This week I enjoyed the growing excitement around the Democratic Convention. I’m not a super-politico, although I have worked on several campaigns (and built a few websites for candidates in the late 90s, when no one was quite sure why they wanted to be on the web, but a few understood that they needed to be on the web – my museum experience came in handy here). In 2004 my girlfriend and I worked as neighborhood organizers for MoveOn.org, which was fun but I’m not sure that it had much impact. Our neighborhood was already bluer than blue and most of the people we met going door-to-door were already on our side. At least it made it fun (and probably the first time I’d met some of my neighbors).

The other night ABC spotlighted a “doctoral student who put aside his dissertation to campaign for Obama.” Whoa…that’s commitment dude, but frankly at this point I share too much of Jenny’s cynicism to lay down my pen. Maybe it’s the fallout from having seen political sausage being made. I’m not a very good evangelist. I have my opinions and my views, but I really don’t like calling you at dinner time to harass you about yours. I hated going door to door even more than call banks. Leave me alone and I’ll stuff some envelopes for you.

Even so, just sitting back and not doing anything also bothers me. This year I’ve decided to do something a little different that still allows me to participate in the excitement this year (without abandoning my dissertation for Obama). I’ve signed up to be an Election Judge. A few hours of classes and one very long day on November 4. I think I’ll make a good judge — I’m not afraid of all those electronics, good under pressure, know the alphabet backwards and forwards. I’ll be interested to see what the whole process is like, what kind of training we get, and what happens on election day. I think the only part of this I may not like is denying people the opportunity to vote because of some stupid rule. I’m particularly interested in what sort of discretion is exercised in those cases.

Now I just have to wait and see if I”m selected.

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Update:I’ve been tagged as an Alternate Judge on Election day. Still not quite sure what that means, but I’ll find out when I attend Election Judge training at the end of the week. I think it means I’ll be a floater to fill in where they need someone. In any case, don’t expect to see me on Nov. 4 – unless you’re voting!

Earlier this year I set out to jump through the latest hoop on the path to the PhD. The Field Exam gave me an excuse to step back from some of the stuff I’d been doing since starting the program. Blogging here and at Musematic slowed to a trickle, while Twittering went up dramatically.

Another casualty of my retrenchment was Second Life. All along one of my annoyances with SL has been its “heaviness.” For me, the barrier between “in-world” and this world has been non-porous. At least it felt like alot of effort to fire up my SL client, get in, and interact with other people. Whenever I did so, I didn’t feel like I could accomplish much else besides being in-world. I never felt as though I could just leave my SL client running in the background- even on my Mac Book Pro it sucked up most of my system resources and slowed everything else down to a crawl. Switching my attention from that document I was writing to “being embodied” in SL carried to much of a load to be useful for me. On the other hand, Twitter, Facebook and other web2.0 apps neatly slip into the cracks of my attention.

On one level I feel as though this is some sort of personal failing. There are plenty of examples of other people who have successfully created interesting resources and projects in SL while juggling busy lives and careers. But this..heaviness..always seems to have slowed me down from being more ambitious in organizing my Second Life. Making the things I wanted to happen in SL seemed like it would take the time away from other real-world activities and commitments like MCN. In the end I just wasn’t ready to make that kind of commitment of time and effort to something where the payoff was unclear.

After I finished my exams, it was time to start making hard decisions about where I was going to go with the dissertation. This time last year, I was seriously considering making Second Life a significant part of my work, but even then I was concerned that SL would be a one-trick pony and wanted to broaden my research to other virtual worlds. As I started talking to friends and faculty about the range of possible dissertation topics, one piece of advice kept coming up: “Do what you are passionate about.” The more and more I thought about this suggestion, the less and less Second Life was the answer to the question “what are you passionate about.”

I took a few steps down the path towards a dissertation that included Second Life, but in the end I’ve decided that this is not where I wanted to make a contribution. For the moment, I’ve decided to put Second Life aside as a concentrated research area.

Now, for all of you in the back row sniggering “I-told-you-so’s,” I’m not done with Second Life, or more broadly virtual worlds, yet. While I do plan on shifting the focus of my research efforts towards other areas, I do plan on keeping a sideways glance at ongoing development of virtual cultural heritage.
Virtual heritage projects are increasingly creating a presence in open worlds, rather than proprietary systems; several real-world museums have taken the plunge into SL (most notably the Tech Museum); and colleges and universities are continuing to explore the use of virtual worlds for distance education. I expect that this will continue to be an interesting area to follow over the next few years. Once the dissertation is signed, sealed and delivered I’ll take another look at how I can contribute to understanding what their role is in the cultural heritage landscape.

Oddly, I find this decision liberating. I have a sneaky suspicion that it might mean that I’m spending more time playing in the GSLIS sandbox..because, now it’s just for fun.