Proofs!

Today I got proofs for my article on "Mobility, Convergence, and the End of Cyberspace," for the volume of papers from the Budapest conference on the philosophy of telecommunications convergence. Even though I spend so much of my intellectual life online, I still have this atavistic reaction to page proofs: it marks a passage of my words from tentative, fragile things to Truth, even if it's riddled with typos and things I've still got to fix.

Of course, I know that there's no difference between a PDF I print from a file in Write Room, and something generated by Page Maker. But it still feels different.

Recently I've been getting more ruthless about spending a little time each night on the book manuscript, and am making progress. I've got several small essays that I wrote here and there that need to be incorporated into the Giant Official Manuscript File, and a pretty clear set of changes I need to make. I'm also going to start setting up interviews with researchers who I think of as doing end of cyberspace-type things, or who've thought about subjects-- copyright and intellectual property, most notably-- that I'm talking about.

It's easy to think of little articles like this Budapest piece as a distraction from the big monograph, but I'm not sure that's the right way to think about it. One reason I'm doing more on the cyberspace book is that I recently had an article come out in a history of science volume in Germany (what is it with publishing in Central European collections? I don't know), am doing more stuff with friends at the Said School at Oxford, and just had a paper accepted at a conference in Europe this summer.

While none of these generate any money or professional capital (that I know if), they're tokens of recognition of my effort to maintain a scholarly life both outside the academy and the Institute. The fact that these admittedly small efforts are paying off (in some fashion) makes working seriously on the book seem more worthwhile.

So small projects are a distraction in the sense that they take away some amount of the always-finite time and energy that you have to spend; but they may make up for it by incentivizing you to shift time away from, say, Nintendo Wii, to research and writing.

Technorati Tags: Budapest, end of cyberspace, postacademic