I was tickled to learn in leafing through Ralkf Dahrendorf’s history of the LSE that one of the key early courses at the LSE was Railway Economics (not phased out until 1947). So there’s a sound historical precedent for the manner in which my own masters degree, New Media Information and Society links broad disciplines (sociology, media studies, information systems) and a particular topical focus.
To the best of my knowledge there hasn’t been a mainstream UK TV series about a personal weblogger until now. Does the first screen outing have to be for ‘Belle Du Jour‘ - on TV as The Secret Diary of a Call Girl?
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I presume there is literature out there taking a phenomenological view of what using a computer feels like but I am not sure where to start looking. I hope to use it to buttress a hunch I have about why people seem to have trouble in managing public vs private space online. My feeling is that it’s because typing stuff into a computer just doesn’t feel like you’re addressing a large crowd at that moment - it feels like you are talking to yourself (unless you are addressing it to particular named other people who you can then visualise). One can make a similar point about the long life of blog postings. They feel conversational, not like having something published and indexed.
Anyway the only relevant reference I have been able to dredge up from my memory and Endnote database so far is this
Le cahier est inerte, plat, il appartient a la nature inanimee, c’est un fantome de lettre, un ersatz de livre. L’ordinateur a plus de relief et de personnalite, c’est un organisme vivant qui s’allume et s’eteint, vous joue des tours, vous surveille… (LeJeune 2000, p. 20)
(Roughly translated: A notebook is inert, flat and inanimate… The computer has more personality. It is an organism which starts and closes down… and which looks at you.)
Lejeune, P. (2000) “Cher ecran– ” : Journal Personnel, Ordinateur, Internet, Editions du Seuil, Paris.
Can anyone out there point me to some relevant papers or books about this?
If you are writing with a word count in mind you should know about something which I just discovered - the word count in Word seems to consistently count more words in your document when it has field codes in than when you strip them out. I just tested this on a document which (according to Word) contained 7179 words before field codes were stripped, 6,473 without (the document had 690 words of bibliography in it). I assume that the latter figure is the correct one. (Note: I am using Endnote 10 on a Mac with Office 2004 - different versions of either application might give different results). It’s worth checking with your own documents before sending them to an editor!