Jennifr

Offline Social Networking.

Met with Shani Lee ( Nlab co-ordinator and part of CCCLeicester) this afternoon for lunch and a natter at DMU. Came across a few points of shared interest - which was good. Especially when we are on the same page about the predominance of Leicester’s new media and social technology presence online.

I am all for emphasising on the “social” part of social media (as I am, first and foremost, up for coffee/sandwiches/beer - it is an important part of my work and without it, I go a bit deranged) so it was good to find out a bit more about other social media organisations that exist offline. We were talking about audiences, publics and the possibility of becoming “friends” with people who you have never met before.

I know that the Internet is great for 1) discussing technology 2)discussing how to use this technology for other things and 3)using the technology to find new technology to take over from the technology that got all broke (oh I wonder what social networking platform that I could POSSIBLY be refering to!) - and- as I have decided to take a crazy interest of mine and pursue it further at Ph.D. level, I find that most of the stuff I discuss on the Internet has to be directly related to my course/future research. Great - it’s so postmodern and self-referial that it attends to my microautisms about online identity management. I get to have some really interesting and intense discussions about what I am doing, with people who are essentially doing the same thing… all the while without complicating things with academic speek and having to go through rigourous procedures to get something out on the public domain. Oh the freedom..

But that’s all very well when you fall into the domain of  the “computer/internet/digital/media” sector. You become well versed in the language of the medium, despite not having much experience in the back-end of the internet - and therefore can rattle on ahead of everybody else - trying new things and coming up with theories about how this can be used in different contexts.

I find myself having to hold myself back, now and again. I don’t use the internet to run my social life. I don’t really the Internet for anything apart from what I am doing now (Shani asked me to define what I want to be when I want to come out of all this, didn’t have the answer straight away and I’m remaining openminded - I am still trying to articulate why I am in Leicester, let alone trying to work out what I actually am going to be “when I grow up..”) As I think I drunkenly rambled the other night, I will probably still be a bar maid, but a bar maid who is doing a Ph.D. - an ironically safe bet, I fear.

So, when it comes to using social technology in terms of career development - or within a university - or even to understand it as something that is quite rapidly becoming part of a lot of peoples’ day to day lifes, I still fidn it hard to understand and/or to explain why people might want to use it to discuss anything other than computer related stuff. Maybe it is because this is my “thing” and I have no interest in using my “thing” to talk about the other stuff I like.

That’s what the pub is for.

And that is why I’m starting to feel like I’m living two, very transparent double lifes. I’m too social for the computer geeks and I’m too geeky for the social butterflies. The very essence of my Ph.D. They never said that studying online identity was going to be easy.