Just because I like the feeling of accomplishment when I finish something, I figured I’d share this exciting news. I turned in a draft of my prospectus to my advisor today. It feels great to get that out of the way before I take a break for the holidays.

I’ll write more about the specifics when I get feedback from my advisor, but basically, I’m proposing a qualitative project exploring what it means to be always on. I’m going to do a ton of interviews, some observation and then a questionnaire. I’m pretty excited about it!

So everyone’s been talking about Pew’s most recent research report, this one about identity management online. Specifically, this report discusses self-Googling (which, no matter how old I get, is always going to make me giggle just a little bit) and the ways adults and teenagers manage their privacy online.

I don’t have anything that new or different to say about these results, but I wanted to take a minute to think about what it means to be one of those “young adults” profiled in the study. At some points in the report, Pew differentiates simply between teens and adults, while at other times the adults category is broken out by smaller age ranges. So I would fall into the category of 18-29 year olds. Which seems like a big range to me - as someone rapidly approaching the top end of this group, I feel like my web habits are quite different than those of an 18 or 19 year old.

I imagine that people near the limits of all age ranges feel like this. But I wonder if we wouldn’t learn something very important from focusing on this bridge group. Sure, people in their 20s are technically, biologically adults - many of them even have children of their own- but they (we) are only recently removed from their teen years. They live right on the border between youth and adulthood, and as such, can offer interesting perspectives from both viewpoints. College students are easy and plentiful targets for academic studies, but they can also provide useful insight into these kinds of issues.

Nick Carr suggests - somewhat sarcastically, of course - that one reason adults may not worry so much about privacy is that they don’t have as much crazy stuff to worry about keeping private. Sure, the older a person is, the fewer keg stands she does (that kind of gymnastics is really bad for my aging back). But I know plenty of adults (and not just the 18-29 year olds) who have all kinds of crazy things to keep private, for possibly more significant reasons than teenagers. Identity theft, losing jobs, getting kicked out of school, or worse - what if your kids Google you? I wonder why more adults aren’t more concerned. This is where I think this bridge group of young adults is important.

We can learn a great deal about this and similar issues by talking to those who, though they may be very comfortable with technology and have been online a long time, they have not always done it. Many of us have only been using the internet since high school or college, less than half our lives. So instead of growing up using tools like Facebook and IM, we’ve had to learn it along the way. But we started learning when we were young, so it’s not very difficult for us. It’s just that we are caught somewhere between the millennials with their superspeed texting and web businesses they started when they were 12 and the seniors who finally got a Yahoo account to look at pictures of their grandchildren (forgive these simplistic stereotypes; I’m just making a point). I think it’s this group that can help us understand more about really what’s going here.

But maybe I think that because I’m one of those young adults and I just want people to pay attention to me. I’m interesting, really; just check out my Flickr page. Though, to really see how interesting I am, you’ll have to be one of my friends since I’ve made all the really interesting pictures private.

Wow, I need to post more than once a week! I’m working on it, really.

Anyway, as I get into my dissertation, I am both searching for and noticing a number of articles and resources on how to efficiently complete a dissertation. I’m using the del.icio.us tag “dissertation tips” to keep track of these resources and am happy to share them with you. Let me know if you have any good suggestions to add to my list!

I will also be sharing things that work for me throughout this process. In an Information Architecture course I took last spring, we spent a full semester strategizing about our own productivity. One thing I took from that discussion was the dissertation log. Every day, I will make some notes in this log that keep me on track, thinking about my project daily and most importantly, create a paper trail for me to reference later.

This is my first version of that log. Each day, I will write notes for myself on this page. I will start with hard copies that I keep in a notebook, but this may move to a dissertation wiki as the project continues.

A recent article in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication explore some of the more productive uses of instant messaging. This is an interesting article for me because it reveals some important issues related to being always-on, and doesn’t simply focus on the negative aspects, such as interruption, work/life balance, goofing off, etc… I’ll be getting into these issues more very soon, but I wanted to get things started by pointing out this article.

Over on the Effusia blog, Hayes has posted a few of his thoughts on this issue, from the perspective of someone deeply vested in the organizational uses and implications of IM. For now, read his post and I’ll post my own thoughts very soon.