The Infinite Terror of Blogging Pt 3

(I promise I will start using a different title eventually. But trust me, using this title one more time will make sense. Honest.)

I am, by my very nature, a lurker.* I'm the consummate wallflower, a constant observer absorbing everything I can about the world around me. But while I comment in my own head about what I observe, I don't really feel the need to comment out loud. I read articles, I follow blogs, I read Twitter posts, but I don't say anything because a) website comment sections are truly scary and b) why? For much the same reason that Prof. Groom doesn't feel the need to get a cellphone, I don't feel the need to comment. Who am I to say anything about what anyone else says? So I lurk, learning and retaining mountains of largely useless information.**
Which is directly contradicted by the fact that I've been blogging for nearly 10 years. I started on deadjournal.com and slowly made my way to Blogger in February of 2005. I can search within that blog for nearly ever major landmark event in my life and can give an approximate date to when those things happen. I lay bare for anyone who wants to read it, my entire life in that blog. While I'm embarrassed by four or so years of what I wrote about, anyone*** can read about my avid fangirliness for a number of topics during that time simply by googling the right terms. But how does this effect anything outside my personal life? It doesn't. I blog to keep a record of my life so that when I get older I can look back and remember what I was like when I was fifteen, twenty, twenty-five. Alzheimer's runs in my family, so I would like to know that for better or worse there's a record of my doings for people to remember me by. Because as much as I lurk, I still want to be remembered.
So what of academia? In as much as I blog about anything, I blog about my classes. I don't blog about each of my classes to the extent that I suspect Prof. Groom will be wanting us to blog about this class, but I do talk about what I'm doing in school. Of all the things we'll be expected to do, I suspect for me that blogging about every step I take in this class will be the hardest thing to do.
I don't blog as much as I use to for many reasons. The biggest hope I have for this class is that I will start blogging more because I'll be inspired to blog more, instead of because I feel bad or whatever. And now, just to prove a point, here's a bunch of media stuff. Enjoy.
(one of my favourite videos of all time)
[caption id="attachment_28" align="alignnone" width="202" caption="Provided by thefilmstage.com"][/caption] (one my favourite movies that I saw last year)



*In classic internet parlance. Other synonyms include leech, which is probably accurate to a certain extent.
**Or useless at this point in time. Perhaps sometime in the future the useless things I know will be handy. I doubt it, but you never know.
***I've actually thought this through, at least in certain aspects and I just hope that no one looking to hire me figures out that the crazy blog they're looking is written my yours truly. Because if they ever did, there's a good chance no one would hire me.

The Infinite Terror of Blogging Pt. 2

As hinted at in my last entry, I am very slow to adapt. It took a few months after getting into college to actually get a facebook account and it took my sister wittering on about the funny things being said on Twitter for a few months to actually convince me that Twitter wasn't completely worthless.* In fact the only way in which I'm truly progressive is in what I listen to and what I watch.** As I discovered when I was studying in London, I am actually a forty year old in a twenty-two year old's body (which can be very inconvenient, the forty year old can get quite grumpy about those youngins). Which leads me to my next point...
Last semester I had the opportunity to take a number of upper level history classes. I'm a music major who thought she wanted to be a history major, so getting to take three history classes was a revelation to me. In all three of those classes, at one point or another, each of the professors made the point that while the curriculum and ideas taught by academia can be quite progressive the actual professors are perhaps the least progressive people in the country, especially in their unwillingness to adapt to new things. Which leads me to my next point...
I have mixed feelings about "A Personal Cyberinfrastructure." One part of me, the part that probably convinced me that blogging was and continues to be a good idea and who got me to finally join Twitter, completely agrees with what Gardner Campbell has to say in both the lecture and the article. But the pragmatist, the part of me that knows that there are people in their mid to late 20s who don't know how to work a power point presentation, thinks that his ideas are nice and yes it would be great if we could implement them, but it would never really work. The majority of professors, heck even the majority of middle and high school teachers, would be unwilling to adapt to the new technology. The same professors who rail against Wikipedia as completely untrustworthy and incapable of providing accurate information would be same professors railing against Prof. Campbell's ideas as unnecessary and incompatible with higher education. They're wrong on both points, but they aren't going anywhere and so Prof. Campbell's ideas will, in all likelihood, go unfulfilled until my generation comes into power.*** That is, if people not like me become tenured professors at universities. Because I'm still not sure about this whole website thing. I like my templates.

*Hello! Welcome to my version of footnotes, wherein I make tangential comments that wouldn't make sense in the body of the entry. Tangential comment: This is a true story. I didn't get on the Twitter bandwagon until February of '09 but almost immediately started following Stephen Fry and rash of British comedians no one has heard of. It was a good day.
**Mwhahahahaha. The footnotes are not always mature.