"As a professor of rhetoric, I necessarily became a student of narcissism, which for simplicity’s sake I define as not knowing where your boundaries end and the rest of the world begins." (Guy McPherson via desdemonadespair)

Trying to blog at the minute feels very much like I'm in an imaginary room watching nameless faces wobble on a knife-edge between polite concern and genuine horror, as a needling worry tries to get my attention: am I naked from the waist down? Do I have my pants on my head? What am I saying? I hold off, waiting for some surety that I'll say something sensible... I end up writing nonsense like this. Why? Why here? What's the benefit of that imaginary audience and their wobbly faces? Is it just the virtual equivalent of hanging around in parks with your goolies hanging out, hoping someone's going to look over? As the quote above suggests, it's a peculiar sort of solipsism.

I've always thought it was simply that you have to adopt a different writing style to accommodate the possibility - however slim - that the Internets might come and read you. That forces a little more thought about structure and flow. But having taken an extended break from twitface, and now to be trying facebook again, I'm not so sure. Some peope know they have an audience, and that must help define what they're doing in their own mind. After all, the feedback is real, not merely a projected hallucination. But there must, of course, be something intrinsically narcissistic about the enterprise: each entry reaffirms a desire, however obscured by rationalisations, to be observed. Otherwise, why not just keep a journal?

It's obviously daft, though, to say any form of communication is narcissistic, any more than a schoolkid doing their homework makes them so. What I like about the above quote, though, is that it seems to capture something of the role of imagination in online communication. As I say, it's been weird returning to Facebook and moving again from being deeply suspicious to letting it back in the veins again. (Sociology alert: that's Bauman's synopticon right there. We demand to be watched, and our most private utterances only take on meaning with a viewing public, even if that public exists only in our own mind.) With facebook, that's not to say there's no genuine social element to it, but it's only in taking an extended break from it - and then relearning the weird urge to post - that I can sense the little high it provides, the (cod-psychology alert) micro-dose of oxytocin from rubbing up against the leg of virtual sociability. The number of people that actually take part, compared to the nominal quantity of facebook friends anyone has, is a hint of that.

So it's slightly the same when blogging; one's mental reactions are real enough, but it's unclear to me what's really going on. It's un-nerving. Spending five years working towards the endpoint of the PhD is obviously a factor in feeling so weird. What the bejeesus happens now? How come it still feels like now, it was six months ago! I have to actually finish it first. The viva is long done, but the corrections are still lurking about. The thing still feels too unfinished to mention; another narcissistic urge to destroy anything lacking some inestimable quality of good enough. Sloping off quietly and pretending nothing happened seems easier somehow. Thanks all the same, good taxpayers...

Being spat out at the end of PhDing can leave one devoid of all porpoise. A bad acid trip that takes a huge hunking bite out of your alloted years; a fairy land at right angles to the rest of time. Hang on - what the hell's going on again? Where am I? How old? What the hell was that all for anyway? So here I am, pants on my head, naked from the waist down and possibly even with pencils up my nose, deciding the way to deal with that is to blog about it. Who knows? Might help. Not a full online career and friendship destroying mental breakdown, but at least something capable of causing a slight sweat-prickle of embarrassment when read a year later. You might delete it but the internet never forgets.

At any rate, this all by way of a little push for myself to pull the plug out of my, um, nostrils and write some shit down, for better or worse. This sort of navel-gazing is even more narcissistic than blogging about something genuinely empirically interesting, of course, but some writing is (possibly) better than none. I don't really want to strangle that while I wait for a decent academic voice to assert itself; think I'll just carry on as normal and hope for the best.

That said, some preparation did go into a separate academic blog: domain registered and everything. I'm just not sure I have the heart to write that "dear coveredinbees" letter, so I reckon I'll hang on here a while longer, see if I can get those topics going. Thank you in advance, imaginary audience, for indulging my half-naked pants-on-head ramblings. Wibble.