Integrity, Ideally

Small thoughts about large issues

My Photo
Name:
Location: Madison, Wisconsin, United States

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

New departure

I have decided to start using this blog again to help my writing. I've been experiencing significant, prolonged problems with focus. One of my strongest supporters, James Sosnoski, encouraged me to resume writing as a way to focus my research and intellectual development.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

My thesis plods on. I've decided to take a Foucauldian approach to discussing the formation and structure of academic departments. I think my most interesting contribution (not to say it is unique to my work) is my vision that the "docile body" of the perfectly trained infantryman is analogous to the graduate student. The soldier is charged with the task of defending and representing the kingdom. The graduate student, in the same way, must act as a representative of his or her department through field-wide activities such as conferences and journals and then protect the reputation of the institution as he or she seeks employment elsewhere. 

I've also found great material in the work of Gregory Shepherd, who makes the case that communication study is about ontology rather than epistemology. True disciplines are caught up in clearly defined "things" whereas communication is more about Being and existence. This is indeed a fairly obvious idea upon reflection, but it's my contention that such reflection and self-reflection doesn't occur much. 

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

I haven't made the time to write about the process of my thesis. In a certain sense, this is good because that means I've made significant progress on the thesis itself. I believe that's true enough in my case.

What it also means is that I haven't allowed myself to sit back and examine what I've actually done since February when I began compose my first thesis draft. I haven't taken the time to figure out and comprehend what the thesis actually means.

In my proposal defense I made the comment, "No one will read this." What I meant was that I wasn't overly concerned with the notion that my work would revolutionize the field of communication. I simply lack that kind of confidence in my work. Unfortunately, my committee appeared to take great offense to that statement. As was pointed out, I made it seem as though I had asked three people to waste time sitting on a committee for a project about which I cared little. 

While this is of course not the case, I do have some doubts about the overall legitimacy of my work. 

In this field we are encouraged -- disciplined -- to make our work generalizable. I use discrete information to build a case study. As such, the circumstances and explanations -- the evidence -- are unique and particular. While someone could use my work as an example of department history, my findings themselves would likely be of little use. 

A mentor of mine constantly asks me if I'm having fun doing whatever it is I'm doing. When I think of the alternative paths I could have chosen, the answer is "yes." Perhaps personal fulfillment is utility enough.

Hopefully you've noticed that I've taken great care not to use the word  "discipline" in this post when referring to what communication study is. This is by design, as my thesis deals with the notion of communication study as a field or a discipline. Discipline has a much weightier component to it than field and there has always been a debate among communication scholars as to whether what they do and the space in which they work is a discipline or a field. 

Discipline seems to be a much more desirable mark of distinction. Field seems nebulous. 

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Second Life

I'm headed back home to the Pacific Northwest in a few hours. I'm co-teaching a course that I hope will be an ethnographic study of Second Life. My students will explore the online environment and report on their findings each week. They'll discuss social and technical issues related to the technology and the built world.

I admit that I had only messed with Second Life briefly about a year ago. I dug around for my character name and password and found that somehow I had selected Japanese as the tutorial language. I suspect that the tutorial could tell me how to change language preferences, but, as Chris Farley once said in a skit on SNL, "I'm sorry -- I don't speak Japanese." Click here for the skit, courtesy of YouTube and some dude who violates copyright law.

To make things more interesting, I chose an Arabic name for my character. I was promptly approached by a guy from the United Arab Emirates. Oops.

Labels: , ,

Thursday, November 29, 2007

First day of the rest of this blog's life

From the time I made my last post to now, Blogger has changed irrevocably. I don't know what this will mean for my compositions and my postings. I hope my stolen and altered design scheme remains intact.

I've been inspired to take up blogging again by two graduate school colleagues who are also my friends (the two things aren't synonyms, usually to the determent of all involved).

The blogs are located here:

Mixed Messages

and here

The Wandering Jew

I'm not revealing their names because they both seem to want a certain degree of anonymity and that's fine. I like to think that the latter got his title from a line in a Simon and Garfunkel song. I make no guesses about the former's.


I don't know this blog will become, but I hope I'll be able to make occasional posts that are like those that I made before -- that is to say things that have some depth and relevance to a somewhat medium-sized group of people.

I had a blog about the very beginnings of my research on the car radio. Maybe I'll continue that here (Mixed Messenger has a post where he talks about talking about his thesis though I don't know how serious he is). I still care about car radios, despite evidence that the manufacturers of the devices in the 1930s (like William Balderston of Philco) didn't.

I also care about other things, now. Like disciplinarity (though my advisor prefers to talk about post-disciplinarity, but he's older than I am). [Sidebar: Firefox doesn't recognize my chosen spelling of advisor/adviser.]

I started to read Annette Markham's Life Online: Researching real experience in virtual space tonight. It's an autoethnography about writing an autoethnography about online experience. It's a good book on the subject, I think. I don't know anything about autoethnography. The experiences I've had with it before Markham's book made the methodology seem like little else but the kind of material one might find on This American Life. It has its place, of course, but I wonder about the overall usefulness of it at times. But I research car radios so I don't know how much room I have to talk about scholastic relevancy.


Enough of this. I've got to get ready for Jaime time.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Dogs and Prunes

I've started to wonder if dogs enjoy prunes. I like prunes.

Friday, July 21, 2006

John Battelle's The Search

Though I’m coming to a review of The Search a year too late, I can explain why. I bought the book on its release, very excited to read some good journalism about the hottest business topic of the day. I was sure that Battelle, who had been chronically his progress on the book on his own blog, would deliver. Halfway through the book (in a matter of three days – a possible sign pointing to its lack of depth) I’m realizing that this is not the case.

Thus far, I have two major gripes with the book. The first is the writing itself. The book is written in informal magazine style, in keeping with his roots as a “cutting edge” technology writer (having worked for Wired and Business 2.0, magazines that try desperately to be “too cool for the room”).

This would be fine enough, except that Battelle has a habit of jumping around from year to year, talking about decisions made by players in Google’s history before he actually introduces them. He never fully explains why it was important for Sergey Brin and Larry Page – Google’s founders – to resign their chairman and CEO posts, nor does he tell the reader what their new titles are. Battelle also has a habit of reintroducing people several times, a practice which at times seems a cheap way to up his page count. His writing style thoroughly muddles however much thoughtfulness there was to his project. I considered keeping a tally of how many times he used “well” as an interjection, but lost interested after I ran out of fingers.

On page 150 he discusses a lack of managerial prowess on the part of Brin, Page and new CEO Eric Schmidt. According to Battelle, one of Google’s investors, John Doerr, insisted that Intuit founder Bill Campbell come on as a leadership coach. Battelle uses an anecdote from journalist John Heilemann’s GQ article on Google, which quotes Doerr as saying, “I don’t know where the company would be without him.” However, Battelle doesn’t include any of his own reporting on what Campbell actually did. Neglecting to explain right away what this ‘miraculous’ shift was is, in my own journalistic view, irresponsible. Not to mention that he doesn’t include the actual title of Heilemann’s article in either the main book or the citations.

Later in the book on page 172, he tries to play the role of not only a technology writer, and search historian, but also media theorist and critic, waxing about how Google ought to be considered a media company – not just a technology company.

In the book’s final chapter, Battelle introduces the idea of having several different kinds of information contribute to “perfect search,” including every tech writer and journalist’s favorite idea, the blog. He bulldozes through a description of the blog and later posits that we have reached the critical mass point, “but we don’t know it yet.” I suspect that Battelle means that he’s savvier than users and other writers and he knows something we don’t, but he doesn’t explain why he thinks we’ve reached the tipping point, nor what that means in the overall discussion of what the blog can do.

Though Battelle tries to play his book as a “history of search,” it is nowhere near as comprehensive as such a book must be. It is a book that sings the praises of Google, nothing more. However, that the book is a history of Google is fine. The company certainly is interesting and large enough to warrant an historical account and Battelle ought to be forthcoming with his intent.

The short discussions he does include of the company’s search engine precursors such as Lycos and Alta-Vista need considerable expansion and deserve to be considered as more than also-rans, if he really wants to be considered the historian of search and not just Google’s corporate historian.