Progress, 7/18/06

Friday and today, I read a number of chapters from A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War. Filling in the gaping 19th and 20th century hole that existed in my review of the development of contemporary conceptions of public and private.

Progress, 7/13/06

Worked through my pseudo-outline of my lit review, rearranged, deleted a lot of stuff. Emphasis on the "deleted", as you can see below.



I also was frustrated to learn that for whatever reason, EndNote 7.0 won't play nicely with Office 2004. I've downloaded the trial of Bookends and I'm liking it so far (and it would cost less to buy that than to upgrade my EndNote). We'll see what happens.

Oh, and Matthew picked up my books for me so I can just work with them from home tomorrow.

Progress, 7/12/06

Have read enough webcam and reality tv stuff to take a stab at roughing out a couple of paragraphs on how they relate to public/private as I conceptualize it. (Like how committal I am about that writing?) Also went back through my notes from The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (and oh, does Habermas make my head hurt) and thought about how to work that in to my discussion of the development of the dichotomy. (And many thanks to Jeremy for pointing out that Spark Notes does treat the book which served as a nice review, since I read it over two years ago and have read many other things, had one child, and moved (among other insanity) since then.)

Tomorrow or Friday I have to go to campus so that I can sit down with volumes IV and V of A History of Private Life and flesh out that part of the background. And then I think I'll truly be ready to get down to writing.

Until I find something else I need to read, that is.

Progress, 7/6/06

Read today:
White, Michele. 2003. Too close to see: men, women and webcams. new media & society 5(1):7-28.
Wise, J. Macgregor. 2004. An Immense and Unexpected Field of Action: Webcams, surveillance and everyday life. Cultural Studies 18(2/3):424-442.

"When one is forced to talk incessantly, to have an opinion on everything, to always express oneself, there remains little room for thoughtful consideration of what one is saying (not to mention time ot listen to others.)"

(J. Macgregor Wise. 2004. An Immense and Unexpected Field of Action: Webcams, Surveillance & Everyday Life. Cultural Studies 18(2/3): 424-442. (p. 431)

He is writing about bloggers here... and often, it seems that he's right.

That said, I'm going to use blogging as a means to force myself into actually making progress with daily "what I did today" updates. Working from home with no nearby institutional support is HARD.