Ok I’ve been ‘away’ from my GirlGeekdom dedication for a while (in case you don’t know, I’ve two weeks left until I submit for my doctorate – phew!)
So in this way you are ‘away’, or rather ‘unresponsive’ to messages, but everyone really knows that you’re there and can get hold of you anyway. My pet hate for this are automatic email notifications, ‘I’m away at present (yawn) and will get back to you shortly’. Essential in todays, always on, always connected culture, but reminiscent of a Spam invitation when such messages hit my inbox. Yuk. I am aware I am being totally hypercritical here as my own Gmail has had its own ‘count down’ to PhD progress auto reply for the past month, which reads something like ‘working hard on the thesis, so your message will not be read immediately, please bear with me!’
I was in Italy last weekend for the first ever academic BarCamp. BarCamp for academics and geeks alike. Or rather academic geeks in my case. There’s some suitably wired up video, blog, forum etc. pages (and yes I’m featured, but not in Italian I might add!) What was striking about this event (unsurprisingly) and the Italian GirlGeek Dinner the night before was the lengths that people would go to in order to notify others of their absence. This pointed to both the quality of the events, people didn’t want to miss out, or withdraw their immediate attention from what was going on around them, and so had phones set to ‘silent’, never off, and laptops for ‘purposeful’ communication. When I was presenting, I think this was a nice way of saying ‘I’m updating Twitter’.
And so the attention in this posting is not only to credit the hard work of the Italian GirlGeek’s and BarCamp pioneers, but to suggest that our culture has changed from the expected time lag in communication, to a near instaneous feeding on feeds, which are constant. Or perhaps a better way to think about this is how they are persistent (incessant?)
Does this mean they are invasive? Or just part of a new set of social expectations? Also as ‘GirlGeeks’, we can be defined as suitably ‘wired up’ and savvy with technology, what about those who are not as confident. Does this level of sociality erk of ‘exposure’ or represent an inevitable and more integrated way of life.
Thoughts on a (digital) postcard/Twitter feed/comment page/posting/thread/media share/poke please.
About Dr Mariann Hardey
I hold the position of Lecturer in Social Media Marketing at Durham Business School. I also spend too much time enjoying social technologies, media+ stuff. That'll make me a Geek then. And a gal.
