Getting Settled

I'm feeling a bit more comfortable in the office now, but less so in the classroom. I've had trouble keeping up the level of creativity I usually like to employ in lecturing; it's devolved to basically lecturing the whole time, and then showing a video clip here or there. It could just be the material, but I still don't like the trend. Hopefully now that I've been able to streamline my process for class prepping (thanks to the slides provided by the publisher) I'll be able to spend less time retyping words from the book, and more time coming up with interesting ways to get the students involved.

Also, that should hopefully give me time to do some work on my research. I've got a couple of grants that need writing, and ideas that need cultivating. One of the things that I have been thinking of lately, that could maybe get developed into an idea, is the idea that new media and the "connected" lifestyle lead to fractured senses of self. I never really found this idea compelling, though I will admit that I do subscribe to the idea that the self is a construct that is created in interaction with other people. However, I think that the new media, rather than fracturing the self, create a continuity that reifies the self as the set of artifacts that exist in (primarily) the digital world.

It is a truism that, once on the internet, data never truly goes away. Similarly, a self, constructed online, is not as ephemeral as the conversational and gestural interaction of two people. Text conversation and message board posts exist as conversation histories and archived discussions. Video communication is easily recorded and shared with the world (surreptitiously or otherwise). Even the less tangible, interaction-in-the-moment reality of face-to-face conversation is often captured as digital video or photographs using cameras and phones, later posted online using Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube.

Not only are the traces of interaction thus solidified from emphemeral, momentary phenomena, but they are also distributed across individuals. Just as we might back up data by spreading it across several storage solutions (i.e. DVD-ROM, hard disks, online storage, flash drives, and hard copy printed on paper), our selves, created in interaction and recorded by these media, spread across multiple people. Each recipient of an email, each person who downloads a photograph from Flickr, and each viewer or downloader of a video from YouTube retains a record of the self presented in that medium. In any of these cases, the construction of the self is out of the hands of the individual, and exists as a collection of the material evidence of the self - the photographs, the video, the recorded speech, and the text communication.

In this context, the self is not fractured, splintered and ephemeral. Rather, the individual is chained by the digital record of their past behavior to a reified, solidified self that is visible to the entire world, accesible to all, and free of context and true interpersonal contact. Individuals can not rely on geographic and temporal separation between selves to exist.

Examples of this abound. Recently, several medical students were penalized for "misconduct" online . Some of the information the students presented was in violation of ethical codes, but in some cases, it amounted not to violation of the patients privacy, but of the boundaries between the students' selves. It is not unethical for the medical students to drink to excess on the weekends, but apparently it is unethical for them to reveal that they do so. However, in the digital world, they are unable to fracture their self based on context, and the self is reified and compressed into a single expression, that of the sum of the digital selves and the interpersonal selves, permanent and undeniable.

Payday

Or, at least, the day we turn in our time cards. It will be nice to have the bank account going into higher numbers again, instead of just slowly declining. We're still living fairly comfortably, but are (and have been for a long time) feeling that twinge of worry in our stomachs every time we spend money. Like so many other things during this time of transition, it is the unknown that is terrifying: the unknown of how much we'll have left over after paying the bills, the unknowns of having so little in the bank, the unknown of Amanda's paycheck. So, we wait, and eat noodles and rice.

My classes have been going fine, but I am clearly spending way too much time preparing them. It's become apparent during the last week or so that if I continue at the division of time I have right now, I'm never going to get any research/committee/grantwriting done, because I'm always prepping for the next class. So I think it's time to dial back my expectations for myself a bit, and use the materials that come with the book a bit more. Besides which, the students are probably hungry for some more lecture and decreased emphasis on the activities.

I'm hoping that this rebalancing will enable me to get some work done for myself in the next weeks, and have an article out for review soon, not to mention finishing the revision of my dissertation.

And on the 7th day...

It was the first day of week 2 today. My morning class, Advanced Criminology, went pretty well, but I do feel a bit like the students are unaccustomed to the seminar style. Some of them at least seem engaged, if not really advanced, while others seem utterly disinterested. A lot of drops as well, but I don't find that surprising, as I am making some fairly heavy demands of them. On the other hand, it's a shame that they're not willing to try to stick it out.

I got really nervous about coming into work today. I'm not sure if it's just that the enormity of trying to manage an entire semester has finally settled on me, or I'm going through the pain of relearning what it is like to have a daily schedule and appointments, or just the general worries that having a new job entails. In any case, I've got that I'm-going-to-get-yelled-at feeling, even though I haven't done anything wrong. It reminds me of when I was a kid, and I'd leave some incriminating piece of evidence for some small wrongdoing uncollected. Consciously, I'd be unaware of the mistake, but unconsciously, I'd have a feeling of heavy dread in my guts that would snap into the crystalline panic of realization just at the moment my parents told me they needed to have a talk.

I suppose in some ways, it's the same fear now: the fear of being found out, of being a fraud and getting exposed. The fear, in other words, that I don't belong here and can't hack the job. I suppose that is indeed the fear everyone has at a new job, and that by being proactive and diligent I'll eventually get comfortable and convince myself that I actually am who I am (to borrow a phrase). In any case, I hope it passes quickly.