canarytrap.net

So, I’ve been a little lax on blogging the past few weeks. Part of it is that I’ve been working incredibly long hours during the week, and spent the last three weekends in a row shuttling back and forth between NYC and Cambridge, MA for a series of very interesting events (more on that in a bit). But another big part of it is that I’ve been making something of a life transition: as of this week morning, I’m working as a Digital Brand Strategist in Weber Shandwick’s NYC headquarters.

It’s quite a change coming from the academic world and a series of mercenary consultancy gigs into the world’s leading PR agency, though a really thrilling one. I’ll have to wait until I’ve been there a bit longer before I can reflect on the adaptation process. All I can say right now is that, having always worked in shared spaces, you are hyper-aware of how decisions that are natural in office environments (like whether or not to close my office door) transforms your space and work mentality.

Altogether a very exciting development, and should lead to a much needed new layer to my thinking.

I hope to get back to blogging regularly again once I get settled, though I suspect that it will take some time to really hit my stride with how frequently I will be writing more lengthy, involved pieces. But in the immediate future, please look forward to a recap of the three great events I attended at MIT the last three weeks. First was the Comparative Media Studies 10-year anniversay, where I sat on a panel about media globalization with Aswin Punathambekar, Ana Domb, Orit Kuritsky, and Jing Wang. Then the weekend before last, I moderating a panel on “Running the Tubes” at ROFLcon, which featured a fascinating group of speakers that run the “behind-the-curtain” social and commercial infrastructure of your LULZ, including Jef Sewell (Despair.com, Amplifier), Aaron Peckham (Urban Dictionary), Larry Oji (OverClocked Remix), and Pete Hottelet (Omni Consumer Products). Finally, last weekend, I attended the always fantastic Convergence Culture Consortium retreat, where super smart folks presenting on everything from Swedish indie labels to transmedia lions (the lion is metaphor . . . I think) to how piracy can save media business models.

So once I get my bearings, keep an eye out for that, along with the long-promised thoughts on geolocation and public space.

So I’ve been on a brief blogging hiatus the past couple of weeks because I’ve noticed a couple of startling behavior patterns. I can no longer go into the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea without taking my phone with me (you know, in case I get some email in the couple of minutes it takes to boil water) or sit down to watch something on TV without also reading blog feeds and fiddling with wordpress themes. I recently had a two-hour conversation with someone sitting right next to me, in my apartment, entirely over Gchat.

Which is to say, there’s multitasking, and then there’s justifying a pathological need to do too much stuff at once, so I took a bit of a breather, read some books, caught up on some TV, had tea without email. Flipside, here I come!

But now I’m back and ready for more thinkiness and blabbering and a not-quite-frequent-but-semi-regular blogging schedule.

Just a quick note — I haven’t been posting recently because I’ve been on the road, driving from Boston to Florida then over to LA, where I am at the moment. Very manifest destiny and all of that and full of the expected roadtrip adventures: winning cash at casinos in Mississippi, thunderstorms through Lousiana and Arizona, John Madden’s favorite Mexican restaurant in Van Horn, Texas and the adjascent scrap metal sculpture garden (my favorite was the fish on a bike). There are entire stretchs of the country that look like they was imagined by indie filmschool grads based on their persistently quirky soundtracks.

I’ll be back on the east coast on the 25th, and moving to NYC at the end of the month. Hopefully will be blogging more regularly once I get resettled.