So here I am. My own blog.

I'm a Concordia University student in Montreal, Quebec, majoring in Sociology. My interests are particularly in popular and cyberculture, online community, and construction of identity/reality.

I've been around the Net for a while. I can truthfully say I remember it "when" ... when it was pre-web, when Archie and Veronica weren't just slightly-dated comic strip characters, when a BBS was the next best thing to real life, when having an email address made you a total geek. As a result, I guess I consider myself a bit of a cyberexpert (but not a Net Yoda though -- they amaze and scare me!).

Thus....when my Mass Communications professor said I could do any kind of media project on anything we covered in class, instead of doing a 15 page research paper -- well, silly me, I decided to take him up on it. Rather than take the easy way out and do that paper, I've decided instead to do a website. The site itself will be the project, and it's based on a theory I’ve got.

What's my theory? Simply this…that this place we call the Internet, despite its roots in science and alternative academia, has become increasingly corporatized as a result of big money moving online and walling off, buying up or otherwise rendering the net a far different place in which to live and be. But now, with a bunch of new ideas, new technologies and new approaches to using the space that is the Internet, we, the people, are taking it back and reclaiming it, turning it back into our own I-Space.

My theory is grounded in the work of two heavy thinkers in the cultural studies universe. The first one is this guy Michel De Certeau, who in the 1970s wrote a very cool work called The Practice of Everyday Life". (Not an easy thing to read, because it's completely couched in over-the-top academic language). Anyways, the gist of De Certeau's argument is we, the people, derive meanings and pleasures from our everyday lives by using tactics to counter the forces of domination and their controlling strategies. Our chosen tactics allow us to carve out our own personal places within the corporate spaces of everyday life. One of De Certeau’s favourite concepts is of "la perruque" (which was my second choice for a blog name, given that I live in a French-Canadian city).

The second guy is Stuart Hall, with his theories on the representation of the image. I’ll save the explanation of his theories though, for another day.

Anyways…

And …so… here I am.

And if you're still reading this, here you are.

This is my project. That's what this blog is. In the next 30 days, I will attempt to crawl daily through the net and cull from its billions of bytes nuggets of cybergold that prove my theory. Then I'll post them here. Along the way, I hope to talk to others who blog and find out why (maybe even approach a few Net Yodas). I might look into a few other tactics as well, like cyberbards, white-hat hacking, etc., but we’ll see. In the process, I hope to learn more about the medium of blogging, learn about the way netizens are deriving meanings and pleasures from their own online activities and perhaps delve into a few theories of what is yet to come for us all in the Internet and online worlds.

Oh…yeah…and, of course, I’ll hopefully get an “A” from my prof.

So…welcome….to my own personal piece of I-Space.