Oh, hi! I’m sure it appears that I’ve forgotten about this blog thing. Really, it’s less that I’ve forgotten than that my attention has gotten fragmented in a million different directions, both work-wise and internet-communication-wise. Much of the stuff that I would have blogged back in the day is getting super-condensed and landing on Twitter, and some of the link-sharing stuff that I might have done here has for the last little while wound up being shared via Google Reader. So this space has mostly served for longer thoughts, things I want to puzzle through, and there’s been precious little time for that of late.

And, of course, the introduction of Google Buzz further complicates my communication network, as Buzz allows not just the bite-size, Twitter-like thoughts to be shared, and not just links-and-comments, but also slightly longer, more discussion-oriented thoughts. There’s been a lot of criticism of the rollout of Buzz — criticism that’s so widespread I’m not going to bother tracking down links; you can, um, Google it — and much of it well-deserved, but I’ll admit that I’m enjoying it, generally speaking. It brings together several modes of communication that I already use in a way that’s useful to me, and it allows me to keep up with what a set of people I follow are reading or thinking about. And it does that without necessarily hopelessly blurring the lines among social spheres, which means — at least for right now — it’s got many of the best aspects of Facebook, but with much less noise.

Necessarily, though, is a big caveat: one of the primary criticisms of the rollout of Buzz was the way it auto-added many of your email contacts to your followers, creating the potential for all kinds of havoc, as things people expected to be private were suddenly defaulting to a more public setting than they’d intended, and as groups that people meant to kept separate were suddenly mingling. The whole thing would have gone much better if the whole follower/following thing had been made opt-in at the outset.

That said, though, it’s possible to create pretty fine-grained control of who sees what in Buzz, if you’re vigilant about your contact groups and the ways you share stuff. So taking my own advice, I spent much of this morning wading through my contacts — synchronizing my Address Book with Google Contacts, creating better groups, assigning each and every contact to the right group, and so forth. I feel so organized right now it hurts.

But here’s the reason for this post: when I got to my own Google Contact entry, I spotted an email address that I wasn’t expecting to see: basically, firstname-dot-lastname at gmail. And I was a bit surprised — I didn’t know I had that email address. In fact, I so didn’t know I had that email address that I’d actually tried a couple of times in the last couple of years to obtain that email address, only to be told that it was taken.

And it was. Apparently, by me.

When I spotted that address in my contact information, I assumed it was a mistake, but decided to check it out. I logged out of my usual gmail account, and attempted a password reset on the other one. The system asked me for my father’s middle name — and trust me, this is a real determiner; there’s no way that someone else out there with my name has a father with the same middle name. And then it took me to the password reset screen.

The account was not only actually mine, but it was apparently my first gmail account; I sent myself an invite from that account to create the one I now use. All of the sent mail in that account was from me, mostly sending out gmail invitations, and all of it was over five years old.

The inbox, however, had a backlog of 525 messages from the last five years, most of them from the last two years. Of course a bunch of it was spam that hadn’t gotten properly filtered. But a lot of it was sent by actual people who typed in an actual email address. And going through these messages was absolutely dizzying. It felt as though some little part of my internet persona had broken off from me and been living a life — or, more accurately, lives — of its own.

I apparently attended an entrepreneurial workshop at Stanford in 2009, where I used this address on several sign-in sheets, and got several followup messages. I also attended a spiritual/motivational retreat in Salt Lake City a while back, and have been deluged with mail from the organization that ran it, as well as the other folks who were at that retreat. My father (not mine; my breakaway persona’s) has invited me to keep in touch with him on LinkedIn. I went to law school and shared class notes with several of my fellow students. I am much loved by a woman who shares my last name, and emails me every single day to tell me so. And then there’s the woman who was emailing me about the arrangements for the rehearsal dinner for her wedding; she’s probably pretty pissed at me right now.

I’ve had internet doppelgangers before, folks who mistakenly think my email address is theirs, and who use it to sign up for some of the most annoying things. This felt different, however, as I’d completely forgotten the account existed, and let it go on to live several different lives without me.

The question now is whether to start using that account. It’ll take some time, I imagine, to persuade my law school colleagues, my friends from the retreat, and everyone else that I’m not who they think I am, but the address is a good one, and it would be worth doing a bit of rehab on that persona, I think.

This happened to me again last night. Same intersection, except from the opposite direction; I was turning left across traffic into the side street that leads to my neighborhood, gauging whether the gap between the vehicles was enough to get across, and completely did not see the pedestrian crossing that side street, and came within inches of hitting him. Literally: he started running in mid-cross and just made it.

I don’t want to over-justify this — had I hit him, I’d have been wholly responsible — but I’m haunted enough that I feel I need to point out a few mitigating factors. Most importantly, that intersection is seriously dark, with no corner streetlights, and no painted crosswalk. And the guy was wearing black, head-to-toe, so even if I’d been on high pedestrian alert (which admittedly I was not; this isn’t a heavily walked route, especially at night), I’m not sure I’d have been able to pick him out.

The irony is that the police department is on this very corner. So at least if I’d hit the guy, they wouldn’t have had to go far out of their way to arrest me.

Anyhow: I’ve made my confession, and I promise to be much more pedestrian-aware going through that intersection, at all hours. And pedestrian guy, if you’re out there, I’m really, really sorry for no doubt having made your life flash before your eyes.

But Claremont PD: could we maybe do something about lighting that intersection a bit better, so nobody gets inadvertently clobbered?

There’s been a lot of discussion in various internet settings over the last week, some of it pretty contentious, about the definition of the Digital Humanities and its relationship to digital media studies. (See, for instance, the debate started by Ian Bogost’s post, as well as that provoked by Dave Parry’s first and second takes on the issue.) Some of this debate arose, I think, from a sense of annoyance among folks who’ve been working in DH for years that suddenly, now, with the rise of social media and the visibility of those working in and on those forms, a bunch of attention is being paid to something called “digital humanities” — but the thing going by that name isn’t quite the same thing that it’s been for the past few decades, and the thing that DH has been is now being overlooked (or worse, dismissed) in favor of this new interest in digital media.

As someone who works in digital media, but feels a profound connection to the idea that I have of the digital humanities, I’ve found myself a little puzzled at moments, both by the debate and by the emotion behind it. I’ve intermittently had that sense of realizing, mid-argument, that you and the person with whom you’re arguing are using exactly the same words but are nonetheless speaking two different languages. And as Matt Kirschenbaum noted — correctly, I think — the fact that these battles over the definition of such terms are based in stereotypes indicates that they’re nearly always, and certainly in this case, institutional turf wars.

This is not at all to say that such battles don’t matter — in fact, for those embroiled in them, institutional turf wars often matter enormously. But what I’ve spent the last few days pondering is why — what the real stakes of such wars of definition are, and whether there’s a better way of thinking about the questions of institutional structure that underwrite them. The result is an awfully long and somewhat rambly blog post, safely tucked below the fold, in which I work through my thoughts on these questions.
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