I've been annotating a copious amount of articles about how the social web is reshaping conventions of public space and identity, and I just gave a presentation at CCCCs about the performance of normative gender roles in status updates on Facebook. I started collecting interesting articles on delicious for my writing students, who are investigating the ways in which different electronic interfaces mediate human interaction.
In short, I'm up to my ears in writing and thinking about things like the architecture of digital publics and our subsequent, potentially tactical (in de Certeau's conceptualization) actions within them. It's week 9, hardcore time, and my intellectual energy is being distributed among a sizable number of force fields, but I wanted to share one Facebook-related thought here. Its seemingly very simple nature belies its complexity, I'm sure, but I won't get into that here, mostly because I need to get back to getting into it in my annotated bibliography for Lois's seminar, Advanced Theory and Philosophy of Rhetoric.
Sometimes, browsing my News Feed is comforting. It cheers me up. I like seeing that others are out there, doing stuff, having happinesses and sadnesses, crises and triumphs. Frustrations, joys - reading about the happenings that are happening every minute somehow sustains me by reminding me of all the people who are practicing life in the same minutes as I am, all of us with our "likes" and dislikes, worries and dreams.
Inevitably, these fuzzy Facebook feelings meet up and tango with a few theoretical paradigms in my scholarship. But for now, in this space, I'm just glad to know about what folks - my folks, the peeps I've met from here and there - are up to. It makes me happy to be alive.
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