Multitasking Has Never looked like this, digital diary

Sunday

• First thing I do upon waking, check cell phone for message from the bf
• He called at 2:30 a.m. and left voicemail
• Listen to the voicemail, feel better
• Get up, turn on desktop pc, check gmail (which has seven different email accounts going into it, so I have work email, freelance email, personal email)
• Turn on MPR’s the Current for music
• Go back to my bed and turn on my laptop
• Google Docs, taking notes for new blog articles

• Writing this article now
• Google Docs (Spreadsheet), balancing check registry
• Twittering all the while
• Added New peeps to join the Knitters Pack in twitter
• Added colleague for a non-profit I am on Board of Directors to twitter
• Tweeting with someone in Seattle about how we neither of us had a good night's sleep
• Adding Rufus Wainwright cd to my itunes library
• Open up Microsoft outlook to sync ipod touch calendar with both Microsoft outlook and google calendar
• Network connection says gDocs isn't saving, so I copy and paste from gDocs to MS Word...annoyed
• I copy “Network connection says gDocs isn't saving, so I copy and paste from gDocs to MS Word...annoyed” and put it into my twitter page as what I’m doing now.
• Now I finally get to doing website work in dreamweaver
• While my laptop loads dreamweaver, I pick up my ipod touch and check my emails, see I have a new twitter following so I check out her profile. I read her last view exchanges, all about breakfast cereal (Captain Crunch purist). Looking for why she’s following me… ah shes in the knit pack, so I start following her. Interesting, she’s from Texas
• Back to the dreamweavering:
• Start by working on www.mncampusallince.org just a couple of quick things, like emailing one of the co-chairs registrations numbers for our annual Spring Dinner (www.mncmapusallaince.org/springdinner) I download it with dreamweaver, open it with MS Access, export it to Excel and then email to Co-chair.
• I check my twitter, message LM, and become her first follower on twitter
• I then decide to check into my Verizon account to see if I can afford to put twitter on my phone so I check my txt messaging bundle. See I don’t have one all of a sudden! (I should have a 500 msg bundle) verizon says I’m going to charged like 50.00 for this month if I don’t add a bundle, but I should have a bundle!
• I call Verizon…
• While on hold I go back to dreamweaver, I switch from Campus Alliance to First Universalist Church website
• I get someone, they say that I still have the 500 text bundle package, and that it must be a glitch in their system. Because of this I decide not to increase my plan or make it so twitter can send my updates to my phone until this month is over and things are sorted out
• Back to the website work
• I think about lunch/breakfast, then look at my bank account online
• I gChat with Kim, she’s back from Rome
• Back to website work
• I get a call on my cell from Katie, we make plans to do lunch
• I’m off…
• On my way to Katie and Travis, I call my mum, we have our daily 2-5 minute conversation that proves I am still alive. Next I call Verizon, and upgrade my txt message plan to unlimited, which as it turns out is only 10/mo more than I have now.
• While out at the restaurant, I discover they have wifi, use my ipod touch to add my cell phone info to twitter
• Now at a coffee shop, I am able to update this list of the day, create some gmail filters to deal with all the twitter emails as well as some newsletter and bill emails so I don’t have to label them manually.
• I check my twitter profile, get a few more things figured out, and discover that a friend of one of my new twitter followers lives in Minneapolis as well. Neat!
• And I’m back to doing website work.
• While working on websites with my green tea in hand, an older couple sits down at another table. The woman asks if her knitting needles clacking will drive me crazy, which is sweet. I tell her no, I love to knit, and then she decides to pump me for information on my laptop, assuming that I know all about the trends in laptops because of my age (which is kind of true in my case). I think though of many of my college friends who basically could use the MS suite and do web browsing and that was the limit. A kind of reverse ageism seems to be recurring where if one is under 25 or maybe under 30, they are assumed to be a tech geek, web savvy, blogger and all around computer tech support center. I wonder how this will impact hiring as people realize that not all young people work well with computers, just like the older generation, there are early adopters, late adopters, those who choose to learn as much as possible, and those who learn what they need to survive and loathe the bloody computers and gizmos that are creating a new world around every person.
• Now I sign off my computer, power of my ipod touch, switch my twitter account from IM mode to phone, and head out of the coffee shop. Now always online, never offline. It seems just the degree of connected fluctuates throughout the day from sleeping with just a cell phone to disturb ones slumber to having a desktop pc playing music from across the room while I am on my bed with my laptop updating websites, my blog, twittering, charging my ipod, and doing work for my no longer strictly 9 to 5 Monday through Friday jobs via email. Finally there is the time between these two extremes that we weave through where we are checking our email once while stuck in traffic, keeping up with txts while on hold at work, and knowing that someone we met once at a conference is eating Thai in Florida. Multitasking as truly taken on a new and constantly growing meaning for the silly great apes of today that thought fire was good idea.

Jumping into the deep end of the pool

So, I spent the day at the Message + Medium + Mission Conference in downtown Minneapolis today. I was able to learn about all the fun technologies that I have thought about using in the past, or different ways to use those I have used for a number of years. Flickr, Twitter, Various Google technologies, FaceBook, blogs and many other of the usual suspects were discussed at virtually every session. Hundreds of non-profit employees, board members, and volunteers got to see how the world is changing and how this new world's tools can be used to continue their mission's in cyberspace. I attended as a member of the Rainbow Rumpus Board of Directors, to see how these new shiny things can help us create a more interactive online community for kids of LGBT parents.

There is much more to the game now than having a website out there with a mission, staff roster, and a listing of programming. Many orgs employ online donation, blogging, galleries of photos, video clips, and streaming audio already and have done so for some time. The even newer technologies of RSS, Flickr, Twitter, social networking sites that seemingly are for the individual are being tapping into for to create powerful online fund raising campaigns, action alert networks, awareness building, and simply getting an org's existence out there for more of the world to see. Only now you can know when the org has reached a fund raising goal, is tabling at an event in another state, or when the Executive Director is out for a stroll around Lake Calhoun.

Organizations seem to be becoming more alive and organic than ever before, as you can friend an organization, know where its representatives are, and in some cases observe live video feeds on the work being done. I saw so many interesting uses of seemingly useless social tools that now I wonder, if Twitter can be useful, what can't be?

It was a great use of a day, and a big wake up call to seeing potential usefulness in spending more time with my laptop. Any way to justify that is priceless to a computer geek that spends too much time thinking about books, reading about computers, and now computing about people. Ah, to be a Social Science major!

Huh?

So Technocultural Anthropology eh? No not a typo or completely random mashing of words together this time, but rather, a fairly new area of academic study which is constantly being defined (even by me...right....now...). Basically this blog is something I have been thinking about doing for quite some time, and after a day of being immersed at a Technology and Communications Conference simply cannot put off any longer. I hope to look at how new technology is not only being used to create new cultures, but how the old offline cultures are interacting and being changed dramatically by emerging mediums. Additionally, I hope to explore how these new cultures which are largely digital in nature spill over to the non-digital world.
For a little more insight into Technoculture or the interactions between, and politics of, technology and culture simply go anywhere online or offline and take a step back and think about how the technology is affecting and shaping what you are observing. I will mostly be focusing on how online technologies are creating new and interesting communities and how these communities are ever-changing and also changing the places they touch, digital and non-digital alike.