To get an idea of the complexity of the film, check out this infographic by Sean Mort, which is a stab at outlining the dream levels of the film:

I might quibble with the top level being called “reality” instead of perhaps another layer of Cobb’s dream, and I might watch the film again and realize I am completely wrong.  Having seen it only once, I am unclear about whether Cobb is dreaming in the outermost level, but here’s the thing: I don’t care.¹  Either he is dreaming or he’s not, but I expected that to be in question, and, frankly, would have been mildly disappointed if it were not.

Some have pointed out the film’s similarity to a video game, and some have posited a generational divide in understanding or liking the film (Henry Jenkins is in the middle of this debate, as outlined in this post), but I can’t help thinking about Inception as a film about film making and spectatorship.  This may not seem particularly insightful as first blush.  Apparatus theory is well known for treating film as a dreamspace, and the dream metaphor abounds in theory and in casual descriptions of the medium, so it makes some sense that a film about dreams might also be about film itself.  I would make the same argument about Waking Life, for example. Indeed, Nolan himself confirms both the video game parallel and dream-as-filmmaking motifs in a recent Film Comment interview.

The reason I don’t really care about the outermost shell of the film is that, even if there is an exterior reality for the characters (for Cobb, in particular), what does that mean for us, the viewers?  The whole thing is a construct; as the dreamspaces are constructed by Ariadne, the film’s premise, mise en scène, etc., is constructed by Nolan and everyone else who worked on the film, so the question is not about the lines between reality and the “subconscious,”² of the characters, but between the film world and that of the spectator.  In what respects do we, as spectators, inhabit the dreams of films, and to what extent does the cinema inform our imagination?  Where is the line between what we want to think of as reality and the barrage of media images we sustain daily?

So, in addition to being a film about filmmaking (and video games, and dreams…), the film is asking some fundamental questions about what we do when we go to the movies, and to what extent this activity is embedded in the ways in which we imagine and experience every other aspect of our hypermediated lives.  It is safe to say, at this point, that there is precious little distance between images, narratives, and ideas produced by others, mediated and shown to us on screens, and the lived, personal reality to which we believe we have privileged access.  These screened images have become an inextricable part of that reality, to the extent that it makes little sense to distinguish between the two.  Like others before it, the confusing, layered narrative of Inception brings this false dichotomy to the foreground.

1. which is not to say I won’t see it again and try to figure out more precisely what is going on. It is just not that important to understanding the narrative devices.
2. an unfortunate term I wish would disappear from pop culture in favor of “unconscious”

Looking back, this blog has grown, both in subject matter and readership, and so has the nature of blogging.  People comment far less often on blogs, I have found, opting instead to respond via their own blogs, or twitter, or other outlets, which is fine.  I am always grateful when a conversation ensues, no matter the venue.

The thought crossed my mind the other day that I might shutter this blog, maybe start a new one, or move exclusively to twitter, where a lot of  energy that used to go into blogging goes now. I have a few reasons for contemplating closing this blog. As stated above, twitter is taking a lot of this sort of energy, but twitter is good for some things, and not for others. For example, this post would not work on twitter (“I am thinking about closing A Memorable Fancy because I tweet a lot” would likely be the extent of it). Also, now that I have graduated, I feel as if I’ve moved on in many ways.  This blog might serve as a chronicle of grad school for me, and a new blog or venue might signal a rebirth, a moving on, a commencement. But that’s stupid. If we want that, just look at any post before March 31, 2010 as grad school, and anything after as post.  You don’t change after graduation — everything is a continuum.

The last reason for possibly closing (and deleting) the blog would be pure caution. I am on the job market this year, and I really don’t know how this blog reflects me as a scholar.  There have been times on here  when I have been whimsical or otherwise thoughtless, and in these times, I may have been impulsively critical of the very institution in which I wish to make my career, or perhaps I have revealed too much personal information, which could be used as fodder for search committees looking to eliminate candidates.  On the other hand, it could (and should, and does, IMO) show a dedication to thinking about issues surrounding cinema and other media.  I wonder what my readers think about this.

In the end, I will keep the blog, and Iwill keep posting here.  I am tempted to go through and sanitize, clean up, trim here and there, but I probably won’t.  I hope anyone looking at a post from 2005 reads it as that of a newly ABD grad student, still finding his way in the academic world, and anything from 2010 as that of a marginally more mature  new Ph.D, still finding his way, sure, but at a different stage and with a wider perspective.

1. this probably isn’t really number 300, due to a database crash a few years ago, but whatever

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?