I've mentioned this before, but I think it bears repeating. I am finding the blog format totally counter-productive to the development of real thoughts or writing the dissertation. The pithy short blurbs, hardly developed simply don't fit with the attempt to work on more extensive arguments. Sure, I could write page-long posts, but no one wants to read lengthily on the internet. I get impatient with long interviews that other blogs sometimes post, and it has all made me very wary of the effects of internet reading. It's like watching t.v., really. I know that there was a recent book that came out, asking whether the internet has made us stupid. I'm not arguing that we're stupid, but I do think our attention spans for reading have surely been affected. The counter-example is the ridiculously long New Yorker articles that often beat a topic to death, which is not necessarily preferable. It seems that a good piece of writing should also lead you to raise your own questions about the material, to be able to generate new directions to take the inquiry that the author has initiated. I guess blogs do this, but they also seem to encourage the sound-bite length information.
So besides the obvious fact that I am no longer actively doing fieldwork (I arrived in LA a year ago today), I'm also not eager to post my preliminary dissertation writing thoughts. I'm finding the internet is increasingly becoming less and less interesting to me. And the solipsism of posting on it has also lost its luster.
