You don't say

•Trying to finish up my computer-mediated communication coursework at the moment. In going back through my notes on further reading, I have just been amused to find that I wrote this without any irony at all:

•Morahan-Martin (1998) Putting CMC research into context – suggests that women find online flaming, sexual harassment, and porn alienating, while men tolerate or encourage all of them. Women are thus discouraged from joining in online and men (according to demographics) dominate.

You mean that women don't like stumbling upon dodgy porn pics when they forgot to put Google SafeSearch on? And they dislike being sexually harassed in online gaming environments just because their profile says that they're female? Shocking, that.

And yes, I learnt the SafeSearch thing the hard way recently. In a moment of bored procrastination, I did an image search for Michaela Strachan and didn't realise that SafeSearch was off until I reached the somewhat graphic naked image purporting to be of her. Well, thanks for that, anonymous person with too much time and photoshop expertise on their hands, I do enjoy being reminded that dodgy porn is alive and well on the internet and appearing on a computer near you. Pffft.

n.b. I should probably note the reason why I happened to be doing the aforementioned image search: I recently discovered that the 30 something male crowd was very much in love with her when they were young (see the Scouting For Girls song Michaela Strachan broke my heart when I was 12). Given that she presented a wildlife programme for kids, I was a bit curious about why she was so sexy to them all! I don't see it, personally.

But then, I'm not an impressionable 12 year old boy. Thankfully.

Convenient sizing

One of the advantages to having small wrists, as I've just discovered, is that you can change your bedroom light bulb without having to remove the paper globe thing first.

Sadly, being generally a bit small means I still can't reach high enough when standing on my bed to be able to readjust the globe so that it's as high up as before. So, er, we're going for the funky, low-flying globe look at the moment...

Small joys, eh?

Teen topics

One of the articles I'm currently trying to summarise for a horribly-close-to-the-deadline bit of work is to do with gender and identity in teenage blogs. Reading through topics that get discussed and all that made me reminisce a little. Not that I'd go back to being 16 - onwards and upwards, I reckon - but I was talking to an old friend recently and remembering how we used to discuss loads of stuff about identity and world views when we were that age. You know, the examination of who you are, why you feel and think the way you do, what influences all of the above. One of my favourite questions was how far we look at the past with rose-tinted spectacles, and whether that's bad for us or just an instinct. I never did come up with an answer. I guess, in the sense of opinions about the world, I still think about stuff. That's why I blog, I suppose! But even being student age sometimes seems the start to losing that feeling that your identity can be anything...you get used to being the same and you lose that sense of the "examined life". I don't ever want to lose that completely, though. Still, much as I'm a fan of introspection, the experience of once having been a girl in her mid teens makes me avoid inflicting dodgy psychoanalysis on myself at all costs!

Don't know what I'm trying to say, really, but maybe it's an interesting thing to consider?

And yes, it's exam time, as you can tell by the thinking about life and the procrastination.