A note for visitors

Yep, haven't published to this blog in forever. It turns out the more time I spent researching bloggers, the more I realized that blogging isn't particularly an appealing activity for me. It's been defunct for some time, and will remain that way. I'll use facebook instead or (godforbid) twitter.

As a blog researcher, I can say pretty authoritatively that once someone stops writing blog posts, their reader base quickly converges toward zero. So this blog has lain dormant throughout my year and a half of dissertation-writing.

I'm now on the academic job market. As such, there's a high probability of people googling my name, leading them to stumble on this blog. Hence the dilemma of the increasingly fuzzy line between public and private life. I started this blog at the beginning of grad school in order to update a few close friends (the only people who would bother to read it) on my occasional musings and important life events. I also was motivated by the loss of an old journal -- my backpack was stolen, containing that and some Durkheim -- to use it as a means of preserving those experiences for posterity. So that's private information, but stored in a space which is open to the public eye. Blogs like this one exist under the comforting cloak of obscurity: an author can speak candidly, generally confident that their words will only reach their personal network for the simple reason that the internet is a very, very big place and no one else would have any reason to visit them.

Chances are, if you're reading this post, we don't know each other and you've just googled my name to figure out who that guy giving the job talk is [as an aside, that means I got a flyout. Note-to-future-self: sweet!]. I'm leaving the old blog posts up for posterity, and because I honestly don't think a medium like this should be an issue one way or the other. Read on if you want to hear a funny story about a bookcase falling on my head, my brief summer exploits making my rent money as a card player, or far too many failed attempts at a long-distance relationship with the same woman. It isn't going to be particularly interesting - grad school isn't known for being an exciting time in a person's life.

I now contribute to a group academic blog called shoutingloudly.com, and also maintain blogosphereauthorityindex.com, which is an update ranking system of the elite political blogosphere I developed as part of the dissertation. Feel free to visit those if you want to hear more about my research interests and candid opinions about public affairs and the state of scholarship on technology and politics. And if you actually came here looking for "dirt" on one of your "competitors" on the academic job market, I'll just close by asking the following question: is that sort of activity really part of the academic community you want to be a member of? I've been cautioned that people do that sort of thing, and I suppose they probably do, but it seems equal parts silly and petty to me. Go work on some interesting research instead, sheesh!