Accounting and Counting Accounts

I've been thinking a lot about social media, and about the way people say a lot of things about the way they work, and how those statements are always totally wrong. I've also been thinking a lot about how much I use social media, and the presence it creates for me, and the absences that result. And I've been thinking a lot about stories.

So here I am on Blogspot, in the same way that I was once on Livejournal and Dreamwidth. (And, technically, still am.) It's a space for thinking and positing and navel-gazing. That can mean a lot of different things. On LJ/DW, I was occasionally emo (hence the frequent derision, nowadays, about LJ as a space for teenage diaries of all ages), but for the most part, it was a community of support. For me, particularly, it was a community oriented around fandom: fiction, vids, graphics, meta-analysis, griping, and tons and tons of squee. I loved it there, and for more than a decade, it was the place where I could talk like I talk and not feel like a freak. Grad school diverted me away from LJ/DW, for lots of reasons, but there was also the proliferation of social media sites. I didn't care much for MySpace, though I had an account. When I moved to Poland, though, I also got onto Facebook, and then a year later, I was in grad school, and the blogs kind of disappeared. And yet, yeah, here I am.

It's only in the past year or so, though, that I've glommed onto other forms of social media. Google Plus is nice but kind of vacant. Twitter is, actually, my favorite form of social media, with its constant (and difficult to archive) influx of news and quips and trends. In the past month, I've picked up Instagram and Pinterest, which I've decried in the past. And I downloaded the Vine app two days ago.


PINTERESTING.
I'm not sure what any of this means yet, and I'm not sure what it means for my ethos. I've got a Facebook thing going, and I'm fortunate (as I move into the job market) to feel confident I can proceed as I have been doing. Twitter's even more fascinating, because I've carved out an academic presence there, even though the majority of my tweets are about television, movies, and games. The other stuff, I'm thinking through; I have mixed feelings about the push to cross-post and sync everything, especially since I have similar audiences in each space. Why should they remain separate? What are the benefits of merging? How much does interface change the way I react to cross-posts? Why can't I search anything? Right now, I'm in wait-and-see mode. I've got to use it to understand it. Speculating without data is the ungendered form of mansplanation. (OR IS IT?)

The Project (my method of glancing, sideways, at my dissertation without invoking panic or guilt) is all about this kind of accountability, I think. I want to look at Writing Program Administration and the things we think make it, but everything ends up being stories. They're articles and books, true, but they're also cautionary tales in the hallway, and bibliographies posted to listservs, and the roll of somebody's eyes in the middle of a meeting. The things we know about what we do are actually, honestly, feelings. I just need to chalk out the boundaries of how we articulate them into facts.

Also, I may have to set up a LinkedIn account before the job-hunting season is done. This makes me sad; a year ago, I wouldn't have one except over my cold, dead body. But I guess we go where the audience will listen? The demands of interaction are weird.