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Will I Get a Job? : An Exploration Of The Boundary Between Virtual And Meatspace Lives.

leamirella's picture

Wanting to produce a paper multimodal, I turned to our syllabus for inspiration. Taking elements from the work that we did with scrapbooks, as well as the "roaming ethnographers" exercise, I have come up with this project. To view all of my posts that relate to this paper, click on the EDUC255 hashtag. (You should see it on the first post!)

My intention with this project was to challenge the method in which academic papers were presented. My approach placed more emphasis on the process of thinking through my ideas and thus, I have intentionally refrained from constructing any sort of "academic claim". Further, in the same vein as the "roaming ethnographer" exercise, I posted throughout the weekend as new thoughts came to me. Armed with my iPad, I captured and collected what I call "digital ephemera" -- items that I found floating around in cyberspace/digital representations of "meatspace" objects, that pertained to my key terms: "online identities", "privacy" (or lack thereof), Clark's term "intrusion", "workplace", "Facebook", "professional", and "employment". Using Tumblr seemed the obvious way to go for me; I regarded it as somewhat of an online scrapbook. 

The fact that this paper comes in separate parts also encourages the audience to make intellectual leaps for themselves. These leaps are the result of the "gaps of indeterminacy" that allow for more free thinking about the subject instead of being constantly persuaded. Through this, I hope that my paper forces the audience to think harder about the material that I am presenting, rather than simply identify my claim and "go with it".