My thesis - this project

So, this is going to be interesting. Although I'm not going to pretend that I'm at an advanced point in my writing of my thesis. Actually I'm currently 'thinking' about polishing off my first chapter that should have been due a week ago [needless to say I'm most likely going to need a massage after confining myself to a chair in the library for a few weeks. If you see someone in the library chugging down redbulls and looking panicked - say hi] - it is nonetheless a little weird getting back to the basics of my project.

So last time in class we talked a little on our project - specifically the language and normalcy. I am incredibly thankful for the fact that there is in fast very little of the extreme language variation that you find in online communities in the area that I am focusing on. I took a look at a thesis that a scrippsie did a few years back on online french. Honestly I wonder at what point you stop considering a language a language. Anyways - lucky for me, travel blogs tend to be written in order to be accessible to a large audience, are often written to keep in contact with family members (ex. my grandma wouldn't know what LOL let alone ROFL means), and are written by perhaps your atypical bloggers. What I mean by atypical bloggers is these people may not have thought to maintain a blog in France, but being in Japan, they felt compelled to for various reasons.

One blogger I've contacted told me that he blogged to record all his memories of Japan because of the sheer amount of things he was experiencing. This is his Blog. He also mentioned contacting family etc.

A lot of these bloggers seem to start out this way - just writing for their own benefit. Then they become amazed when linking eventually gets themselves a readership and I'm trying to show (in my thesis) that their content changes. Their content changes because now they're trying to keep the readers interested.


But maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. I had meant to talk about what we were talking about in class. Now let me see if I can express this - if the job of the anthropologist is to explain using 'experience distant' / 'emic' what is ' experience near' / 'edic' to some group, then if I am playing the anthropologist to a group of people who are a little like unofficial anthropologists.... then is my job as to explain the experience near of a group of French people explaining an experiences near to Japanese people and culture?

I think I need a drink . (insert humor here)

ciao - Nicole