You know you’re an Internet scholar when…
- You know that poking is inefficient.
- You agree that we are all just pathetic dots.
- Half your course is spent trying to determine the most technologically efficient ways of retrieving, duplicating, distributing, and digesting your coursework. (Tip: This is also known as an option course called “e-collaboration“.)
- You wish there was TCP from your readings to your head.
- Your procrastination activities include assigning gender and personality to typefaces. I am perpetua titling light.
- You’ve forgotten what a book feels/smells/looks like. The same goes for libraries. Bookshelfporn.com makes you tear up with nostalgia. So does the Facebook “Visualise My Friends” option from 2004.
- You’ve come up with a witty response to people asking whether you, as an Internet scholar, study only Facebook and pornography.
- This statement gets you excited: “We could create something even more contemporary than Facebook. We could develop a Xanadu-based social networking tool!”
- You spend the holidays trying to explain to your relatives that, even though you study the Internet, you still can’t fix their computer.
- You begin to debate the ethics of open-sourcing your paper.
- You still don’t know what’s new with your friends after spending hours researching on Facebook.
- After spending hours researching on Facebook, you finally take a study break and…browse on Facebook.
- You do the same thing on Twitter.
- You cite danah boyd as a “social media rock star goddess” in your dissertation.
- You wonder whether ex’s can be considered data controllers.
- You debate whether you can demand a subject access request from aforementioned ex’s for the low price of £20 if they are based in the UK.
- You get frustrated with yourself and your friends for not clustering nicely. But you blame yourself more for your obvious need for triadic closure.
- You consider tweeting your supervisor because you know that’s the most efficient way of contacting him/her.
- You realise that you don’t have an excuse for not replying to your supervisor right away – s/he knows you live through your Blackberry/iPhone.
- You know that the social media people are the most self-involved. They just sit around trying to figure out how to be friends with each other.
- You get into really heated defenses for the validity and efficacy of Twitter. It’s not just Bieber fever and @shitmydadsays!
- Your study break includes taking Facebook quizzes. Then it hits you: Facebook quizzes as your new dissertation chapter! Win!
- You have a lecture with some of the brightest minds in technology scholarship but no one knows how to work the air conditioner.
- “Heteroscedasticity” begins to sound like sneezing and coughing at the same time.
- You are increasingly annoyed by the terms “social networking site/services/softwares” and you propose to change it all to FML. Facebook MySpace LinkedIn. FML.
- You wake up in the middle of the night with the brilliant idea of developing Twitter goggles!
- You spend a week reading on sociological interpretations of online observations and then spend five hours in the pub with a friend interpreting SMS’s and relationship statuses.
- You want a QR code tattoo that links to your social networks to skip the tedious social more of querying a stranger for mutual friends.
- Your professor in mobile technology does not own a mobile.
- You’re super jealous that you didn’t come up withwhatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com first.
- Your supervisor can track your dissertation progress via your Twitter and Facebook status updates. And so can everyone else.
- Lists like this one make you feel like you’re not alone.
- You actually understand this list and even find it slightly entertaining.
- You feel the need to link this post on Twitter. (hint, hint!)
To context collapse, information flows, and the strength of weak ties,
Lady Hufflepuff
(special thanks to the Oxford Internet Institute‘s MSc Social Science of the Internet inaugural Class of 2009-2010 – it was a brilliant year. Of subzero temp’d conference rooms, 20p coffees, and hours in the SSL copy room.)
via bodleianblurts
