Jennifr

Get off your face(book)!!!1

I have been managing a facebook page for my bar job for the last month and a half. Yesterday I got asked to read and sign an official guide on how to set up Facebook groups, issued by the company’s head office.

Within the pages, I was particularly drawn to the section of what I wasn’t allowed to do as profile manager.

I was not allowed, under any circumstances:

• Make any reference to violent activity. (A given…)
• Make any reference to alcohol. (Hmm…)
• Make any reference to being drunk. (Erm…)
• Make any reference to being drunk in the pub. (I don’t know if posting photographs of people in the pub counts…)
• To encourage people to come to the pub to drink more alcohol than they normally should. I.E. Don’t write “get off your face tonight at the Dry Dock!” (There goes advertising drinks promos, drink prizes in the quiz and any theme nights…)
• Put any pictures of staff members on the site without direct permission.

Following this, I was directed to a section in my contract that states that any involvement with social networking websites on behalf of the company would be monitored at a regular intervals and if I was to break any of these rules, it could result in instant dismissal.

Lovely.

It’s nice to see big companies attempting to embrace social media (*cough*). Of course, I don’t (officially) get paid to organise online grassroot marketing for them - although my manager does (unofficially) give me free beer in return for taking the risk on his behalf.

So how do I run a facebook group, on behalf of a big company, who wants to appear like they are “down with the kids”, when the pub is pretty laid back anyway, but without losing my job in the process? And where do I stand blogging about this, as this is the view of Jennifer Jones - the blogger, not Jennifer Jones, the Mitchell and Butler representative? Does it even work?

Posted in blogging, general, internet tools, leicester, part time jobs, work |

I’m Not Dead!

My blog has been pretty quiet of late. This is down to two possible causes:

1) I’ve just moved house. Well, I moved house about 2 and a half weeks ago - however, I have only just got round to contacting potential broadband suppliers (went for Virgin Media in the end - no need for a phone line) - so I won’t get fully-working broadband/wifi until next week. It is GREAT to be finally out of the Halls of Residence (aka The Yellow Prisons) and back into a real house - and as real houses go, it is bloody marvelous (The landladies have recently done it up - every room is shiny and new and what little belongings I have, goes with the decor of my comfy, double bedroom..) I hope to NEVER (fingers crossed) find myself living in such rip-off, disgusting conditions again…

2) I have an extension on my dissertation. There was a little bit of a court case over the summer that I was involved in - which leaked a bit into the time I had for my dissertation write up. My original deadline was the 11th of August (which has been and gone) - which has now been moved to the end of September (or a month longer if I doth require it, as I have to attend court again in the beginning on September (meh!) However, I am back on form with it - so hopefully the combination of highspeed, uncapped Internetz and comfy new house so aid the write up process.

Need to get back into the blogging - but once I can catch up with the stuff I miss out on a regular basis (mainly multimedia things like podcasts and videos) and have got my google reader back down to a reasonable amount, this shouldn’t be a problem. I also need to get back into the ways of using del.icio.us and stumbleupon. At the moment I’m only really managing to check into my emails, social networking sites such as facebook and using Twitter extensively… Twitter keeps me connected when I can’t be otherwise.

Apart from that - yeah, stay tuned!

Posted in blogging, dissertation, general, internet tools, leicester, masters, moving to england |

Untangle my brain.

Here is a new experience in my short-lived academic career - coming to terms to have to go back and reuse things I have already been assessed on. Undergrad taught me to forget everything ‘boot telly and films and focus on the new media and computer stuff - now I want to use EVERYTHING I’ve learnt in sort of dissertation pie. Having to go back several gigantic leaps and revaluate work I have done for my Ph.D. proposal and tailor it for my MA thesis. My brain is currently tangled up in stuff I got a good mark for and stuff that I NEED to include in my literature review. The whole philosophy of the Inter-webs is to move forward, forward, forward - and now I feel that I’ve rattled on so far of myself, I’m grudgingly wanting to go back to do what I need to do in order to “level-up” - booo! I guess this the fun, angst-y, HARDWORK, “learning about yourself” bit you get with wanting to pursue any sort of research career. 

That is all. I just wanted to get that part of my chest. Thanks for listening.

Posted in angst, dissertation |

Writing an MA dissertation. Part one.

Social Networking and Identity: A case study investigating the relationship between social networking software and the online and offline identity constructions of University of Leicester students.

So, today is the day I start writing - no more mucking around, it works out I have 7 weeks to complete the whole thing and I’m sitting on a grand total of NAE words (word counts don’t matter, eh?) - so finger out and planned my literature review.

It needs to be around 35 percent of the full thing (between 15,000 and 18,000 words in all) - so I’ve split my literature review into roughly 5 sections to cover.

• A brief overview of the concept of the network society, information age and the changes in the digital economy resulting in the importance of data collection online.

• Wellman (1998, 2001), Castells (1996, 2001), Granovetter (1983) and Fiske (1992) – which explores network analysis theory and the concept of “networked individualism, Small World networks, the importance of weak ties and the differences between networks and groups.

• Virtual Identity and the construction of virtual identities.

• The contrast between online and offline relationships.

• Recent work that has been done on social networking software and sociality. That’ll probably be a bit of danah boyd and co.

So as it stands, I start from around these sort of areas roughly and see where this takes me. And because I am a mad fool, I intend to get the first draft of these done for this time next week. Shouldn’t be too bad if I try and keep focussed and stop getting distracted every 15 seconds….

Although, to be fair, blogging about the work I have to do has got to have helped me into to getting 75 percent in every assignment I’ve done this semester.

Posted in blogging, dissertation, general, leicester university, masters, university, work |

Aren’t they all just applied Philosophy?

Posted in general |