jenniferdebeer

today is ONE WEB DAY

22 Sept. 2006

How has the web changed your life?

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Where to start with an answer to the above... For one, I guess I´d be out of a job :) Further, I would not know my cousins from "down under" if it weren´t for Net effects (smile). How to answer without seeming too self-important nor overly intellectual. The latter especially since I´ve just come from a PhD thesis defence hearing, which was gratifying to view /spectate, after all, but now leaves me with a sense that i need to "elecubrar" here in some grandiose way. Okay, let´s think concretely here... How has the Web changed my life?

My sense of self, and also sense of the social is divided (sometimes almost schizophrenically) between the online and offline. Sometimes there is discord between the two types of relating and the two worlds often enough don´t connect. Even so, in spite of the latter "discord" I feel better for having real and virtual contact with my friends all over the planet.

I´ve been able to trace people using the Web; I´ve taught undergraduate classes, because of the web (thinking here of all the tech subjects); all the stuff I´ve done have been technocentric and so, more often than not, web-centric. Now that I stop to think about all of this, I wonder what I would have done career-wise if the Web had not existed... I don´t know. It is hard to say, even in retrospect.

What I do recall most of recent stuff is when I was at the ASC conference in Leiden, and I had exited during someone´s talk so that I could put on my blaser in anticipation of giving my own presentation. As I stood in the foyer, African drumbeats echoing out through the hallway (it is an African Studies Centre after all...), I turned, looked in the mirror as I put on my jacket and smiled back at myself, thinking: "How fortunate that I actually love and enjoy the work that I do."

{Blog written in the postgrad cafeteria, Edificio Luis Vives, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain}

posted by Jennifer A. DeBeer @ 13:21