Cold Turkey

I’ve been using instant messaging for about as long as I’ve been using computers. One of my best friends (who apparently doesn’t have a web presence anymore, thus preventing me from easily outing him) hauled me on the ICQ bandwagon my freshman year of high school, and I migrated to AIM about a year later when it became apparent that marketing trumps feature set and usability when it comes to software for the masses (big surprise, right?). I was pretty much in on the ground floor: my ICQ number was only six digits (828995, yes, I still have it memorized), and I didn’t have to append any numbers after my name when I registered for an AIM screenname (although, I guess I did anyways, but Roman numerals don’t exactly count).

Numerical semantics notwithstanding, the point that I’m getting at is that I’ve been using instant messaging about as long as anyone has: nine years come September. I’ve been giving it some thought, and I think that nine years of instant messaging is enough for one lifetime, so as of midnight, July 24th, 2005, I’m giving it up…at least for a while.

I’ve never been a big fan of talking to people via the internet, so I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with IM. Yes, it’s incredibly convenient and cost effective, but all in all it’s a pretty crappy form of communication. Good writing, the kind that conveys meaning and evokes emotion, takes time to compose, and it’s not called Instant Messaging for nothing. Punctuation? Too many extra keystrokes. Spellchecking? Hu carrs abut thyt? Modern AIM clients even have indicators that show when the person you’re talking to is typing and when they’ve stopped, presumably so that you can harass your friends if they attempt to proofread their messages before they send them.

On top of the negative effects of instant messaging on one’s writing practices, there are other, more subtle implications. Working with computers is what I do, and the problems I wrestle with from day to day require my complete, uninterrupted attention for long periods of time. I don’t watch enough TV to warrant killing my television, but in the same vein I can’t afford to be sidetracked every time the Adium icon starts to bounce in my dock.

To be honest, after nine years, I don’t really see the purpose of instant messaging. If I want to catch up with a long-lost friend, I’d rather do it on the phone. If I need to have a technical discussion with a colleague and the spacetime continuum prevents us from finding a whiteboard together, email is a much less error-prone medium. If one of my roommates wants to chew the fat, we should do it at a bar, so we can drink! I want a tenure-track academic position at a good school when I’m done with my Ph.D., and promising young faculty are not forged in the fires of…oh, look, something shiny for me to click on.

I’m sure I’ll fall off the wagon eventually: it’s always possible that some situation will arise that requires me to log back on, and since we have an internal client at work that my manager forces his team to use, it’s not like I can totally escape from IM’s insidious clutches. But, on my laptop, for at least the next month, I’m going cold turkey. After thirty days, I’ll reevaluate.

So, for the time being, search for me no longer in the “online” window of your IM client. If you want to talk to me, send me an email, or give me a call, or better yet, write me a letter! Multitasking was par for the course when holding instant messaging conversations, but send me some brownies and I guarantee you’ll have my full attention.

Why this space is often intentionally left blank…

From Bitch. Ph.D., a Chronicle of Higher Education article about, essentially, the planting of one’s foot securely in one’s mouth via blogging. I already briefly alluded to this phenomenon in my inaugural post, but it’s worth mentioning again.

People seem to be slightly pissed about the content of the article for what they claim are a myriad of different reasons, but really they’re just indignant about the idea of faculty committees using the contents of an applicant’s blog to influence hiring decisions. This segues nicely into a discussion of what academic freedom and freedom of speech really mean. The popular culture definition of these terms seems to be something along the lines of “I get to say whatever I want, and you aren’t allowed to react negatively to it because that would be infringing upon my rights.”

Perhaps this notion would be understandable were it emanating from elementary school students who have yet to take a civics class, but I have to confess to being utterly bewildered by the venom demonstrated by some of these (presumably) intelligent and well-educated bloggers. The First Amendment guarantees that Congress will not unduly restrict your right to express your opinions, but (with apologies to Miranda v. Arizona), and this is key, anything you say, write, or blog can (and probably will) be used against you in the court of public opinion!

The American Association of University Professors, in its Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure instructs that college and university teachers should be free from institutional censorship or discipline when they speak or write as citizens, but this protection only applies after you’ve gotten the gig. Furthermore, they go on to state that “[a university professor's] special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, [and] should show respect for the opinions of others.”

It’s the phrase “appropriate restraint” that most bloggers seem to completely overlook. While it may be amusing (and even therapeutic) to blog about one’s tawdry sexual activities, illegal drug habits, desire to overthrow the government, contempt for certain religious groups, or frustrations with one’s coworkers, you shouldn’t do it because, quite frankly, it makes you look like an asshole (are we detecting a trend here?). Universities do not want to hire assholes: they produce plenty of them all on their own, thank you very much (Q: What’s the difference between God and a newly-tenured professor? A: God doesn’t think he’s a newly-tenured professor.) The applicants described in the aforementioned article weren’t removed from consideration because they had taken an unpopular position on a controversial subject; they were dismissed because they demonstrated a remarkable lack of taste in a public forum.

One popular “solution” to this “problem” is to blog anonymously, and in fact the article in question is even written under the pseudonym Ivan Tribble (probably to avoid the lawsuits that would almost certainly result if the school and department described were identified). I think this is a really bad idea. In the first place, it’s almost impossible to preserve one’s anonymity for any substantial length of time while simultaneously being prolific and descriptive. In the second, if you aren’t willing to sign your name to something, why are you posting it on the internet at all?

The internet is, in many ways, inherently dehumanizing. Email, instant messaging, blogging…these are all tools that make it easy to communicate with people while almost completely removing the personal aspects of the act of communication. Technology has made it too simple to transmit to thousands of people ideas one would never give voice to or put on paper. In the end, though, for all its dynamic and ephemeral nature, the internet is a permanent record of what we say and do, and it should be treated as such. In the immortal words of Omar Khayyam:

“The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.“

Think about that the next time you’re about to click “Publish Post”.

Short Posts Suck…

…but this is the coolest optical illusion I’ve ever seen. Just goes to show, when you’re dealing with perception, what looks right is way more important than what’s actually right.

Yeah, I didn’t believe it either. Use your favorite image editing program to check.

Is it the Fourth?

“All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”

-Thomas Jefferson, June 24th, 1826.

In other news, I seem to be living with a bunch of fruits this summer.