The morning jog

Idea the 1st

I had an idea when I was out on the morning run; sun, wind, freshly mown grass, pain, sweat, inability to breathe, etc, etc. I will have to come back & refine it later, but I wanted to jot it down in case it struck a chord.

I've been grappling a bit with the nature of research, in fact it might be fair to say that it's been a bit of a distractor, but it does seem to me in some way pretty fundamental to why I'm here.

Why do research? Because research is a way of gathering rhetorical tools/devices/weapons - pick the metaphoric framework you want to slide into, before I decide to try and control it myself later by reducing that list down to one item - that will be used in some discourse conflict. That covers a lot of ground I think, from persuading an assessor to pass your dissertation through to sating the deep emotional need to be purple-shirtedly videoed by random tourists outside St. John's College Oxford. (If you're not doing LX1 you may miss the point of that)

It's not that I don't like the idea of research to add to the world's store of knowledge; it's a beautifully romantic idea and I'm quite susceptible. I feel it, but I don't believe it. Research adds to the world's store of research, that's it.

Idea the 2nd

 The internet interferes with the operation of time, or at least the intuition of the operation of time and in quite non-trivial ways. People feel the interenet is fast, in some way, all this information, there at your fingertips in milliseconds. Well, sometimes. Sort of. Maybe. But.

Let's say you are leaping arond the internet collecting journal article for research. Great, in a day I can track down thousands of articles. Still, reading 1000's of articles isn't going to take any less time than it ever did (in fact, if I try & read them on a screen it will take longer), so I'm going to have to select a readable number from out of the 1000. That selection process is going to take a long time. And I still have to read the articles. Has the internet saved me time? Not really. It might have increased the range of materials, but if it is going to take me a year to read them anyway, there wasn't really that much hurry to find them all on day 1.

E-mail seems so much quicker than letters. Of course it is, but email is not the same discourse as letters. E-mail substantially maps onto a conversational discourse; you can't talk to your lecturers (as a random example) but you can email them anytime. A quick comparison of face-to-face conversation with email quickly shows that email is really really slow.  There are the mechanical issues; speech runs at around 250 words per minute; typing, say, around 100 (if you're good at it). There are the structural issues; conversation has multiple parts, including clarification & confirmation. Each of these requires a separate email and since most people chunk their interaction witt email into daily/twice-daily/thrice-daily periods, and it's pretty random whether your periods corresponed with your correspondent's, you're lucky to manage a partial exchange per day. It can take several days to conduct a 10 minute F2F conversation by email.