I have it on good authority that despite what the website says, Camgirls is finally in stock at Amazon. So go buy a copy, if you've been putting it off.

Tags: activism, gender, internet, politics, pop culture, work

No work is more fun for me than editing, and I've never had more fun editing than I did last December when I worked on Terri Senft's Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks.

Camgirls is a book about women who live their lives in public on the web, and it concentrates on webcams in their heyday, but that's really just its hook. It's a book about how celebrity and community operate online. It's a book about LiveJournal. (Terri has been participating in and observing LiveJournal culture as tsenft for eight years, and she's got a huge amount of smart stuff to say about how LJ operates as a tool for building connections between people.) It's a book about feminism, about sex work, and about how gender is lived on the internet. It's a book, fundamentally, about the construction and presentation of the self in the online era --- about how we establish and maintain ourselves as people and as personae when we live our lives online.

It's a hell of a book. Really. I bought two copies, so that I can lend one out and not worry about getting it back. Go get yourself one. If you do, and you regret it, mail it to me. I'll pay you for it, reimburse you the shipping, and find it a good home.


Update: Forgot to mention --- If any of you are interested in reviewing Camgirls, or if you or anyone you know is teaching a course in cyberculture or women's studies for which you might be interested in assigning it, let me know. I'll get Terri to hook you up with a PDF reader's copy.

Further Update: So it appears that Camgirls is not yet quite available. Consider this a pre-publication endorsement, and I'll post again when the book is actually on offer. I'm still happy to make arrangements to get PDFs out, though.

Tags: activism, gender, internet, politics, pop culture, work

So I've been really busy recently --- took a work trip to Vegas, am elbow deep in the book, trying to get back in the groove with the last round of pre-defense dissertation edits, warily eyeing the syllabus for this fall's class. There have been some interesting personal and professional developments for the upcoming academic year that I'll be talking about eventually. And our sitter is on vacation for a week and a half, so I've been home with the kids.

It's been fun, though, being with the kids. The other day I made a half-hour-long recording of a conversation between me and Casey that started with Rosa Parks, meandered past Thurgood Marshall to the concept of race, and from there proceeded back from the early settlement of New York City to the theory of evolution, the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, and whether elephants, like birds, are the lineal descendants of dinosaurs.

Elvis is pretty damn cool too, I'm being reminded. I think I said something in my last Elvis post about how no parent can ever be at all certain how many words his toddler actually knows, but spending a couple of days in a row with E has really been an eye-opener. She has a lot more words than I'd realized --- I have no idea how many, but it's got to be several dozen.

A couple of weeks ago I was participating in a focus group downtown, and I went out for dinner by myself before the event. I took a notebook and pen and wrote out the Elvis update I'd been meaning to post, and then promptly lost track of the notebook. By the time I unearthed it, I was well into the crush of work I mentioned above. But since I've been with the kids all day, C1 is letting me hide out a bit while she preps dinner, and I'm going to transcribe the thing.

...But not just yet, it appears. Elvis is melting down, and interfering with dinner prep. I'm needed. Watch this space.

Tags: casey, elvis, family, work

As I noted in a friends-locked post yesterday, I've launched a new blog at studentactivism.net.

The blog is a hub for news and analysis about activism that's taking place on campuses today, and for historical background as well. It's a resource for activists, scholars, and bloggers who want to be kept informed about what's going on. (And despite the name, it's not just about activism either --- it's about students' rights, student empowerment, and all issues relating to the student's place in the university.)

I've been researching and writing for the blog for a couple of weeks now, getting it ready to go public, and I've got to say that I've been startled by how much there is to cover.

Just to pick one example, there have been four major anti-sweatshop sit-ins on American campuses in the last two weeks, at universities from Pennsylvania to Montana. (One of them, at the University of North Carolina, is now in its ninth day. The other three ended in mass arrests.) I've seen no coverage of these actions outside of local and campus media.

There are lots of student activist bloggers out there, and lots of great activist media outlets. But as far as I can tell there's nobody else doing what studentactivism.net is trying to do --- provide a daily ongoing roundup of events in the world of student organizing and student protest. Because of that, there are a lot of actions that folks aren't hearing about, and a lot of important stories that just aren't getting told in the major progressive blogs.

In the 1960s students would read about protests on other campuses, or watch them on television, and be inspired to launch projects of their own. Today, the mainstream media aren't covering student organizing, so that kind of inspiration just isn't taking place. The big political blogs could be serving that function, but they're unaware of a lot of what's going on themselves. Student networks are doing a lot to spread the word, but they're mostly speaking to relatively narrow slices of the student population, and very few of them are reaching a significant audience beyond the campus.

The time is right for new approaches, and I'm hopeful that studentactivism.net can help fill the gap. If any of you have suggestions for how we can do that most effectively, ideas for stories we should be covering, or information on resources we should be tapping into, I'm all ears. (We've been doing mostly short stories so far, but look for longer analytical and historical pieces in the future. If you know of great writing we should be pointing our readers to, please give us a heads-up.)

One last note: It's my experience that publicity that's posted to the net at the start of a weekend tends to produce a lot less bounce than it might otherwise. I'm posting this now because I've been getting some incoming traffic as a result of mentions we've already gotten, and I wanted to let people know what the project was all about, but if you're thinking of linking or otherwise banging the drums, I'd ask that you hold off until Monday. The more bounce we get, the bigger a resource this will be for folks on the campus.

Tags: activism, education, history, work

I'm a draft or two away from having a solid conclusion to the dissertation, and I'm going to be circulating it to the core members of my committee imminently. The following paragraph is a little frumpy, and it may not make much sense out of context, but it's one of my favorites so I'm posting it anyway:

At its core the model of the student as consumer of higher education, as it was promulgated by administrators in the 1970s, asserted that students lay outside the institutional structures of the university --- that higher education existed prior to and independent of a student body that would, it was hoped, come to the campus in search of certain educational services, pay for those services, obtain them, and leave. The ascendancy of the metaphor in the last quarter-century has not been an acknowledgment of a pre-existing, or even nascent, consumerist ideology among students so much as an effort to reconceptualize students as consumers, and to induce them to think and behave accordingly.

Tags: class, education, history, work

I'm going to have to pick a typeface for my dissertation soon. Suggestions?

Update: C1 says we're all a bunch of geeks.

Tags: work

So about a month back I was tagged with this. The idea, as lauredhel summarized it, is "to list three things the taggee believes are necessary for good, powerful writing."

Seeing as how I've just finished a major editing project, and am neck-deep in the middle of an even bigger one, and seeing as how my other other huge project is currently in a research phase, I'm going to write about editing.

1. Get out your pen.

I know some folks only ever edit on-screen, and if that works for you, great. But if you haven't tried pen-and-paper editing, give it a whirl. I find it makes structural revision a lot easier, for starters --- I'm a lot less daunted by the prospect of moving big hunks of text around when I can see the before and the after in front of me at the same time.

It's also my experience that writing by hand produces a different tone than typing. In academic writing particularly, a passage that I sketch out in pen or pencil will tend to be less clenched than one composed at the keyboard, and I have a sense that there's a similar effect at work in the editing stage.

2. Cut. Cut some more.

When you've got the piece in decent shape --- it's structurally sound, it says pretty much what you want it to say, it maybe sings a little --- it's time to start cutting. Do a word count, then take an axe to the thing. If you're anything like me, you're going to need to do this a bunch of times. Word count, read-through. Count again, cut again. Look for vestigial paragraphs, meandering sentences, even unnecessarily long words. Cut the piece to the bone, get it to the point where it's as short as it can reasonably be, and then scrape away another ten percent.

A corollary to this is that if you're writing to meet a word count, your first draft should be long. Seriously long. If you're looking to submit a 700-word essay or a 10-minute conference presentation, and your first draft is 764 words or 11 minutes and 13 seconds, you're not going to be able to bring yourself to make the cuts you need. You'll convince yourself that slack passages are tight, because you'll be stressing at the prospect of ending up with a final draft that's half as long as it should be. Write a big, ambitious piece, and stress about which of your gems to leave out. It's a much more fun way to stress.

3. Read it aloud.

Really good writing reads well when it's spoken, even if it wasn't written to be read aloud. If something flows when you speak it, it'll flow in your reader's head. So when you've got your piece close, when you've done all the structural stuff and most of the cutting, print it out and read it, with a pen or pencil in your hand. When you stumble over a word, mark the word. Keep reading, marking as you go. When you're all the way through, or when you get to a passage that completely bogs you down, go back and look at the marks. See if you can figure out what tripped you up --- two consonants banging up against each other, a rhyme you didn't intend, a sentence that takes an unexpected turn in the middle --- and fix it. If you can't figure out why you stumbled, consider changing it anyway. Repeat the process until you can read it through without a hitch, or until you run out of time or interest.

Tags: essays, work

Thanks, guys.

Stalking isn't exactly what I'm worried about --- I'm more concerned about how I present myself to people who might find me by Googling my real name.

I'm happy with how I appear in the blog --- it's a good enough reflection of who I am, I think. There isn't anything here that I'd particularly want to hide. But if I get Googled in a professional context, and this is how I wind up making my first impression, that's a little different. One kind of wants to have the opportunity to manage one's self-presentation. Not to lie or conceal, but to tailor what you say and how you say it to the demands of the situation.

The simplest thing would be to start fresh with a self-titled, or at least explicitly non-anonymous, blog, but that raises the question of how to relate this one to the new one --- unless there's a firewall between the two, the split doesn't really resolve anything.

Friends-locking certain posts is a serviceable kludge, in the short run. Plenty of non-LJ people I know read the blog, though, and I'm disinclined to ask them to jump through hoops. And while this isn't a high-traffic site by any definition, there are people reading it that I don't know, or know anything about, and the number of such people does seem to keep creeping up. I like the idea of having a serendipitous readership, and I like the idea of maintaining an openness to that while transitioning to a less pseudonymous approach.

So hm. I guess I'll be putting up a friendslocked post on the Monday gig. Anyone who wants to read it is welcome to befriend me --- I'm happy to befriend you right back, no questions asked. I'll leave the larger questions for later, and if anyone has any thoughts, I'm all ears.

Tags: work

Yesterday I learned from Majikthise that Jerry Andrus had died. Jerry was a magician, an artist, an inventor, and a skeptic, and I had the honor of meeting him last year in the course of my work on an upcoming book. He was, as a friend said of him this morning, "one of the good guys."

You could sit in front of a television set all evening and come out and say you've had fun, but ... if you sit in front of a television and say you've had fun and enjoyed it, you've produced nothing in return. If you had fun making a project or something, or working on things, you've had fun and when you get done you have something to show for it.

His website is here, and it features a passel of lovely videos of him giving talks, performing magic, and demonstrating some of his tremendous home-built optical illusions.

The obit from Jerry's hometown paper is here.

Tags: art, random coolness, work