Since my last post, I completed the first [BETA] draft of the dissertation thesis. I don't think I'll pre-publish much, if any of it. Most of the text was handwritten in notebooks at OSLO coffee shop in Williamsburg (Brooklyn, NYC) over a period of eighteen months or so. Periodically, my reader Chris Moylan and I would meet to discuss the book, project, progress, and ongoing Novadic developments, as well. I owe Chris a tremendous debt of gratitude for his participation, suggestions, observations and good will. A note on process, that is relevant to the site-activity for AFH nodes like this one. When I commenced the writing phase of the dissertation, I consulted Geert Lovink (Video Vortex, EGS, etc.), and he recommended I get a cabin upstate and settle in til the work was done. I find the image of the isolated scholar in nature thinking - prototype Walden - to be a lovely, romantic trope. Having lived in rural settings for a fair portion of my adulthood, the romanticism is informed by practical experience. I chose a different path. Instead of shacking up north of Hudson in the Catskills, or somewhere in the Adirondacks, or up in coastal Maine or woodsy Vermont, I stayed in Bushwick (7th coolest neighborhood on Earth, according to Vogue, at the time), shut off the social media, quit updating the AFH network, closed AFH studio and put pen to paper.
Some old friends assumed I had died, or imagined some other dramatic scenarios. The adjustments were practical, media-tactical and not more than that, really. Nonetheless, the experience was informative. Auto-imposition of restraints in the virtual network exchange yielded a bounty of anecdotal material, tied to the effort required to maintain a digitized presence in the social - and the consequences of opting out. I may as well have moved into the analog Wilderness. The effects of the two conditions (virtual Outsider, actual Outsider) on important aspects of my relationships (business, personal, political, and so on) were oddly similar. I can say that, having done both. I plan to write more about this phenomenon later.