As the Wheel of Fortune spins again, I am attempting to shake off private blues to regain control. Privacy proves baffling in that respect: control. Privacy appears to offer control, but in today’s climate it takes plenty away too. After a grilling yesterday in the use of ‘motive’ and ‘intention’, here lies a drop in the ocean on ‘exposure’ and ‘control’.
This past fortnight, mixing with the best early-modernists and Marvellians in the world, exciting and exhilirating as it has been, has shown an alarming sense of insecurity. Alongside your scholarly idols, it is easy to see yourself as lacking. I am a confidence player, and my private mood plays a strong part in my efficiency and productiveness. I have sought crumbs of support, and been thrown crusts, only for other birds to steal in as I approach. I have been offered some great things, potentially, but have grown too sceptical to believe they can happen.
There are different types of insecurity. Sometimes I want to hide and slip away. Sometimes I look to talk more. I seek to gain respect, to find a moment of brilliance to match everyone else. It never comes. There are people out there who benefit unknowingly at my expense or effort. I suddenly become stirred if I hear these people mentioned, and yearn for some credit and respect back.
I am average and unremarkable, physically and mentally, and can do nothing to turn heads, academically or personably. Yet, to divulge these private acts of sacrifice that I have made, which may bring warmth or sympathy my way, is only to destroy what made the acts special, and also to destroy my dignity in the revelations. The only dignity I can build is in silence. There’s no winning; just a passage of time until I try to bring 2005 round again.
There has been quite an uproar in recent days over privacy scandals involving social networking sites. It comes at an interesting time with my PhD upgrade procedure next week. A better media furoré could not have been hoped for in demonstrating the relevance of privacy in a very public sphere.
The details of Facebook’s battle with users over privacy have been widely documented. For reference, a few startling facts: the growth of Facebook’s consumer base, and presumably its expanding commercial empire, has coincided with increasingly complex privacy settings. It has meant over 100 different privacy settings, and a policy which (columnists have taken pride in noting) is now longer than the US Constitution. This week, however, members, propelled by consumer experts and a media bandwagon, prompted Facebook director Marc Zuckerberg to rethink. Hence, Wednesday saw an official declaration of a more simplified system to try and repair the relationship with a sceptical Facebook usership.
What privacy rights and expectations should users expect for social networking structures? Little in life comes for free. Facebook’s own business model must be based to some degree on future profit projections, and that, to date, has not involved consumers paying for the service. Plus, the internet has spawned several high-profile casualties (e.g. Myspace) when tastes and preferences move on. The fickle nature and finite lifetime of cyberspace fads are the incentive to push for whatever marketing potential can be found. But it is often the results of that push which drive consumers away. As the venerable Al Allday notes, “People don’t like being a target demographic“.
Image lifted from Rob Cubbon's excellent guide to self-marketing.
PhD students typically do not market themselves very well.
PhD students are typically modest about their abilities.
PhD students do not always believe in their achievements.
Training programmes for research postgraduates now include a number of courses and events related to career development. These include CV workshops, presentation skills, interview skills, and so on. These messages, imparted from the courses, are their raison d’être, and they strike a strong chord.
It is a relief that these deficiencies affect a much broader cross-section than just me. But a concern of much greater weight is that scepticism about the value of this long-haul degree and where it will lead means a struggle to climb out of this bracket. How can one believe in their strengths, abilities, and the weight of your achievements if the growing concern is how weak their current course of life will leave them?
To an extent, this is going to revolve around occupation and personality. Some people recognize their aptitude for sales. Some recognize their aptitude for caring professions. The difficulty is in traversing boundaries, which is where the most-accosted ‘transferable skills’ come in.
Continue reading ‘Something Hard: Struggles in Self-Marketing’
If I am following the destiny of Andrew Marvell so well, chances are that, thanks to biographical hints from John Aubrey, I will have to develop a taste for the grapevine.
He kept bottles of wine at his lodgeing, and many times he would drink liberally by himselfe to refresh his spirits and exalt his muse.
Though [Marvell] loved wine he would never drink hard in company, and was won’t to say that he would not play the goodfellow in any man’s company in whose hands he would not trust his life.
But this development probably took place near the end of Marvell’s life when he had more powerful enemies in London than trusty friends. We are not surprised then to see one of those enemies call him, after his death, a drunken buffoon, ‘temulentus scurra’.
Pierre Leguois, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (1968), 98.
It is not surprising that a man obsessed with privacy who was eventually elected as an MP at least had an understanding of public impressions. In the context of the slanderous and wide-reaching seventeenth-century print culture, this limited trail of evidence suggests that Marvell’s vice was, by and large, a private one. In the context of what is to come, I share a modicum of my own private life: Friday night.
If the paradigm shift can be forgiven, this is a nervous return to the world of thought. (Perhaps I mean sentiment). The impersonal neoclassicist yields to the romantic.
It has something to do with the temporal. Tomorrow morning (28th) marks the ten year anniversary of a nasty incident that shaped much of what I have become in this decade. Aside from the day permeating the calendar, the causes no longer reach me with their unexplained darkness. For the effects, I’m glad to have had the opportunity to address the case personally.
I’m also grateful for new avenues, having moved to London; it has opened my mind to boxes locked by embarrassment. At the end of a long conversation with someone I trust unendingly, the thought just crept into my head. “It’s like…” I reached into my pocket and found two inauspicious copper coins, one of which became a circle of need, the other of asset love. A glimpse of the days of naivety, characterised by little crackpot ideas and crackpot instability.
Today presents a fresh start and a new beginning; the Pendulum swings once again. To explain the context of this space, I begin by quoting from my old journal on the subject of writing.
My words will never be good enough. They do not deal with the situation. They do not settle the fractured complexities that harbour themselves. They don’t suffer the test of time. They struggle to sit right for me. This is a preoccupation that has refused to go away. I feel a great weight of expectation upon my writing. I follow friends’ journals that have power, and professional journals that inspire me, and I feel frustratingly left behind…
Tara Brabazon has said recently that ‘All of us, including postgraduates, learn to write by writing’ (Times Higher Education)… The positive academic start to university seemed largely indebted to the methods of expression and the wealth of creativity that had surfaced through writing online. Spontaneity then took over. Academic work seemed to suffer from the same kind of arbitrary spontaneity and carelessness. As third year approached… the journal started to bear the dense responsibility for carving a life after graduation, and the new preoccupations that would govern the indefinite next stage of life. Academic work became the top priority over journaling, and I have never looked back from that. But it has clearly showed me that writing is a behaviour. You may learn to write by writing, but one learns behaviourally whatever is practiced most often.
There are strange conundrums at play. A sister journal was created to split two streams of consciousness. It is an experiment that has worked to some degree, but a chiastic amalgamation has uncomfortably manifested itself: a personal touch has entered my academic discourse, while an academic touch remains within my personal discourse. Rustic academic methods have instilled themselves so deep within that it seems that they are all I know. Sometimes it pays to remind myself… academia is not a profession that one can dissociate themselves from, but a way of life. I may wish for freedom and spontaneity to some degree, but it would scare me to compromise the stringent discipline that governs my writing now. I can spend several days writing, editing, and re-editing a single page; there is a single-minded drive for perfection … While these standards govern me, I think aggressively about method when the very idea of writing emerges. I want clarity, and relevance. I am capable: the introductions written for the Features section of Noted (Spring 2008 and Autumn 2008 issues) link all sorts together, but it takes scrupulous effort, and the end product is consciously a very different kind of achievement to the journal entries of old. More like ticking mental boxes rather than tipping mental poxes.
I’m also both confused and intrigued by the psychology of space, a further conundrum. The journal box has grown into a space to be scared of, a den of iniquity. What is the white space of comfort? … Investigations about the increasing difficulties in writing have yielded a number of answers. The polity of audience has been one; attempted respect to friendship; changing priorities; and now the semantics of the aesthetic and the psychology of space.
I have long endured a rich but troubled relationship with writing. In training for a profession where publishing unique and high quality research is the endgame, I have become increasingly cautious about writing. Two existing journals will merge here. One, a personal journal, approaches six years of age. The second started three years ago to siphon the academic thread of my thoughts away to a smaller contingent.
It was impossible to predict, but academia did prevail, and brought with it the start, and all too swift end, of a new life abroad. Academia pervades character, emotions and thought. It influences how you think about aspects of everyday life. Keeping separate journals for separate purposes is no longer a easy prospect. Additionally, each space forges an identity. A journal of nearly six years often proves less familiar and more distant. In the trivial ephemera of the digital age, it is a treasured antique, and needs more care and attention with age. Yet, more care and attention to the content is only further mental red tape, and so a difficult cycle continues.
A, or B, or C please.
Something has been missing for some time: a space for diversifying and attempting something new. To provide some sense of context, a number of old entries have been imported. It may take time to adjust here, as I come to terms with a third, all-encompassing portal, but if it provides the key to liberty it will all be worthwhile. Most importantly, if one does learn behaviourally that which is practiced most often, it cannot be left to caution and silence. Time to write again.
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