I need to say it now as I fear I may not have said it enough already, and I fear I may never say it enough in the future:

To A, B, C and D (i.e. Andrew, Budge, Cam and Denis) and to your partners George(ous), Callie and Robin,

Thank you for letting me stay over when I need to, but more than that, thank you for being around. In decades to come when I look back at the first few years of this century and wondered how I ever made it through, I hope I’m reminded that my strength came from you. In lonely times I am met with the surprise that at least one of you was thinking of me. In stressful times I find your couches and your conversations warm and soothing. In happy times I know exactly who I can call to share the happiness.

This semester I’ve been coming down to Melbourne quite often and have depended on you. Next semester I get to stay home a little more, have more time with my children, have less pressure by travel and work. And I will miss seeing you as much as I do. So I must say I feel blessed. Having the seven of you around makes me feel rich.

So today I decided I had really had enough. A couple of weeks ago the wifi wasn’t working so well. I’m in a house where the only two phone jacks are in the kitchen and the main bedroom, at either end of the house. There is a study right in the middle of the place, equidistant from both jacks, which shows the designer of the unti had no idea what the Internet was at the time of building. So I had the modem in the bedroom, and I was sensing that the wireless connection between my machine and the modem was fairly fragile given the consistent dropouts in connection.

So I decided I’d move the modem into the kitchen. The problem seemed to be resolved. No dropouts, no messages on my computer telling me that no modem could be found, yada yada. Everything was great for a few days. But a couple of days ago I had been noticing that, while the modem connection remained strong, I couldn’t seem to open any web pages, and when I did, download speeds had been reduced from the usual 150-160kBps down to around 20-40kBps. So I called my ISP.

My ISP is bigpond.com (if you live outside Australia you may not know that bigpond is the Internet arm of Telstra, the country’s largest phone company, once the only phone company - a government-owned monopoly, and likes to think it owns the country, since the country don’t own it no more). Claiming to be a customer of bigpond.com is kinda like saying you drive a Toyota Starlet or you’re favourite singer is Madonna. You get sniggers or pitiful looks. And you kinda know you deserve them. Bigpond.com was the best provider of ADSL in my town *at the time* (i.e. by no means is that true now) but I’m locked into a contract where my fees are at least 50% more than others’ and I swarmed by PR spin in every second email from them.

The guy on the other end of the phone was really helpful. We spent at least forty minutes talking, and he treated me like someone who knew a thing or two about the Internet, didn’t treat me like an idiot. But we went through all possible reasons for the slow connecton and the only conclusion he could come up with was that there some spyware on my computer that was accessing the Internet, thus slowing down what I was trying to do.

So I downloaded spybot search and destroy, and ran that program at the same time as the Microsoft version I already have (that we all know is as good at catching spyware on your computer as I am at catching salmon with a pair of tweasers). The conntecion was still slow. So the final resort - backup all my data, delete my profile, start a new profile.

Two hours later, success! For three minutes. I got to my homepage, downloaded a couple of emails, then couldn’t access my blog. Bugger.

I went out to dinner with a mate from work who’s the official IT guy, and he suggested I reinstall Windows. I wanted to throw pieces of my beef & black bean at him. Last time I did that I spent two days without sleep loading all my data and programs back up. I told him I didn’t want to do that.

I got home at 9, and at 9.10 I was on hold with bigpond help. At 10.40 I was still on hold, pressing the Refresh button on the computer over and over again until my pointing finger felt arthritic, humming a little tune about killing Telstra’s CEO and blowing up Silicon Valley, selling my kidney for a new computer yada yada yada.

Then a thought occurred to me. Why I don’t just fucking put the modem back in the bedroom, and see what happens? I did that, then I checked my emails, downloaded a couple of podcasts at full speed, and then I started writing this post. And when I’m finished doing that I’m going to think about what I’m going to say to bigpond.com when one of their marketers call me up and ask me questions about the nature of their service.

Yet again, another brilliant man is taken from us.

Budge has written a tribute here, where I read all my own feelings of joy at having known him.

One of the bloggers I have interviewed wrote a reflection on the experience a few weeks ago. Because I take samples of bloggers’ articles plus 28 days of comments, I normally don’t come across them until a month after the posting. I like how he called a “dude doing a phd”; a much more comfortable label than academic or theologian, a lot less pressure to start wearing cravats. I was taken particularly by this passage in his post:

Was also interesting thinking about the stage I went through with my blogging where I really cared how many people read my blog, and would fully just make up posts so that my readership wouldn’t go down. Nowadays I couldn’t really be bothered. It was cool seeing my hit counter quadruple in the week after I was on the TV/paper/radio, but nowadays I don’t blog to get readers. If people read my stuff, then sweet, if not, then I’m ok with it.

Funny things blogs.

It reminded me about Cohen’s attack on the criticism that bloggers are narcissistic. In his article A welcome for blogs, he argues that the criticism of narcissism is brought about by a misunderstanding of the relationship between the blogger and his or her audience. For Cohen, as for me, the act of blogging is not just the act of communicating with an audience; there is a process of creating an audience for the utterances and actions in blogging. Just as one chooses one’s clothes in the morning and wonders what would look appropriate for the settings one will find oneself in during the course of the day, a blogger imagines and creates the situation in which his or her article may be read, and manifests it in the posting. The process of creation is supported by the knowledge of an audience that is brought about by the appearance of comments by other people, links made to the blog by other bloggers, etc. Essentially, however, a blogger posts to an audience that is a mixture of known, presumed, and imagined.

Therefore the act of blogging is not merely the projection of a public speech, but the ongoing creation of a blogger, or a blogged identity, for the gaze and interaction of other online identities. it is not the same as the projection of a personality on a TV screen, or at a theatre, where that character/celebrity is an already fashioned item. As Cohen asserts,

blogs appear to be shifting the balance of personality and impersonality in the operation of publics and in the production of public subjects – which is to suggest that blogs are shifting the ground for selfhood tout court. (p. 166)

We do not interact with bloggers as we do with personalities in other media (like radio or TV) where our powers are limited to traditional definitions of “audience”. We can contribute to and change the media content that bloggers provide; we can make ourselves “known” to the blogger. Yet it is also not the same as engaging with another on an IM chat or email list. A blogger’s audience is wider than the list of registered members in a discussion group. We the audience are being created as we the blogger are creating ourselves to engage with it.

If bloggers appear to be narcissistic, if they disturb us for this reason, then is this not a clue that, whatever our opinion of the wine the produce, blogs re-wire the circuits through which we comfortably reflect on ourselves, the ways in which we use intimacy to distinguish self from other, the way in which we care and come to care. (p. 169)