It is with some dismay that I‛ve realized that I‛ll be working mostly online next semester. My class on Rhetoric, Intellectual Property and the Internet is a meatspace class. But my participation in Collin Brooke's Networked Rhetorics class at Syracuse will be necessarily virtual, and I‛m teaching an online section of Technical and Professional Writing. While I‛m excited about all the courses I‛m taking and teaching, I‛m concerned about what it means for my tendency toward hermeticism.

This is compounded by the fact that I‛ve never learned to work in the office as a graduate student. I did it all the time when I was in industry, but my previous department‛s graduate student offices consisted of four desks in an old, musty room that nobody ever went into. Working there was often more lonely and inefficient than working at home, because at home I had Mister Boyfriend and a DSL connection. Things are better here, where I have a very nice office that I share with one other person who‛s rarely there. It‛s a bit off the beaten path of the department, which makes it nicely quiet but also means that I have to go out of it in order to see anybody. At least one person has commented on the fact that I‛m rarely in the office. Since I wasn‛t teaching last semester, I didn‛t keep office hours, and it usually doesn‛t dawn on me to go in except on days when I have space between two classes.

This whole arrangement reminds me of last spring, when I was working on my thesis and teaching one course online. My only meatspace seminar met one evening per week, and there was nobody else in my department who dealt with my research area. In spite of a lot of lunches with friends, it was a pretty lonely, boring semester. Mister Boyfriend was always around the house too, but we had offices on separate floors and were both working on theses. I found that I missed the bustle of human energy, and it impacted my work processes. It was certainly not the most productive semester I ever had.

I‛m telling myself that this one won‛t necessarily be the same, because both of my classes are in my research area and will involve a fair amount of physical and virtual conversation. I‛ve made some friends up here, and I‛ll be sure to check in with them from time to time. Who knows, I may figure out how to work in the office again. And I may learn to read in coffee shops. Scott has told me for forever that I should do it in order to be away from TV, the Internet, and fascinating spouses. (In fact, he has a nice entry on coffee shop-as-office here.) I‛ve never bothered because I have a tendency to people-watch and because as an Internet researcher I need the Internet to get things done. So many places have wifi now that connectivity needn‛t be a concern, but I think that leaving the laptop at home and doing my reading someplace public would be a good way to remove my usual procrastination devices.

We‛ll see, eh?