punctums

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Originally uploaded by marikas mom.

My mom uploaded old family-photos to her flickr-account. I'm so happy she did. I love looking at them, thinking about how they are moments from lost time and lost life. Special to me of course, because these are photos of my family.

This photo is probably from early 1950s. My mom and my aunt, somebody I don't know and a dog.

What actually changes with emergent practices of digital amateur photography?

temporarily mentally paralysed

I have received reviews on the articles I have submitted to Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and New Media and Society. The reviews are really useful, and I am so satisfied with actually being invited to re-submit (though of course, no guarantees of publication). Drawback: too many things happening simultaneously. Ok, the article that I need to send in to the aoIR-conference in September is almost presentable. Yet the article about changing rhetorics of the self that I'm writing for an anthology is not even close to what it should be considering I need to have a draft ready for the first deadline 25th of August. And then: re-writing two articles to be re-submitted.

I don't mean to complain. I'm finally beginning to feel that I'm qualified for working with what I do. I have frequently doubted my own academic skills, though seeing that I'm actually getting somewhere is rather motivating. I just need to get over this moment of being mentally paralysed and overwhelmed by the feeling of not quite knowing how to proceed from here.

Of course. I wasn't qualified for a PhD degree when I started. I'm not yet qualified. But in a years time I hope to be. That's the whole point, right?

random playlist happiness

Bicycling to work I was given the following tunes from my beloved player:
1. Fugazi: Repeater (oh, those were the days)
2. Tom Waitz: All the world is green (from the wonderful 2002-album Blood Money
3. Spain: Spiritual (makes me want to cry)
4. Röyksopp: Sparks (modern classic)
5. Dinosaur JR: Going home (though I was walking to my office now - what a wonderful song).

Happy morning despite a couple of sad songs. Sometimes I want my life to be as random as my player. Then again, maybe it is.

writing puzzle

How on earth am I going to write about conceptions of (social) identity, self and subjectivity from perspectives of pragmatism (Cooley, Mead), discourse-theory (Foucault), symbolic/social interactionism (Blumer, Goffman), postmodernism (Lury, Turkle) and perhaps a dash of feminism (Butler) - all within a few pages? I need to write about self and subjectivity in a comprehesive and relevant way for my new article about how mediated digital expressions convey (re)presentations of self. This is not really a cry for help, I already have too many books that try to discuss the self from various theoretical perspectives. I especially like Giddens's Modernity and self-identity (of course) as well as Richard Jenkins's Social identity and Nick Mansfield's Subjectivity.