What can you do with Sociology/Psychology/Cultural Studies/Social Anthropology post-grad qualification

[onebatmother]

Apart from pat self on back?

I am thinking of retraining but no idea about jobs. Those are the things I'm considering studying - what REAL ACTUAL JOBS might I get with a postgrad MA/PHD in them?

I mean ones that pay money. Any money. But must be money.

Thanks dearies.

Did you read the .. um ... discourse analysis in the Graun yesterday about the renaisance of the exclamation mark in online communication, and its greater use by women -- to acknowledge 'inferiority' and for purposes of conveying friendliness?

Only a humourous piece but interesting. The point it didn't make is that there is a whole new style of writing online in which writing has to take on the immediacy of the spoken word it is chat. So punctuation has to convey things like 'thinking aloud', the provisional nature of what is said i haste etc. It also has a few function of adding in non-verbal aspects of conversation the equivalent of body language and emotional tone.

The piece saidi that exclamation marks in emails were used to compensate for the lack of affect in a sparse utilitarian format. But then went on to say that letters are equally sparse and yet hadn't prompted the overuse of exclmation marks. So it missed the point. Emails and cyberchat have and therefore strive to perfect the immediacy of face-to-face talk.

You know how in the nineteenth century, conversation seemed to or was represented as imitating the ponderous, elaborate, and reference-strewn form of the written word? Eg .Austen's characters speak with impossible perfection. Well there is the opposite literary trend now -- written word imitatiting spoken word with a hasty broken imperfection. The Bridget Jones woman started it, and it is a style apparent on Mumsnet.

Anyway the main point I wanted to throw out was that one of the reasons places like MN thrive is that this immediacy is greater than we give it credit. You'd think that talking-mediated-by-complex-technology would have a special cumberousness and detatchment. But when you reflect that our face-to-face talking it mediated by the technology of our bodies eyes, ears,mouth, whole-body all we ahve done is replace one mediation by another. The computer-mediation is in many ways less obtrusive. Because we share the same computer-mediation it lacks salience, in a way that our bodies don't. It backgrounds itself. That's why, in many ways, talking online seems a little like telepathy, direct mind-to-mind. Does any discourse analyis type thingy pursue this?

I read Mrs Jordan's Profession (Claire Tomalin) very recently where there are abundant examples of early 18th century letter writing and it was curious to see just how casual it was and how much it resembled today's email style!

sorry, that should have read late 18th/early 19th century

That's interesting BA. It's a patchwork now as then, I suppose.

And re telepathy, the world being the bunch of fuckwits that it is, we are busily undermining that by adding in various bells and whistles and tickers. Even mumnst with its proud austerity drags in the clunky mediation of body-technology thusly -->

That's v interestihng Threadie - I've often thought that the exclamation mark was the symbolic equiv of a dog's panting tongue..

You're right re MN vs letters. To wank further: in the case of letters, communication is mediated not only by the technology (pen/paper - and a handwritten alphabet whose signs are only partially shared and express symbolically the physicality of the writer) but also by the anticipated delay and crucially, the body of the postman/go-between - and it's the intervention of the body of another party which, I think, gives the exchange of letters a peculiarly erotic charge.

I don't count that article as discourse analysis, threadworm, but yes, there are people studying discourse analysis online, including me. My phd was on computer-mediated communcation, though this was before the internet, these days there are a lot of people studying internet communication.

Mumsnet is interesting in being quite atypical of most sites, one site I'm supposed to be analysing is stuffed full of emoticons, epithets, images, photos, and we're currently trying to work out how to include all of these in the analysis. Being a discourse analyst I'm much more comfortable with analysing talk or writtten language, not images.

I do dot dot dot to indicate other, more interesting things that I could have said, had I only time..

ah this is all very interesting. In fact we mimic Austen on MN by judging people's characters by their correct or incorrect use of grammar, or by their efforts to be over familiar, etc [etc being a way of alluding to intelligent examples you would think of if you had the time] The use of the exclamation mark is a case in point. Can you imagine a Jane Austen character who spoke with an exclamation mark after every sentence? Lucy Steele comes to mind...

yes or the sensibility sister
There is an archness to parts of MN which also mimics Austen

I think we need a bum-sniffing emoticon

Sounds interesting fennel. Wd like to see the fruit of that resaerch.

Yes onebat re persisting body-mediation in the handwritten letter. The postman I'll have to think about.

Of course even a v austere site isn't really like telepathy still mediated by symbols, etc. But then that raises interesting questions about what would count as unmediated conversation, if anything, or in other words about what telepathy would be like. It would have to be still linguistic, I think, and hence conventional. (Thought abstracted from language turns out to be a bit of a non-starter.) And I think it would have to still involve a communication-intention: there would be mental acts of communication rather than just the passive presence of thoughts that others would view like goldfish in a bowl. I think this must be true because even when reflecting to myself there is a conscious formulation of thoughts -- so reflecting to others must have that too.

So, if telepathy involves language, will, and presumably lots of psychological characteristics like disposition to humour, irony, systematic distorions like negativity and optimism all of which might possibly be called media through which we communicate we get to an interesting question about how we can ultimately draw the line between the media (these internal media) and the communicator. There might be no communicator if we try to abstract entirely from those sorts of media. (Or if you abstracted from them entirely, you might just be left with the pure ideas that are being communicated, so that if you liked paradox you could say that the communicator was just true and false statements.) There must be loads of people who write about this sort of disappearance of the self?? (!!!)

What about the danger of the disappearance of self up one's own arse? [thinks twice about using a vulgar grinning emoticon]

When one is intellectually inferior one has to resort to insults. Didn't mean to halt the conversation, please resume over my head.

S'ok. I was just looking for youtube clips of "The Day Today" philosoper and 'cultural commentator' Jaques Jaqcues Liverot to take the piss out of this kind of conversation.

You could view people as having distributed identities, one of which manifests in internet or computer-mediated communication.

Or, you can have "identity" defined by how it's communicated. Which is a fairly standard postmodernist assumption. No such thing as Identity or Self except in concrete instances, which you can then study.

Threadworm, I have done some basic discourse analysis of mumsnet, there is a link to it on another thread at the moment, another mumsnetter academic and I have written a book chapter on this, which we are inviting interested mumsnetters to read. The book chapter is only very basic DA as the book is quite a basic sort of textbook, but I'm elaborating on it for a journal article at the moment. You can find the details in Site Stuff, but it's under my real name not mumsnet name and I'm trying to keep the two identities just a little bit separate.

But it's possible to study mumsnetter discourse without worrying too much about !! or because they don't really dominate. Unlike the Yoof Site I am currently analysing (the NHS is trying to get down with the kids, hence the funding).

Fennel -- Ah! Yes I looked at that thread. It is interesting. Shoulda guessed!

I'm soory because, as you know from earlier in the thread I know notjhing about the relavant traditions in philosophy and alllied thought. But coming at it from a Dead White Hume background, the disappearance of the self there, etc, I still have an interest.

Essentially, I just like to explore in a range of areas the very basic ideas of how elements that seem to have a very crude simple 'out there' reality ultimately turn out to be constituted in a nexus of practice, perception etc. The reason this still grabs me is this feeble quest I have on the religion threads to find an account of God that is similarly not 'out there' but constituted in The Matrix as t'were, but whose reality and significance is not thereby compromised. But am so rusty.

Would love to see that Fennel - where is the link ??

I remain sniffy about exclamation mark use. Pre MN I was alaso vairy sniffy about emoticons but I've learnt that it helps convey posting mood eg = I'm just back from the hairdresser and my highlights look fantastic, = because I'm worth it, = I'm rising above your looooong, tense response.

Ruty - LOL at Austen.

I love the account of the exclamation mark as indicating an acknowledgement of social inferiority, eg, a long and reasoned post, possibly quite assertive and critical, followed by something like 'That's my view, anyway!!'.

It reminds me so much of the way dogs behave when they have challenged you by disobeying but they are unsure of themselves so turn the whole thing into a 'joke' by some elaborate bodily invitation to play.

And that is Freud's account of the joke too, isn't it.