Today I'll be giving a presentation about this chair blog I've been keeping. I'm also 2 weeks from finishing up my term as interim chair. So it seems like a nice convergence of things which might bring a bit of closure to this blog. Not that closure is a goal for blogging. Actually, the opposite seems to be true. That blogs have no closure beyond people just giving up on them. On the other hand, both as a writer and a reader, I am always looking for closure. I love when a story comes full circle and some small detail from the beginning proves critical at the end (a la "rosebud").
I can see from my first day at the C&W conference something I already basically knew was true. That those who blog actively also make blogging a part of their constant work/life practices which are saturated with tech use. So while attending a workshop, I observed people who post their notes on their blog as they listen to the workshop (in this case using a ning private social networking site). People also carry their cell phones with them (iPhones of course!) so they can twitter about their experiences or post brief facebook entries about their experiences at the conference. In other words, there is a growing group of people who remain linked in all the time so they can communicate and record their experiences.
That's not a radical observation. It's already been made by others. What is interesting for me as a chair, though, is to see how some people's work styles have shifted while other types of jobs remain rooted in earlier modes. As chair, I've found I actually prefer to use even email less and less to solve problems. I can in 5 minute conversation explain and resolve issues with faculty and persuade them to things which I could never do on email or via facebook. Time, or the lack of it, is always the key for a chair: Time to manage people issues, time to meet deadlines, time to track progress on issues. As chair I need less linkage to the large tech community and more local linkages to my faculty and administrators. Now if all those people were linked in, as they might be in a big company, I would be able to resolve issues, perhaps, via twitter. But of course my faculty, like so many in English, are mostly not linked in.
I had a friend years ago who left the technical writing company where we worked to take a job at Microsoft. This was back in maybe 1990. At the time, MS was just rising and she thought it would be a really exciting place to work. What she found, though, was that people there didn't talk to each other much in person. They talked to each other via email or chat from their cubicles. She said she missed our small firm chats around the coffee machine. I'm sure that wasn't the only sort of interaction that went on in at MS in those days, but she was struck by the difference when she got their.
All of this calls to mind the book Feed I'm reading about teens who are permanently linked to the world net through a sort of neural link surgically placed in their head. The mechanics of the link are only sort of explained in the book, but it's classic cyberpunk and the concept makes sense. The kids stay online in their heads all the time, so they can call up encyclopedia info., chat with friends, even watch TV and news in their minds. But they also are constantly bombarded with ads telling them what to buy to stay hip. The kids are, as one might expect, a bit screwed up. A cool book overall which I am only a ways into. But the language and writing style is fascinating. One of our grad. students, Josh Lederman, told me about the book last year. He regularly teaches it.