thinking is the new black

Dramatic events in the thinking is the new black house hold this week, when my personal computer began to sound as if it were being powered by a russian hamster on a tread wheel. Unfortunately it was the hard drive in my 3 year old mac mini that gave up the ghost.

Apparently living in and powering my mac-mini

Frankly at the time, an utter horrendo disaster. Although I regularly back work up, and managed  to salavge all my thesis and teaching work, I still lost some of my itunes and photo data. It’s a painfull lesson to learn as I’ve spent several hours already this week, loading CDs into itunes and rummaging around for old software disks and memory cards. But thanks to some help from my friends I now have a suped up 160GB, and modded mac-mini as good as a brand new one. And I have discovered a great Mac Mini civilization camped out there on the t’interweb of streams.

Even more nail biting perhaps was the return of my TV husband Jack Bauer, in a one off special 24 Redemption. Damn It! This has certainly wet my appetite for Day 7 which is on in January. I’m now beside myself with excitement.

I always base the upgrade of my mobile phone on what ever Jack is using, so the writers strike in the US has meant a delay and me being stuck with a rather rubbish motorola razor for some time and looking like a right old laggard. Jack I am waiting for you.

sorry Bruce Parry - there can be only one. xx

I’m always impressed by good public speaking. 2 speakers whom I‘ve yet to see surpassed are Professor Lord Giddens and, you guessed it… Mr Steve Jobs. I’m captivated when they’re on stage. So intoxicated by their modus operandi that for the duration of the talk I suspend any critical facilities I possess, and in the round up and applause I find myself almost besotted.

piccie of Giddens

At Tara Brabazon inaugural lecture she gave a great performance. But like the other two, what I find amazing is that, and this is particularly true of Giddens, the performance itself is so energetic, convincing, dynamic etc. that there’s this while, where I shelve my analysis in favour of being totally impressed by them and their intellect.

Here’s a synopsis of her lecture as I understood it.

Tara began talking about what she calls “the seagull effect”. You know when a dirty fat gull swoops down and nicks your ice cream, right out of your hands. When it comes to reading, writing and thinking, we’re all racing to take the last chip off the plate in case it goes. With a super-size portion of irony she used the image of the cover of Malcolm Gladwells’ Blink – “Thinking without thinking”. The audience sniggered; thinking without thinking is the stooooopist funniest thing ever to an audience of professional intellectuals.

The idea of the collapse of time and space has been knocking around since Daniel Bells seminal “The coming of the Post Industrial society”, perhaps even a tad before when the invention of papyrus by the ancient Egyptians ignited globalisation 1.0. But according to Tara the events of 9/11 have seen a parallel trajectory with the speeding up and condensing of information. We expect everything bite size and quick about it.

Academic expertise will crumble under web 2.0 & I will end up as a cheap talking head, according to her. Experience is now much more important than expertise. Oh dear.

Her beef with Google is that it ranks on popularity not importance and therefore we can no longer tell the difference between popular and significant information, especially, because to be popular you need to be popularist. And finally in a passionate call to arms to the academic world she urged the community to improve the calibre of scholarship online. Google, she said, has provided the infrastructure and it is down to us to improve the social structure.

Part 3 coming soon...where I’ll actually share my thoughts.

I’m going to be no 1 on Google under key word search: brilliant. It’s going to be world domination

More inspiration from the world of work readers – all 62 of you. I want to increase the readership of this blog and spread the love.

For someone so interested in technology I have come to the understanding that I am actually not marvellously technologically competent. Nevertheless I’m learning all sorts thanks to my new job and I have also noticed for sometime that blogger.com and safari aren’t all that simpatico. I am loathe to give up on safari completely and I’ll be damned if I’ll install explorer, so I am going to have a whirl at wordpress just as soon as I can find the time between being a social networking goddess and my other labour of love, the thesis.

I’m coming across so many interesting communities and websites in the office through my research that I’ve been tagging like no ones business on del.icio.us which I want to share with y’all and the narcissist in me needs to be on technorati and the like.

Watch this space for the new url coming soon.

mwwaa ha ha ha

I love Steven Fry’s new column in The Guardian.

Like Slim Shady I’m back, back again, in fact I’m the slim shady I’m the real slim shady – in truth I am a slim lady.

Now there are several very good reasons for my departure for the months of September and October and for semantic economics I shall resort to a bullet points

• It was my birthday in September and my birthday lasts a whole month
• All manner of upheaval with the long suffering b.f who decided to suffer the PhD and myself no more
• I was writing a new draft of my literature review – this is the sum of 2 years worth of reading folks

And now most excitingly I have gone over to the dark side. Yes readers, I am in the commercial world of work, I am indeed, a paid employee. But have no fear I have retained my strong hold in all things technology and social shaping having taken up a position as a content and media analyst with a digital marketing agency in an exciting and visionary team – doing social media audits for big brands and am now finishing up the thesis PT. Rather ironically then social networking has kept me from social networking!

For these reasons and for transparency I feel it is necessary to rename the blog as my escapades are now not solely in academia. Escapades in the office just doesn’t have the same ring to it, but I promise the content of the blog will still have the same heady mix of intellectual fodder and glamorous lifestyle comment – to that end I have decided to call it

Thinking is the new black.

I’ve been busy tinkering with my literature review 20,000 words and counting and gathering a little more interview material, before I begin the long lonely road that is ‘writing up’. I am actually really excited about finally writing the thesis and it’s hard to believe it could all be over in April.

Success at the two conferences I went to in July and it seems my paper on Steve Jobs has gone down well, and may very well be published online in September. MeCCSA was loads of fun, and great to meet other researchers and share all our woes. I have to say the cake selection was remarked on as much as the key-notes and plenary though. UWE certainly fed everyone very well. I consider myself some what of an expert on high tea, having championed the 4 O’Clock session at the Dorchester way before Kate Moss and her posse got in on it, & having recently sought out Angelina, just about one of the best patisseries in Paris, so I feel somewhat of an authority. A group of Finish academics who I had lunch with on the last day, asked me to take their group picture with the dessert plates and the conversation moved very swiftly from questions of epistemology to the marvels of chocolate fudge. I am cake crazy at the moment – just made a batch of lavender and orange and was eyeing up the Mario Testino tea room in Ship Street on Saturday. Perhaps when this is all over I shall open a trendy tea room called “The Public Sphere”, with Spark style notes on Habermas in the menu?

Anyway IAMCR –Paris. I am absolutely ga-ga over modernist architecture and all objects 1950’s so a high point for me was getting to be in the UNESCO building for 3 days. It was designed in 1958 by Marcel Breuer one of key Bauhaus gang and the inside is a cross between a giant ski-lodge and an urban cathedral (aka hideous / gorgeous). Unfortunately such was my awe that I spent most of the opening address, gazing wide eyed around the vast room, and fiddling with my head set, changing language channels, impressed by the interpreter booths, and thinking “gosh this is just like being in a film of being in the UN”.
During all the sessions there was an amazing mix of nationalities and it is a testament to the IAMCR that people travel from all over the world to attend, but special mention must go to the Spanish hombres – who were all dressed to kill in dazzling tailoring. They looked like wall street bankers or retired premier league footballers, golden tanned, sharply dressed and stood out against the usual academic corduroy aesthetic. I was also mesmerised during another session by a female speaker who had modelled her look on Jerry Springer it seems. She spoke for a full 20 minutes in a peculiarly measured tone, with absolutely no inflection or intonation in her voice . I suspected her at one point, of being an android dressed in a stolen bank clerks uniform due to the glowing man made fibres and high buttoned collar of her blouse. She scanned the room with her eyes at regular intervals like a light house beacon, so everyone in the audience received an equal amount of eye contact and punctuated her sentences with small duplicate hand gestures –lift hand up, wave slightly, speak, – sort of thing. Definitely a robot, or that is what happens when you do research for too long.

I’m back, after a long break, ready to turn my full attention once again to the glamorous world of postgraduate research.

The transfer meeting finally came at the beginning of June and despite feeling I was going to keel over with stress during the preceding few days, it was a huge success and a motivating experience. I had an ‘extra’ on the panel, a professor with some weighty experience in my subject area who fired a 10 point list of questions at me, but who said afterwards that these were exactly the type of questions I would be asked in the real viva and that I did really well, so although it was tough on the day, it was all useful stuff. My department were a bit worried that having such a large panel would be intimidating but anything that prepares you for the real thing I think can only be a bonus.

Aside from having some time away from the UK in S.E Asia where I sadly took the books with me, I have been away at several conferences this summer – MeCCSA & the IAMCR, presenting a paper, which emerged as part of my analysis on the idea of the human logo and personality branding. I prefer to think of this as taking the data on tour, which sounds a bit more rock and roll. IAMCR was held in UNESCO in Paris and all in all was a great conference with some high quality papers and top notch panels. More of this soon…

I would like to say for the record that ‘marking sucks’. Official.

I’m faced with a pile of first year reading logs, plus assignments for two other modules I teach on, and am slowly loosing the will to live. There is a strange lump forming on the middle finger of my right hand through clutching a pencil for 16 hours, and my eye-balls feel oddly sore.

Marking is the short straw when you’re a lecturer on an hourly rate. It takes time to mark carefully and give useful feedback and I, like so many other research students do not get paid for this or the preparation for classes. Therefore the deceptively decent rate of pay when divided by actual time invested in the role, works out at roughly £1.23 per hour at a rough guess.

Grrrrrrrr!

Transfer time is a bit like ‘Hammer Time’ – remember he of the peculiar pyjama pants, and nifty running man dance moves?

As is usual with per her ders I am registered as an MPhil. I have been working on the research for 2 years now so it is time to face a panel and explain why I am making an original contribution to knowledge and should be allowed to progress to a PhD and write the damn thing up. No pressure then.

I have been working on the report for a few weeks in between teaching 1st and 2nd year undergrads and was hoping to have the whole process over and done with, but alas I have to wait for the panel to schedule a date that all necessary peoples can be in the same room at once – hopefully some time this decade. There is also a bit of political argybargy at my place about who should attend. The SuperDupers are very keen to get the report perfecto and dazzle the panel which has been frustrating as advice is somewhat organic, there are no consistent guidelines on what the report should contain and SuperDupers are occasionally given to a nebula communication method during counsel (though advice given is usually superduper once harnessed and processed by me), plus being dyslexic my grammar sucks when I am tired and I seemed to have developed a new car-crash approach to syntax.

I am beginning to feel bogged down with the waiting and where as a few weeks ago I was uber confident that I would enjoy the experience, I am getting more anxious the longer the wait goes on. I would like to write the thing and move on with my life at some point y’know? Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those research students who has grown to hate their project and feels trapped by the burden of finishing. Not in any way shape or form, in fact I love and believe in my little idea (cue torch ballad), but I do not want to work on it for the rest of my days and I am feeling as if this might be the case. Therefore I am thinking of telling them all to hurry up, come around to mine for a BBQ instead and I will present a copy of the report and a performance to make clear why I should be allowed forward, because….

Can’t touch this
Can’t touch this
Can’t touch this
Break it down!
(Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh)
(Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh)
Stop! Transfer time!

Last week I joined the long suffering b.f, and some of his work colleagues on a music industry jolly to the launch of Groove Armada’s new album.

I have been to this type of event before (actually a younger, pre-PhD version of myself used to organise this type of thing, though sadly never for anyone as cool as Groove Armada) Nevertheless, the usual set up with a showcase is that it is quite a small audience of influential industry bods, music journalists and radio types.

Imagine my horror when we turned up to the venue to find the world and his wife and someone she knows who knows so and so, queuing around the block. Obviously at this point I was not taking into consideration that ‘I’, who had no intention of submitting a review to MixMag/ TimeOut / Guardian etc. had managed to blag an invite by association and what was OK for me should therefore be acceptable for the other 200 or so hangers on. But at the time I sniffed at the prospect of queuing up to a be constantly knocked and pushed past once inside, whilst clutching a plastic glass of cheap booze.

The door policy was utter chaos, with the PR co giving out different coloured wristbands that allowed access to various free bars. I never really managed to work this out, but it appears they were actually grading their guests, which doesn’t strike me as the best policy for bringing in new business. Blue – you’re really important, Pink – we like you but don’t give a monkeys if you have to stand at the back where you can’t really see the band and you can only drink sugar infused bright blue alcoholpops, and finally yellow -you have wronged us and must therefore stand at a bar 5 people deep waiting to be severed by a surly and overwhelmed barman only to be told the bar has run out of drinks and you have missed the first 4 songs. This resulted in a lot of “Do you know who I am?” and ringing of mobile phones, furtive calls on the mobiles, air kissing and saying hello to people they clearly had never met to demonstrate position within the hierarchy. Imagine this at an academic conference dinner –you’re a professor so you get three courses and a glass of wine, you’ve recently published a paper in a well known journal so you get after dinner mints and you – well you’re just a research student so you may sit at the table and make conversation but do not under any circumstances touch the table setting.

As a friend of one of the performers long suffering b.f was given a special wristband whilst the rest of us were actually deemed the lowest of the low and left bare wristed – the shame! However before the band had even arrived on stage the free bars to which he had access had run of drinks completely, so I stupidly volunteered to make a foray into a crowd of others to begin a long and arduous journey to the paying bar.
35 minutes later I was finally served 4 bottles of beer, but only after having my oxygen supply cut off and nearly suffocating in the throng /passing out from dehydration and being elbowed out the way by a bloke who also told me to F*** off when I pointed out that he had pushed in-front of me and stepped on my foot. It then took another 10 mins to make my way through the crowd and find my party. What joy – what fun.

Thankfully Groove Armada was absolutely brilliant, and can really pull it off as a live act. (They play all their own instruments you know!). I really enjoyed their set even though they only played a few tracks off the new album – the classics like super styling and my friend were fantastic and made it all worth it –particularly the live trombone and vocalists. I even managed to shake my arse a tiny bit despite the ridiculous lack of room within the multitude for major arse shaking.