Finally! I’ve seen these types of arrangements in other cities, but nothing quite like it here in Austin. Until now, at least. LaunchPad Coworking will open this summer, and provide the sort of community workspace those of us who work from home sometimes want, when we just need to get out of the house and be around other people. It’s more than a coffee shop and less than an full-time office. I love this idea! I think that some days, all I need to get my creative juices flowing is some interaction with like-minded others. Being around people who are excited and working hard inspires me to be and do the same.

From their blog:

LaunchPad Coworking is a place for independent workers, telecommuters, business travelers and office escapees to join together and work smarter. Carefully designed as a collaborative workplace with a café, LaunchPad Coworking provides independent workspaces and meeting rooms for rent by the hour, ergonomic chairs, ample power outlets, and secure, fiber-optic connectivity. LaunchPad Coworking is a cure for home office isolation and cubicle craziness.

Awesome! I’m looking forward to learning more about this space. I think it’s a great idea, especially in a town that seems to have so many people who work for themselves or out of their homes. I would pay a reasonable amount of money to have a something like a timeshare on an office somewhere else, for those days when I need to get out of the house but Austin Java just won’t do. My home office is wonderful - I have a comfortable chair and two huge monitors - but sometimes I enjoy being around other working people, and this seems like a great solution.

Note: I guess I do have a desk on campus, but there’s been a dead cockroach under it for more than six months and it’s dirty and old and not at all the kind of work environment one needs to be creative and productive. In fact, it’s just downright gross.

The SXSW Interactive schedule has been posted. I’ve yet to go through it completely, but I’m so geeked out and excited that almost all the panels look good.

Lots of the Core Conversations look interesting - Examining the Different Ways We Can Work, Coworking and the Evolution of the Independent Worker, Next Generation Education: Bringing the New Web to Campus, Mobile Manners: Mobile Presence and the Undefined Etiquette, Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?, Online Identity: And I *Do* Give a Damn About My Bad Reputation, among others.

More on this over the next few weeks.

Why is it, that even when we know months in advance when a deadline is, we always end up working right up to the last possible minute to finish something? I use the generic “we” to refer to all people, not just me or the people I work with. Though there may be unique individual cases (a.k.a. freaks), procrastination seems pretty universal.

I absolutely despise working under duress, and last-minute work is always stressful. And every time a big conference paper submission deadline approaches, it seems to surprise us. Even though the submission date is the same every year! This is a strange phenomenon that seriously demands scientific study.

So, we’ve reached another annual NCA submission deadline. My last paper was just submitted, only minutes ago (not by me, thank goodness, because 40 minutes before the submission site closes really is pushing it), so now we can all relax. But I really do want to know why we always wait so long to get started. It probably has something to do with behavioral economics; somewhere someone like Steven Levitt is ready to tell me that procrastination is an expressed preference for valuing present time over future time. Or something having to do with rational utility maximization. Probably that one. It sounds so technical; it must explain this.

We got our SXSW Interactive passes today! I’m very excited; for two years now, I’ve regretted not going after hearing all the cool things people were talking about. So this year, the husband and I were both determined to go.

So maybe this will be the motivating, energizing conference I’ve been looking for. Tons of the scheduled panels seem relevant to my dissertation, I am definitely looking forward to hearing Steven Johnson and Frank Warren speak, and even the kid from Facebook might be interesting. I can shop my dissertation project around, recruit some interviewees, maybe get some leads on post-graduation work. Anyway, it should be a good way to spend spring break this year. More on this in March…

Okay, I took a very, very long winter break. But I’m back to work and will be posting somewhat regularly again.

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.

A good friend and colleague of mine, Andrew Ishak, has finished a pretty cool documentary called Out of Egypt. It’s about the experience of Coptic Orthodox Christians in the United States. You should support him and check it out.

So, here’s my blog. It’s about time. This will be my space for ruminations on my research and teaching, the dissertation process and basically whatever piques my interest. Enjoy reading!