So …. let’s get it out!
I'm playing a dissertation game - I’ve been playing it, a form of hide-and-seek, mostly hide variants, for the last few months, since September 2013 to be exact! So far I've been mostly keeping myself on the periphery, avoiding the things as if it was a big smelly pile of crap - excuse my metaphor but perhaps the use of stronger language will embarrass me into action (?)
I haven't written for a year and my reading has been very irregular to say the least, resulting in very fragmentary knowledge. Combined with a memory like a sieve (old age!), it is becoming increasingly difficult to forge connections between the snippets of info that manage to sink in. The delusionary belief into having to give birth to perfection at the first attempt does not help either. In a word, it's tough, this game, and I hate it with passion.
The Other Player
I hate it at the moment but in the past, not a very remote past as a matter of fact, I did manage to enthuse about it despite the accompanying screams of intellectual pain. In the end I didn't lose but enjoyed a sweet moment of triumph so why this fear at present? After all it's a game and I have more than just one life, don’t I? Yes, but how many more exactly? And what if the other players (well, there is one at the moment) get tired and fed up with me and lack of commitment on my part? So far they have been understanding, accommodating and very supportive but I can imagine there are limits to the patience and I would not like to test where those limits lie!
Thinking of giving up
It would be a sheer stupidity to give up now as I've gone this far, a long and arduous journey and much as I value the process it would be nice to pocket a trophy - yes, I can see the glint of the gold or am I hallucinating, drained by the energy I put into procrastinating?
Blank screen
The blank screen looks scary but let's type up the first word. The first word is ‘analysis’, actually ‘analysis of students' multimodal assignments,’ that's more than one word, 5 words in fact, fractions of permilles of the dissertation word limit but, hey, it's more than nil. Jokes aside, I need to tame this monster, this fear of blank screen, the fear of failure! I might have lost a couple of lives already in this game, mostly by making false starts, faffing around and not pressing any buttons.
But I think I've got one life left, may it be a glorious life!
***
Talking about practicalities
Now, coming down to Earth and talking about practicalities, what I am intending to do is to reread all the articles I’ve perused so far. Since I’ve got some data now and an overall idea of what I need or might need in terms of theoretical support, I’m going to reread them in the focused way, creating summaries of the most interesting and important ideas, filtering them by relevance. Those summaries I will post here, tagging them appropriately so that in the end it will be easier to sift the content and reorganise it into a longer piece of writing. What I would also like to do is to create visual metaphors to facilitate the percolation of ideas and to create space where the ideas could connect with each other, a kind of a visual curation gallery. I might use the cut-up technique to play with words from McLuhan’s Medium is the Message (I got a second-hand copy for this particular purpose) to provide semi-poetic haiku-type contemplations on my writing struggle.
Let's see where it takes me ...
The Other Player
I hate it at the moment but in the past, not a very remote past as a matter of fact, I did manage to enthuse about it despite the accompanying screams of intellectual pain. In the end I didn't lose but enjoyed a sweet moment of triumph so why this fear at present? After all it's a game and I have more than just one life, don’t I? Yes, but how many more exactly? And what if the other players (well, there is one at the moment) get tired and fed up with me and lack of commitment on my part? So far they have been understanding, accommodating and very supportive but I can imagine there are limits to the patience and I would not like to test where those limits lie!
Thinking of giving up
It would be a sheer stupidity to give up now as I've gone this far, a long and arduous journey and much as I value the process it would be nice to pocket a trophy - yes, I can see the glint of the gold or am I hallucinating, drained by the energy I put into procrastinating?
Blank screen
The blank screen looks scary but let's type up the first word. The first word is ‘analysis’, actually ‘analysis of students' multimodal assignments,’ that's more than one word, 5 words in fact, fractions of permilles of the dissertation word limit but, hey, it's more than nil. Jokes aside, I need to tame this monster, this fear of blank screen, the fear of failure! I might have lost a couple of lives already in this game, mostly by making false starts, faffing around and not pressing any buttons.
But I think I've got one life left, may it be a glorious life!
***
Talking about practicalities
Now, coming down to Earth and talking about practicalities, what I am intending to do is to reread all the articles I’ve perused so far. Since I’ve got some data now and an overall idea of what I need or might need in terms of theoretical support, I’m going to reread them in the focused way, creating summaries of the most interesting and important ideas, filtering them by relevance. Those summaries I will post here, tagging them appropriately so that in the end it will be easier to sift the content and reorganise it into a longer piece of writing. What I would also like to do is to create visual metaphors to facilitate the percolation of ideas and to create space where the ideas could connect with each other, a kind of a visual curation gallery. I might use the cut-up technique to play with words from McLuhan’s Medium is the Message (I got a second-hand copy for this particular purpose) to provide semi-poetic haiku-type contemplations on my writing struggle.
Let's see where it takes me ...