Cover Letters

Cover letters, I hate them.  Some weird amalgam of college application essays and those weird formal letters you learned how to write in your sixth grade computer class, cover letters are little packets of desperation and salesmanship wrapped in a reiteration of key terms.  And the advice that is given on the proper writing of cover letters is just, well, crap.  Use your own voice!  But use their language!  Be detailed! But cover everything they mention in the job description!  Tailor for each application! In three paragraphs! (My major critique is that I tend to be too formal.  But I’m a proper kind of girl- I send thank you letters and don’t start eating until everyone at the table gets their food – informal cover letters just horrify that tiny bit of me that one summer read every manners book the local library had).

I was mired in the middle of an All New ™ cover letter and anxious over opening and concluding sentences so I decided to go for a run to clear my head.  Halfway into the second mile I started to compose this blog entry instead.  Really, it’s not a surprise.  Cover letters and more “formal” blog entries are very similar.  They’re both fairly short pieces designed to be both sell your ideas and knowledge while remaining very readable.  An impressive tidbit; an amuse-bouché for the mind as it were.

And in and after a summer of cover letters, of trying to find a new way to say that I was smart and a team player who really could do research, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised I stopped blogging, finding other projects instead to take my time.  I was burned out in trying to differentiate  my one little bag of thoughts and skills from everyone else’s and then pushing them out into the big bad world.  Both the job market and the blogging/thoughts on social media/etc field are stuffed full of people.  Full of good people, bad people, connected, un-connected, cocksure and lost people.

I certainly didn’t know how I fit in and then, then I went for a run.  When I wrote my master’s thesis, I worked on it in three places: in a carrel at the UofC library with piles of books and notecards, on my living room floor with CSI playing in the background, and on the Lakeshore running trail, feet pounding frustration.  The carrel made me feel smart and productive, the floor was mainly organizational and editing, and the trail?  The trail was for letting all the pieces slide around until they started to work. Until I started to work.  If this were an after school special, this is the point where the inspiring montage would happen.  Me training for some race, running up the corporate ladder.  Neither of those is me, but I’m going to try to go clear my head a little more often, write a little more here and a little less there.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have a cover letter to finish.

 

On Being Real on the Internet (part one of fiveish)

Realness.  On the surface, what is real is so simple.  You instinctively know what is real and what isn’t. But the internet, the internet seems to trip people up.  Suddenly, people seem to lose their gut connection that tells them what is real.  (Leading to the dichotomy of “real life” versus the internet).The lack of sight (as well as other senses) bothers some folks.  

When I started my MA project a couple years ago, my advisor had a particular time of it.  ”How will you tell if they’re telling the truth,” she asked, repeatedly.  Yet the questions that I was asking- about self-identity and self-presentation- are intrinsically internal.  We can see the outside, the final product of self-presentation: clothing, attitude, maybe social networks.  However, the process to getting to that point, how individuals feel about themselves, can only be found out by asking and comparing what the respondents say.  Insert blog text and comments for clothing and attitude, and you pretty much have my project, yet it continued to be a difficulty for her.

However, I don’t think it’s quite as simple as getting over not being able to see people.  The nature of being online is that there are different norms about reality.  Simply, different things matter.  The ways we divvy up people- men aged 16-25 for example, are less important online.  Race, gender, and age can often not matter at all, as long as the things that connections are made on, such as shared beliefs on tiny details* are solid.  

In addition, people who are used to online presentation are also better at understanding multiple presentations of self all given at once.  Off line there is situational social geography- that depending on our situation, we give a slightly different presentation of self.  All of these presentations of self are valid, just keyed to be appropriate for the situation.  Online, we can see all of one’s presentations in a way that we rarely see offline, collapsing ones identity. It’s also more appropriate to play with presentation online and there is space for visibly fake presentation that perhaps there isn’t in “real life”.

My goal for this series is to start to tease apart how these things work and also to explain how corporate organizations can change their expectations of norms to better interact online.  The current schedule (always open to change and suggestion!) is:  norms of realness online, the politics of unmasking people, how to incorporate both on and offline realness, and then some sort of brilliant conclusion (and citations- would anyone be interested in offline citations?).  This is definitely a working project, nothing I say is the one “way things are” and I would love to hear feedback, other research etc.

 

 

* The intrinsic rightness of a slash-pairing, the gut hatred of dpns, love of Papa Lohan gossip.

Something Else We Can Learn from Al Gore*

As those of you who follow me on Twitter know, I had the pleasure of seeing Al Gore speak at the Chicago Theater last night.  It was a little crazy- there were several distinct groups of protesters outside- and I had no idea what he was speaking on, but I was so excited.  You see, I love Al Gore.  The 2000 election was my first election, the first one I could vote in, although I had been doing political work after school for a while by that point.  I postered, phone banked, and went door-to-door for Al.  I had an ongoing fight with my next-door neighbor about a giant Al Gore for President sign (he would take it down and lay it on the ground every morning on his way to work, I would pick it back up on my way to school).  In short, I was an Al Gore flunky, but not just because he was the dem.  I thought he was super smart and I adored his environmental chops.  Anyhow, he didn’t win, I was devastated, I’m sure he was devastated and some eight years later, there we were, with Sir Harold Evans asking him how he got over it all.

It was a topic both he and the first presenter came back to- how did you get over the 2000 election?  When they* were asking about it, it was kinda dumb to be honest.  But Al Gore’s response was brilliant and, I think, good for anyone who is currently unemployed, searching, or just worried (I wish I had video).  He first said that everything he had been through was no worse and probably a lot better than what most of us and America was going through.  He followed it up with the idea that he viewed it as an opportunity to really think about what he wanted to accomplish and another way to do so, which was, of course, An Inconvenient Truth.  I think I’m missing a lot of the passion of his words, but it really inspired me.

The problem is that, for most of us, a primary goal of a job is to make money.  We maybe don’t have the luxury to have a goal of saving the planet from people, at least not as our main goal. So how can we take Al Gore’s advice to heart?  By trying to think past the money to our goals.  Maybe it’s not a job itself that moves to your goals (we can’t all work for non-profits/charities) but a job that lets you work on them (good work/life balance, ample time off, educational funding).  Or a job that will lead to a job working on your goals.  I know it’s hard, it’s hard for me as well and I was really lucky to come upon the idea that thinking about people and their behavior made me happy and that I could find that in market research.  Then again, even with all of his cash and contacts, who would have thought back in 2001 that Al Gore would win an Oscar?

 

*The first being that we all need to be way way more ecologically friendly.  As much as I love Al Gore and that he was being very funny, it is so depressing to hear that we are five years away from not having summer North Pole ice caps (and he didn’t even mention starving polar bears).

**Sir Harold gets a pass from me, however, for the best kiss-off ever.  Somehow there were protesters in the theater (against the idea of global warming I think), and he kept yelling back “go and write a book”.

What’s the Problem With Twitter?

I’ve been in the middle of a big series of posts, so there are a lot of things I haven’t written about, but I think the, for lack of a better term, Twitter-knowledge cavern, is something I really want to talk about.

There’s been a lot of chatter about Twitter by non-Twitters (inspired, I think, by the uptick of Twitter-talk in the MSM, especially the NYT here and here).  This discussion has been, in general, not so positive.  At best, it seems that people unfamilar with the idea think it’s another version of the Facebook status feed, at worst, unbridled narcisism.  After all, who are you to think that people care about your every move? (as epitomized by Current TV’s ‘Twouble with Twitters“)

And yet we live in a society both where we are constantly fascinated by every detail of famous/semi-famous people’s lives (how many pictures of John Mayer getting his dry cleaning do we need?) and that is constantly engaged in the over-share.  We have an entire genre of TV that exists so we can see normalish people make fools of themselves losing weight, trying to get a man, and actively coniving to get their friends to eat bugs.

So what’s with the Twitter hate?  Some observations on types:

*Unfamiliarity with the form.  You haven’t seen that many tweets and from what you’ve heard, it’s just a giant group of people all sharing that they had ham and cheese for lunch.  You don’t know about @zappos and @comcastcares or you don’t care.

*Base Snobbery.  You think you’re too good for Twitter.  This can be based on some unfamiliarity with the form or just that you think that you’re better than the average Twitterite.  You will occasionally acknowledge a good and/or interesting use of Twitter, but in general, don’t like it.  Often, you will insist it’s really about some pathological and sad need to over-share.

*Low Interest in (random) Others.  You aren’t that interested in people as a mass and don’t really see the point.  Like the haters of social media (below), you’d rather call or hang out with the people you do like than interact with them virtually.

*Social Media Overload.  You have no time to think about Twitter because you already have issues keeping up with email, Facebook, IM, and the like.  Possibly, you also think that there is absolutely nothing more you can learn about people that you know after all of those sources.  Unlikely to try Twitter unless it seems like little or no effort is needed.

*Hatred of Social Media.  You hate Facebook.  You’d rather call someone than email them.  You hate chatting online.  Twitter is probably not for you, unless you really really like your phone/texting.  You may also find it creepy that people you don’t know can invade into what you’re doing by following tweets.

*Hatred of Social Media as a Performance.  You feel that somehow internet based interactions or certain ones aren’t authentic.  This may be linked into the idea that people are somehow performing or crafting their identity (I want to play with this idea next week).  Your feelings are not being helped by the publicizing of all the Twitter ghost writing going on.  You may be convinced to try Twitter if close trusted friends are on it and seem to be genuine (or you may stop being their friends if you’re curmudgeonly enough).

*Dislike of Popular Things.  Either you’ve already Tweeted and now you’re over it, or you’re tired of hearing about it and have no interest.  Possibly you throw things when CNN tries to use Tweets as some substitute for actual news.

 

My observations are from a whole lot of conversations, but most recently from this Jezebel post.  I would love to hear other types/be lead to other conversations on Twitter.  Personally, I like it.  I really love how it’s a constant stream of social science research, particularly on media, into my lap.  I also really like using it as an on-the-go notepad, but I do often worry that I don’t have knowledge-dense enough posts.

Edit:  Another good source of anti-Twitter talk, thanks to Meg.

Selling Unemployment

I attended “Job Hunting in a Difficult Economy” put on my the University of Chicago alumni organization tonight.  The place was pretty packed, a larger (and older) audience than I expected.  Right in front of me was an out-of-work science Ph.D. and a couple of rows up, a woman who had lost her job twice in the last eighteen months.  Frankly, it was depressing, despite the free snacks and posh surroundings and that was before the speakers started to talk.

The problem with job search advice is that the listeners want answers, smart answers, specific answers.  And, without knowing the individual backgrounds of all audience members, the speakers are left with basic advice, weird platitudes, and personal platforms.  When you are a recentish grad looking to break in and the panel is two people who work with high-powered executives, this guy, and one recentish grad (who managed to get a new job in 30 days in September 2008 and won’t share her secret), well, it’s not so useful.  Seemingly CEOs do a lot of “journaling” though we didn’t get a definition of what that was.  Overall, interesting, but not so useful, although I did get a strong affirmation that my insistence on Thank Yous is right.

Then they tried to get us to all network together.  Acknowledged semi-desperate to desperate job hunters all talking to each other?  Strangely not popular.

So what should people giving job hunters advice do?

Listen to your audience.  They did let the audience ask questions, but they really steered away from the tough details.  One woman asked how she could get out of the “dying ship” of arts education since she knew no one outside of the field.  She got advice to fantasize about what she would do.

Stop with the networking (or give us advice on how to actually make it work).  We all know that networking is important.  Believe me, we know that.  However, what are you to do when you don’t know anyone to network with?  If all of your friends are out of work, how do you network?  You get a lot of advice about networking events (full of your out of work friends) and using college networks (limited to the amount of collegiate spirit alumni have and how good you are at badgering people you don’t know on the sole basis of your alma mater).  The truth is that networking works really well for middle-aged professionals who make a lot of contacts through work and people who are natural connectors (or people who are really really good friends of the above two groups).  For the rest of us, it’s a mixed bag.  Admit it already!

Do not tell us you got a job in a month without giving us more detail on how you did it.  We want to know so we can do it too.  This goes triple when you’re the only non-MBA on the panel.  

Relatedly, have speakers that have some relation to your audience.  I went to an event specific to my MA program a couple of years ago.  Of the four speakers, two had or later got JDs and were in careers that required them, one woman had her teaching certificate from undergrad that she was actively using, thus leaving one person who was only using her MA that we all shared to get a job.  This didn’t help the 90% of us who only had the MA.  When your event is for BAs, MAs, JDs, Ph.Ds and the random MBA, don’t have most of the talk centered on high-level, high-powered corporate life.

Never quote Freud at us.  That should be  general rule for life though.

I got laid off… and I’m kinda happy about it.

So, long story short, I got accidentally caught between some politics at work, which lead to increasing misery and then being laid off.  Granted, this is probably the worst time since I was in diapers to be out of work (and for some reason, my gig was super steady then), but I’m excited.

I’m excited that I’m getting pushed to grow and change;  to really go for what I want and what I need.  I stayed at my old job for way way too long because I was afraid to be out of work and had no time or energy after work for the basics, let alone a proper job search.  I am looking forward to the opportunity to refocus my attentions as well.  I have been shorting my hobbies, my friends and family, my creative growth, and my sanity.  Although I will have limited financial resources, I will be regaining all of my other resources to productively do *things* be they a job search, a creative project, caring for my loved ones, or building on my own knowledge banks and skills.

I’m glad that I had that job.  It was money, of course, but I learned a lot of other things about myself.  The most important thing that I learned is that I personally will work myself to a stub to make someone happy.  This is great when I’m in a good fit and a good situation, however I am not very good at recognizing when my situation is good for me and that drive and when it will just be a waste of everyone’s time and energy.  I also learned that, for a person who has clutter everywhere, I crave organization to work well.  It drives me crazy to constantly have to sort things out and then re-sort things out.  I am, however, very good at organizing (it’s when things can’t stay organized that it’s bad.)  In addition, the parts that I most enjoyed about my job, researching and writing, helping people brainstorm and organize, are where my strengths are and where I need to look for more work. 

I’ll be temping, of course, and freelance editing (contact me if you’re interested), but I am also refocusing.  Work is work, but I want to be working towards a career of research, probably non-academic.  I am very interested in market research, but as companies continue to become more savvy about how the internet has upended old power relationships, I think there will be increasing opportunities for internet ethnography (a specialty of mine) and work on understanding subcultures, how people develop and create meaning for themselves, and how companies can work with, not for or at, consumers.

I’m excited, even if I’m also terrified.  Big jumps are like that and I’m grateful that, since I was nervous about making it, that life gave me the push.

Goals and Challenges

I haven’t written in a really long time, mainly because I’ve been letting the stress and unsettledness of my day job get to me. It’s not so much that it’s intellectually challenging or even organizationally challenging, it’s just… life challenging. I think when I was in college or grad school, I really thought that being there, the ins and outs and juggling of multiple projects, of bad feedback, of trying to figure out how to find a place to stand, intellectually, and then to defend that position was hard. And it was hard, in a lot of ways. But I think being a full-time working person is in some ways harder. There’s just no time, no space to think and I’m lucky because a lot of my job does require higher level thought (I work as a research assistant for an economist). It’s not what I’d want to think about, but I still get to read and analyze a little bit and I do get to use a lot of what I learned in school at my job, which is awesome even if I do really want a new one. Of course, economy being what it is, I’ve realized that I won’t be able to shove a new, more interesting, more thinking position into my ennui, at least not anytime soon. So it’s up to me to find some sort of space to think and stretch my brain in new and harder ways and to realize even if I am reading books, non-fiction books, academic books, new books, that’s not cutting it.

I have been playing around with the idea of doing a personal research project, one where I play with ideas and at least engage a little bit. Ideally I would end up with something finished, possibly even something publishable, but really just to be working on something of my own, instead of something of someone elses. I’ve always been interested in the idea of fans, fandom, the idea that, in this era of hundreds of channels, shows, commercial products, blogs and the like, something can speak so strongly to someone that they will devote more time than absolutely necessary to something, that they can form community around it. And then I started thinking about Etsy and Etsy marketing. At the face, they might not seem related, but I’m getting to that. Although there is casual shopping on Etsy, a lot of the success or failure of any particular seller comes from people who like their purchase or the idea of something enough that they’re willing to purchase more or to talk about it. It seems that Etsy sellers engage more fully with that than say, mainstream marketers and I think it’s really fruitful to think about from a variety of angles. In this current economic climate, Etsy continues to grow, people are still engaging with it in a way that many mainstream stores are not with their clients (obviously this isn’t an exact 1to1 comparison). On a more academic level, there’s a lot of potential to examine how consumption is a way of forming identity and a way of rejecting identity, particularly as DIY/crafting continues to become more and more popular.

So my goal is to work on that and those ideas, to try to engage my brain a little bit. I’m hoping for feedback, I’d love to hear anyone’s ideas, to really engage with people on new turf and stretch myself a bit.

Some homework for me is to look through the below links. I also have a paper that i downloaded but it’s at home and I don’t have the title in front of me, but to read that as well and make some notes and, most importantly, blog about the notes. Actually write and play with things a bit

Etsy selling guide; Etsy monthly sales updates;

The oft-maligned iPod

A couple weeks ago, I was reading an article about the mortgage crisis in the NYT. In the comments, various things were blamed, from Hummers to governmental credit card policies, lattes and movie rentals and OPEC, and, well, iPods. Then earlier in the week I was reading a blog about eating organic and there it was again, the enemy, the slim white music player, keeping people from being able to afford healthy groceries.

So what is it about iPods? Is Apple really trying to ruin America? Is the ability to listen to Timberland and Timberlake 24/7 allowing the Chinese to sneak up and steal our stuff? Is music enjoyment keeping us from *gasp* reading?

Personally, I love my iPod. This is my third one since 2002 (I now use shuffles and am exceptionally hard on them) and I can’t imagine living without it. When my last one snapped in half (a gumstick shuffle), I immediately ran to replace it. And I can see where it can be construed as a luxury, however, $70 for something I use several hours a day, nearly everyday, for over a year, seems like a good deal to me. That’s what, a couple cents an hour? Granted, I think the iPods being blamed for fiscal irresponsibility are the expensive ones, but compared to all the other things that people spend their money on (such as cars and big screen TVs) it doesn’t seem like that big of a line expense. So what’s really going on here?

1. iPod as a name brand. I think it’s no mistake that iPods and Starbucks are both named exceptionally frequently. As any beginner writer knows, specific examples make more convincing arguments and everyone knows exactly what you’re talking about when you say iPod or Starbucks. Plus, it sounds fancy.

2. Loosely-construed “need”. Most Americans need, or at least think they need, a car. This leads to a whole score of arguments as to why people need a particular car (usually SUV). Since the argument is based on an already accepted need, it at least has a sturdy base. Meanwhile, culturally over-all, I don’t think there’s the same believed need for an iPod. Part of this is probably generational, which plays into the issue with cellphones as well (younger people need cell phones usually because that is their only phone, where older people think of them as a luxury). I would argue, part of it is the car assumption. Owning an iPod makes a lot more sense when you spend a couple hours in public transit and/or walking a day. In a car, you already have music and, in most states, wearing a pair of headphones is illegal while driving.

3. Self-controlled/created space. Space to oneself is a luxury, maybe less so in the U.S where most people have at least their own room, but still wonderful. Especially in cities and on public transit when you’re forced to interact with strangers up-close and personal. An iPod creates a type of space where you don’t have to listen to others. You have to still proximate around them and see them, but you don’t have to hear them. Considering how little control we have over the hearing process, that’s a pretty powerful statement. (and a pretty obvious one as well, if you don’t replace the white headphones.

4a. iPods code “people (not) like us”. It seems like there’s a cultural assumption about the type of people who own iPods (who aren’t teenagers). They’re young, hip, a little yuppie, too materialistic, too cool. And there are the good solid rural adult types who work hard and don’t cotton to such nonsense. This dichotomy is completely false; the market saturation is to the level that “everyone” owns them. But it persists and thus iPods, like the similarly-doomed latte, indicate people who seem to have it a little too easy and deserve what’s coming to them.

4b. It’s easy. Blaming iPods as a sign of America’s materialism is easy. They’re shiny, a little pricey, and a lot of people own them.

Community Norms

One of the best things about living in a large city is seeing how a lots of different peoples’ cultural and social expectations meld and combine under the pressure of everyone needing to share the same space.  One of the worst things, however, is having to handle when melding doesn’t go well, especially when it doesn’t go well with your own personal needs and preferences.

There’s the rude people, the people on the train having long personal conversations on their phone which are either boring as all get out or obviously not meant to be shared (though I personally love to evesdrop), the person with too aggressive dogs or children or perfume.  And then there’s my personal menance:  my downstairs neighbor.  

The problem is, as it so often is in apartments, volume.  I am, by nature, seemingly a fairly quiet individual.  I feel like I like my loud, but compared to most of the people I come in contact with my loud is quiet.  More importantly, I would be mortified to find out that my music or tv often bothered my neighbors.  I was raised by the WASPyist Slovak/Roma ancestry ex-Catholic ever and we just do not do that sort of thing. We do not disturb or interrupt other peoples’ lives, if at all possible.  I think you’re seeing the crux here.  My neighbor is often ridiculously loud, to the point that she wakes me up several mornings a week, that I could hear the actual lyrics of what she was listing to at 8:30 this morning and yet, I feel ridiculously intrusive to actually go down and tell her to shut the damn music off.  It doesn’t help that both times I have, she has looked at me as if I was crazy while every possession she owns is vibrating to the base.

As a social scientist, I realize this is ridiculous.  I need to use her cultural norms to make her realize that she’s being rude (if she cares, it is entirely possible that she doesn’t).  Feeling awkward is the price I pay for both living in a city and being able to sleep past 6:30 and I shouldn’t even feel awkward, knowing full well that my urge to not intrude is culturally created and not natural.  But it’s still hard.

cross-posted at my LJ

long time, short post

I’m in the middle of reading Buying In and I think he has a lot of valuable insights.  However, when he says Hello Kitty is a blank projectable slate, he’s wrong (in UScentric situations).  Hello Kitty is a Japanese-themed, kawaii-themed blank slate to project one’s identity on.