I’m supposed to read this horridly dry book on social research methods tonight. Thus I’m blogging. It seems like the further I get into grad school the less I like reading… A simple 10 page paper full of new ideas or problems can get me thinking and scribbling for hours, stomaching hundreds of pages becomes an exercise in rejection, skim reading or other futile actions. I find my mind spends at least as much time thinking about the various people and social circumstances in my life as it does on research, classes and work combined. I wonder if I should have been a social worker.
Anyway I was thinking about my community informatics concepts class from last semester. I played a rather strong – no overbearing – role in it. It felt like I was in a room full of terrified mutes but looking back on it and knowing what I do now, I think it’s largely that people didn’t like me. I think I may have actively ruined participation with my intensity. Anyway, it’s this reason I need to be in PhD classes, but besides this I was thinking about this and feeling bad. I want to apologize to all of the shy and quiet people and those who might have felt squelched because of my all too often open mouth. But what would I be apologizing for? To make myself feel better. And that’s rather shatty. So my current theory is a new metric of apology. Generally, one should only apologize when they will make the other person feel better at least as much as themselves.
This clearly leaves apologizing to (forgiving?) oneself off the docket, but still.
As my studies go, I’ve come upon another revelation: Facebook was easy.
I mean seriously! I was an insider in to the community (or at least one of them) and could find all kinds of different social and psychological theories that would apply to the way people behave online. Data-collecting techniques were clearcut – find a theory and a bunch of questions, and observe, interview or survey. Done.
Now I’m essentially enacting as a nonprofit consultant for social service institutions. I’m pretty inexperienced and bad when it comes to figuring out their needs – and all of my leadership experience has been with people pretty similar to me (rich students). Suddenly I have to figure out how these places work, design programs for them involving technology training (pretty much on my own, I have 2 other students to help me), and while that, to me, seems like a worthwhile ‘project’ or challenge, it’s considered elementary. Never mind that establishing relationships and workable programming is scary, I’m supposed to evaluate all of this and keep it housed in scholarly questions and theory. My advisor warns me to stay away from being ‘too practical’ and I increasingly worry that I’m going to turn tale and run back to Internet studies for my dissertation.
Sounds like I need to have a conversation with Ann Bishop, but then she sometimes struggles to find acceptance in academe, and she’s a tenured professor.
Once in a while I think about radically changing my trajectory, nabbing an MLS and running off to the nonprofit/saving people world. And then I remember that this economy is (supposedly?) disastrous and I’m wildly privileged. I just don’t feel like there’s a lot of academic guidance or support for me right now, I guess. Which worked well when I was studying Facebook, the thing I understood and no one else (around me at the time) did, but not so well when I’m trying to study something that’s new and uncomfortable to me.
The good news, though, is that my social life has managed to stabilize a bit post-Mandy.
Time to go back to reading…