, educational software-ing…I can do all that, and have been for many years.
• Ability to use bullet points
• Great communication skills. Years of academic conferences, committee work, teaching and publishing have honed remarkable written and oral communication skills in a variety of contexts.

But, also like many recent graduates, I have little experience in the corporate world. I fear that I am perceived as having the deadly combination of being over-qualified (a term I absolutely despise) and under-experienced. I also am not as familiar with corporate lingo as those who entered that culture out of college, which makes it hard to recognize jobs for which I may be qualified. I am not looking at nonacademic jobs only as Plan B, nor am I bailing out of academia, but trying to explore my options on both sides of the fence (as well as those that are firmly on the fence).  What can I do? Freelance writing of any sort, teaching/training, editing, proofreading, tech writing, software implementation…the list goes on. Perhaps I should, as this article suggests, start with my passions instead of skills, but that’s easy – writing and teaching are truly my dual passions, and anything that incorporates either or both should make both me and an employer quite happy.

1. Remember that your committee wants you to succeed

This is usually true. Your committee would not let you get to the stage of a public defense if they did not know that you would pass. They have seen drafts and given comments on your project, so they know it and know whether it is ready. They will ask you hard questions, but, in most cases, they won’t try to trap you in unanswerable questions.

2. Know that you know what you know

By the time you get to the defense, you will have been living with your project for years. You will have thought about it, written about it, discussed it, and worried about it on some level, pretty much constantly, for a long time. You know it inside and out.

3. Know when to shut up

My dissertation director’s wife, an attorney, told me this a few days before the defense, and I took it to heart. If you are nervous or aren’t sure of an answer, one of the worst things you can do is keep rambling, hoping to say the right things. You are more likely to start floundering or wander onto a topic that you are not prepared to discuss. Instead, shut up and see if they have follow-up questions.

4. Be aware that your committee is performing as well

Your committee is performing for the audience and for each other just as much as you are. Keep this in mind and it gets a little less intimidating.

5. Keep it simple

When summarizing your project, simply tell them what you did. Keep it simple. Here is my project. Here is the question I posed. Here is the research I did. (A faculty member gave this advice the day before)

6. Engage the question honestly

When I present at conferences, I sometimes adhere to Robert McNamara’s advice in Errol Morris’s documentary Fog of War: “Don’t answer the question they asked. Answer the question you wish they had asked.” Works for politicians and sometimes at conferences, but not in your defense. Your committee members are experts in their field(s), and have been through their own defenses as well as those of others, and they will smell any diversionary tactics. You are better off trying to engage the question as asked, and get as close as possible to an answer. Which leads us to the next two points.

7. Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know”

There is no shame in admitting you don’t know how to answer a question. A flat out “I don’t know” probably won’t work, but a stab at the question preceded by “I don’t know exactly how to answer that, but…” might work wonders. I often found myself towards the end of an answer that I was not sure I had answered to the questioner’s satisfaction, and I would stop and say “I don’t know if that answered your question…” which invited clarification or guidance (this goes with #3 – know when to shut up).

8. You can’t know everything — don’t expect to

You are the expert in the field of your dissertation, and it’s possible you know more about certain aspects of it than your committee, but you can’t possibly know everything. If questioning goes beyond your topic, admit that you are not familiar with whatever new topic has come up.

9. Get a good night’s sleep

Cramming won’t do you any good. Worrying won’t do you any good. Sleep, if you can get it, might do you good.

10. Have fun

I know this sounds weird. A faculty member told me this the day before, but it makes sense in light of some of these other points. You will pass. This is your chance to show that you are the expert your committee suspects you are, and there is no reason not to try to have fun with it. It is your big moment, after all.

Between the sessions and the twitter backchannel, I learned a lot from these historians, archeologists, archivists, rhet/comp scholars and others interested in digital humanitites. It was fun trying to figure out who people were based on their twitter handles, and having multi-layered disucssions. For example, when someone mentioned a link in a session, someone would tweet the link within minutes, creating an ad hoc link/conversation repository. This method also worked for break-out sessions, where a group of people find a mutual interest and schedule a new session by editing the original schedule and tweeting an announcement. More information was packed into these two days than I would ever see in a traditional conference with more people.

I attended sessions on Open Courseware, social media analytics, teaching with technology, geospatial technology, Zotero and scholarly networks, and scholarly publishing, and we had a vigorous discussion about facebook vs twitter. I hope to   The people and topics addressed are too many to mention, but I will give a few links for those interested below.

Delicious links from the conference. Lots of goodies here!

A list of all the tweets on March 20-21 with #thatcamp hastag

A twitter list of many of the participants

A list of all the campers from the blog.

On the other end of the spectrum, how do our online personae affect our chances of obtaining employment? Posting online is always to some extent an exercise in reputation management. I am currently beginning to look for a job, preferably academic but possibly not. I have several public identities online — this blog, my twitter account, and walled and semi-walled gardens like Facebook, Google Buzz, and others. I know people who delete or restrict their facebook and twitter accounts when looking for a job. Is there a difference between academia and private business in terms of google-searching applicants?  Academics are expected to be public in some ways, but not necessarily so in business settings. Is it better to be invisible?

Brown’s history lesson at the beginning is provocative, but his appeal comes about 3 minutes in. What I like is that he brings social class into the discussion, albeit a bit sketchily. Luckily, Dave Parry at Academhack discusses the video and teases out some of the class elements.

So, can one get an equal education online as in a classroom? If you are looking for knowledge and information only, yes. But there should be something else that college teaches, something that comes from college life, from interaction with peers and professors that you can’t quite get online. Unfortunately, with larger class sizes and the increasing use of overworked part-time labor, these things, as Brown points out, may be disappearing.

Christy Dena has an inspirational post about transitioning from the “Training Wheels” of  the Ph.D. to whatever comes next.

Some liveblogging about a talk by Julie Cohen about networked selves.

Some of my own stuff:

Have I told you I am coblogging about a topic I have been thinking about for a long time: Attention Theory?

On an extremely lighter note, here’s a link to my silly tumblr with which I have no idea what to do, and to which I have just posted a picture of a snake smoking a cigarette.