Not the movie.
My contacts with other people yesterday were frequent, surprising, and rewarding. That’s true most days, actually, but even so yesterday was unusual. Here’s a partial list off the top of my head:
1. I got to school and found that the writer I had blogged about the day before, a magazine columnist named Chris Pirillo whom I’ve never met and never blogged about before, had left a comment on the blog. About 15 hours after I blogged about the writer, the writer had read my blog and commented on it. (Deep breath.) Okay. Wow. I then went to his blog and learned about Podcasting and about blogging from a Palm Pilot. A “handwritten” blog is an interesting thing. I’ve linked to his site in my blogroll (see right).
2. An daily email digest of stories at MIT’s Technology Review led me to a blog on TR’s website that led me to an online Physics World piece on great equations, the piece that was the subject of yesterday’s blog. The end of the essay had a mailto link to the writer. I emailed him and thanked him for his wonderful essay. Within moments I got an email back saying “you’re welcome, and how did you happen upon my piece?” Another massive attack of reflection ensued.
3. In my film studies class, I went over the midterm exam that I handed back. We watched a clip from Notorious together, going over the camera motion I expected them to be able to see and note. Following that review, we began our discussion of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by “mapping the diegeses,” that is, listing the story spaces in the film and thinking about how they were related. The discussion was very intense and very fruitful; the students were ready to go and they inspired me. In the evening, I read posts on our electronic discussion forum that reflected on the movie as well as on the full breadth of my students’ movie-going experience.
4. I had lunch with a good friend and talked about the Presidential debates we had both seen on television. We also discussed the spin we had been seeing on TV, in newspapers, and on the Internet.
5. We in the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies here at the University of Mary Washington are beginning an experiment with an intranet content manager as a way of communicating more fully and frequently and as a way of collecting and managing our knowledge more effectively. Martha has set up the site and included a very nifty chat room. I’ve not done much IM’ing or chatting online, but my eyes are beginning to be opened to their value and usefulness. Along the way, the chat experiment led to an interesting conversation with a colleague about one of her friends for whom English is a second language, and for whom online-speak has complicated her acquisition of standard English. I’d never thought about this issue, I blush to admit, but it’s interesting to consider. In the past, immigrants learned the language from newspapers, then from radio, then from television–and now from online-speak? The topic reminded me of the discussions I’d had with my son about “leet,” a super-esoteric kind of geekspeak. Super-esoteric to me, anyway. I shared a little bit about “leet” with my colleague and dropped off a movie for the media collection.
6. I went to a farewell party for another colleague. (Thankfully, she’s not leaving the University.) It was bittersweet, as all such occasions are. Much of the conversation had to do with workplace stuff, but a lot of it also had to do with books, movies, myth, television, and the general power of compelling symbolic worlds made of language, images, and sound. We shared our virtual worlds and our private experiences with mediated language as we stood face-to-face, ate cake, and prepared for (and marked) another organizational transition.
7. I began a cell-phone conversation with my wife as I left work and continued it when I got home. Just before bedtime we watched a little of an old favorite of ours, In The Line Of Fire. This morning, I’ve already gotten my first email from her.
If Rod Serling were here (who knows? maybe he is) he would do a much better job of summarizing the lesson. In his absence, I’ll just say that contact is awfully sweet, sometimes, no matter what the medium.