Magpies
G. W. Lennox Paterson (1958)
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Last week I was amused to receive an email from a student at the University of Southern California inviting me to contribute to his PhD by answering a questionnaire about my blog. The purpose of his research is to study "the relationship between what you post on your weblog to your actual stances on issues, attributes about yourself, and things that you do". In other words, if I tell the truth to my readers. I admire his confidence that he can pick out truth and untruth from over two thousand posts and thought it would be kind to give some pointers.
I have only written one post about politics so that is an easy place to start.
I still have the same box of yeast in my kitchen cupboard
I am MrsM, but not always...so perhaps he can untangle that for me.
I like the idea that he is going to use "clever ways to cheaply leverage human knowledge and effort" by extrapolating from my blog to "characterize an offline population". That will be a world of women sitting on the sofa ignoring the ironing.
I don't recognize some of the words he uses so I doubt that anything he writes is worthwhile.
ReplyDeleteI have already cheaply leveraged this student's knowledge and efforts and have characterized the academic population of his university as a complete waste of space.
ReplyDeleteWhat a load of codswallop.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to the elaboration of the MrsM enigma which has many variations, all interesting.
ReplyDeleteMore pertinently splitting an infinitive is never a good way to really go about things...
I don't want to suggest that this not a valid piece of research and it may be that the design of the questionnaire is more appropriate for American bloggers. However, there is a serious point here, which is that bloggers must accept that if they publish in the public domain their work is available for analysis and the results of that may be used for economic purposes.
ReplyDeletewell, I've always found you wonderfully open and funny about shortcomings and challenges, but I think there could be something interesting here about social media and how some people only present their best lives and what that might do to them over time. It must be hard to sustain. But Instagram might be more fruitful than your blog on that front - yours is lovely!
ReplyDeleteCathy
Thank you for these kind words. It is true that social media present snapshots of lives and there will always be things 'out of frame'. Some bloggers are more comfortable than others writing about personal issues or discussing other members of their family and the readers will hopefully respect those boundaries.
DeleteI think that Instagram is interesting because it works best as a shop window when there is an excuse for the polished photos that are now the norm. I have never really found a satisfactory theme and so my account is a disparate collection of images and rather dull.
no sofa, no ironing.
ReplyDeleteOFFline? Where is that?
No sofa? I am truly shocked. How do you survive?
Deletesometimes I sit in bed ignoring the ironing. will that be too much information for his research..........
ReplyDeleteI think that it is important to acknowledge the Ironing Spectrum and reach out to people like you and me.
DeleteI have always felt that some people have an issue with irony, not us of course
ReplyDelete