The economy sucks

I've been remembering the 70's, my childhood, in a lot of these dark discussions about the economy and how this is going to play out. Sorry, I think the stuff we've been seeing is just the opening act- the announced layoffs of tens of thousands in the finance sector, and tech, and manufacturing. Nobody's talking about the service sector yet, as if all these salaried employees are just going to continue mall hopping and going out to dinner on their unemployment checks. Yes, it's looking that grim these days, as much as we'd like to think it's going to just go back to normal next year.

My hometown was a factory town where the factories started shutting down. I had friends who didn't wear shoes sometimes in the summer- they had to save them for school in the fall. The neighboring town was row after row of tar paper shacks. 30 years later, the shacks are gone, replaced by housing developments and the local answer to McMansions. I remember my Dad being happy when his first job paid enough finally that he could give up his second full-time job.

Suddenly, the fifth year of a PhD program and a life cobbled together with a collection of full-time and part-time jobs seems questionable, but the alternative, of staying an IT worker in finance in New York, where each job held has dozens of better qualified people willing to work for much less seems even more precarious. Was this worthwhile? Hard to say, but the alternative might have been much worse.

But when the dire economic forecasts stopped making comparisons with the 70's and started talking about the 30's, things don't seem so great. My grandmother had stories of my grandfather hunting deer and fishing for food, and the family grew most of their own food. Over 70 years later, I'd hope we learned our lessons not to let things get that bad again, but a simplistic assumption about technology just isn't good enough.

May be it's time for all that talk about empowerment and efficiency to be put to action. What pisses me off more than anything else is the defeatism in the air- that we're just waiting for the financial chopping block. There's the can-do spirit, inventiveness, and ingenuity that is supposed to be the hallmark of America, and I don't see it anywhere. But I find myself mired in 1970's research on carpools and think that this isn't a long term solution, but when all this is over, when we have clean energy and a functioning economy, the hell with it, we'll go back to driving ourselves around as we please. But we need to mobilize nationally to pull out of this, not just wait for Congress to hand over more of our money to scared multinationals just looking for their own best interests.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

I ran across this little trove of quotes from Elbert Hubbard- not the Scientology guy, but his adopted uncle, or great-uncle or something like that. (Note: This blog has just degraded into a rehash of quotes. Soon, I'll be posting pictures of my cat. This is what PhD candidacy does: consider yourself warned.)

• The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.
• The vintage of wisdom is to know that rest is rust and that life is love, laughter, and work.
• The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
• To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
• Victory; a matter of staying power
• We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.
• We work to become, not to acquire.
• You can lead a boy to college, but you can't make him think.
• Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.

Or.. Maybe Not

Turns out there's a distinct difference between having a dissertation topic and having a research question.
A dissertation topic points you to the right section(s) of the library. A dissertation topic merely indicates that you found a reason to stick it out through 3+ years of graduate and doctoral level classes. You've read everything ever written on a topic and your literature review reveals that you alone see the gap that nobody on earth could see (or at least cared enough to explore in greater depth.)
A research question describes exactly what you plan to do and how you plan to do it. And how you plan to do it directly related to exactly what you plan to do.

So what exactly do I have? I have a topic, a huge gap in literature. (Nobody's studied carpooling much in the past 25 years, and the general public has computers, cell phones and the internet now.) And I'm trying to match methodologies to research questions to one of a number of variations on the same dissertation topics. I mean, nothing academic has been done with alternative transportation and student success in over 25 years.
A dissertation that doesn't have much prior work to be directly compared to. You'd think that would be a good thing.

I just realized I'm studying Communication Theory

That's it- working on my dissertation proposal, having realized that a former Communications Department professor would actually fit perfectly on my committee- I just realized most of my dissertation is really about Communication Technology. There's no information processing at all- except in the brain.

Wow. I've been writing the wrong dissertation proposal. Glad it took me a friggin' year to realize that.

The hour is getting late

I'm staring at a nearly blank page with scribbled notes trying to reconstruct a conversation I had today that could help set the course of my dissertation. Without details, it was about carpooling and media choice among participants. Does the media shape the message, or vice versa? Or is it merely a matter of social networks- voice wins out for keeping a carpool running (strong ties) where texting for rides doesn't work (weak ties) to establish trust? Well, we know what doesn't work- the hard part if trying to figure out what does work...

It's been a day of staring at Word's white background with little to show for the time. I think the word "Introduction" on top is now permanently burned into my retinas.

This old dissertation proposal

Another meeting with my committee, only the second of the semester (my teaching load and my little illness a month ago have been an enormous setback). I'm recasting my entire proposal, though not quite starting from scratch. But it's more like recycling- like tearing down a rickety, half-built barn and using the boards to make a tool shed. Yes, I'm not throwing away that much stuff, and yes, I need to build a new framework, but I can salvage the old doorways and walls in combination with new materials.
It still kinda sucks. I'd like to just throw a coat of paint on something and call it done so I can move on to the next project. I've got lots of other things I'd like to do, but they're all put on hold.