Crunch Time!

Whew, so it would appear that time is winding down on this paper project; with my presentation on Monday and little over two weeks to the cutoff for blogging my work and getting down to screen-to-paper processing, there is so much I haven't put up here. I know that these posts are littered with the wreckage of empty promises for other, new and improved future posts - but this time I mean it! For now, I am just going to outline some of my activities of late as a sort of compendium I can refer back to when I finish the lecture I'm currently writing and actually get down to blogging each and every individually:

It clearly behoves me to try to trace out the networked paths and locations I've been circulating in, and some of my key observations...soon!

I've had a few interesting exchanges on major anarchist discussion forums over the last couple of months; generally on the slow side of asynchrony, given that I'm pretty focused on Greece and the situation there has seen a major slowdown since December...

I've also tried a number of avenues to get a bit of direct input from the bloggers I've looked at, including a couple more peripheral to the Greek news but who've put up interesting commentary on the subject. In general, I've found that many are impossible to contact, most that can be are unresponsive (literally, tout court), and a couple kind and quick-thinking types have graced me with some kind of reply: one ongoing and one pending (but promised)...and a number of emails floating in the ether.

I've got some serious reading on the go, with Jeffery Juris (and others) on 'networked social movements' and the web as public sphere, Uri Gordon, Francis Dupuis-Deri and David Graeber on contemporary anarchism in general, Geert Lovink and Michael Dartnell on tactical media, online insurgency and blogging, and a particularly welcome find in an Owens and Palmer (2003...then grad students at UNC Chapel Hill) piece on anarchist use of the net to reach out after the early anti/alter-globalization surge, which introduces the simple-enough but - I'm thinking now, anyhow - potentially productive idea of a tension in online activist circles between in-group and out-group communications (which I think links to wider issues as well...)

And I must check out that iRevolution bit recommended to me...

The Occupied London blog is still seeming somewhat regular (others less so, if at all), and putting up interesting material to keep things hopping...and various items of news and commentary seem to pop up intermittently, which keeps me close to my Blogger RSS, anarchist Twitterers and assorted alternative-anarchist-radical-left news sites when I can spare the screen-time...

Alas, back to lecture writing on social deviance, contestation, social movements and the anti-police brutality march this past 15th!