Wake Me When It's Over

We spent five hours today talking in circles. I think we're all ready to kill something.

So we came up with a definition last week for meaningful engagement, and now we’re trying to figure out how to measure it. We thought we would survey people, and have them example social media posts on a scale of 1-10 for each of the three main factors. The first two are intuitive enough—personal interest and learning. But how the hell are you supposed to rank a post for its community aspect? There’s nothing intuitive about that.

So we started throwing ideas back and forth, and shooting them down as quickly as we came up with them. They weren’t specific enough. Were too biased. Were completely subjective. We debated and argued and discussed and got bloody nowhere.

Once again, the problem is that we’re engineers trying to do social science. I tried (not for the first time) to point out that we don’t need a technical, exact, thorough measurement; we just need /something/ that can later be used as a launching point, a starting ground. It’s subjective by nature; it doesn’t necessarily have to be specific. But I did a poor job of communicating that, or else they just weren’t willing to accept it; I’m not sure which. Maybe both. So we talked in circles some more.

And then it got worse, when one of my teammates burst out saying that not only is our project impossible, but it’s pointless. No one actually cares. No one is actually going to use anything we uncover. All anyone cares about is getting more customers, making more money, and meaningful engagement isn’t going to help that, so it doesn’t matter whether anything is meaningfully engaging to begin with.

And when I tried to argue that meaningful engagement does matter, that it is useful, the other two agreed with her, and together the three of them all but outright stated that I was wrong.

Suddenly I feel like I’m the only one who wants to see this project succeed. Who cares about it at all any more. And I feel like any input I have, any suggestions I make, are disregarded or ignored. I don’t think that’s actually true; I realize I’m likely being oversensitive and putting too much weight on a few particular instances. But it still feels that way.

Anyway. We met with our advisors today. They told us that we don’t need a technical, exact, or thorough measurement, that it’s subjective by nature, and that it doesn’t necessarily have to be specific. Go figure.

I don’t want to go to work tomorrow.

Day the Twenty-Second

For the first time since I arrived in Wellington, I slept past 11am. Then I got up, had breakfast, packed myself a dinner, and headed out.

My first stop was the train station. I got a response from the bus company yesterday telling me that they hadn’t been able to find my purse and were considering it lost, which had me just overjoyed. I figured, if it wasn’t on the bus, maybe someone turned it in to the train station? But I arrived to find that the customer service desk was closed on weekends. I’ll try again tomorrow, but I’m not actually that hopeful. At this point… I’m pretty sure it’s gone for good.

I spent the afternoon at Te Papa. At around 5pm I joined up with my project team so that we could hammer out the draft of our Lit Review which is due tomorrow morning. It was rather plain that none of us actually wanted to be doing work, but we disciplined ourselves and got it done. With luck, we won’t have to spend any more weekends doing work. I’m not feeling inclined to trust our luck.

Tonight was apparently the world championship (or something like that) for men’s singles tennis, so a bunch of us went to a bar to watch it on a giant screen. That was fun. My understanding of tennis is approximately the same as my understanding of any other sport, which is to say, not that great. But I learned more, and I was more or less able to keep track of what was going on.

Overall, today was a boring day, which means you get to hear about another Te Papa exhibit. Turns out, Te Papa is currently home to the largest collosal squid that has ever been captured. It was caught somewhere off Antarctica, brought to Te Papa, dissected for Science, and then pickled in this giant tank that’s hanging out in the museum. The tank is bloody huge, and I think it makes the squid look smaller than it actually is. Apparently, if you sliced up the mantle, it would make rings the size of car tires. Think about that next time you’re eating calamari.

There’s also a game to go along with it. You can play it [here] if you’re interested. There’s your procrastination tool for the day.

Three Weeks Done....

I didn’t even have any plans today, and I still didn’t manage to sleep in. I suppose that’s a good thing, since it means I’ve developed a consistent sleep schedule here. It also meant that I spent all day at Te Papa taking advantage of the wi-fi. I got to play Nightshade! With a new character, even. (I think this is the part where I comment on the wonders of technology, and how I can participate in a game from the other side of the world.)

And I had the last of my rice-beans-corn-chicken for dinner. It’s finally gone! I can eat something different!

I also discovered some massive and colorful bruises on the backs of my legs. Also, my tailbone hurts. Courtesy of my jump into the water. Sitting is painful. This was an unexpected consequence, and confirms that I won’t be trying it again.

This is apparently a weekend for new experiences. Jumping off platforms into water… going out clubbing… there’s a group of Australians staying in our apartment complex, and apparently last night they met some of us and hung out. So they were hanging out again tonight, and my roommate invited me to go along. Since the alternative was spending the evening alone, I agreed.

We hung out at the apartments for a while, visiting. I hovered at the periphery, not quite feeling comfortable enough to join in on any conversations. Situations like this make me shy. I was also one of the only sober people there, and planned to stay that way, having no money to spend on drinks regardless of any desire to drink them. One of my classmates offered me a beer, which I accepted; that was my only drink for the night. After a while, one of the Australians introduced himself, and we had a conversation. I started to relax. Still felt out of place, but not as much.

When we were politely informed that the noise ban had come into effect, we headed out to a club. This, too, was outside my range of experience, but it didn’t matter so much. I’ve said before that music is universal, even if it’s club music being pumped through speakers that leave you deaf. Most of it was actually familiar; I recognized the majority of the songs, and that’s saying something, given the amount of attention I pay to contemporary music. We all danced together and watched out for each other, and just generally had a good time. It was a new experience, but I’m glad I went.

Also, this may have been the first night I’ve been in Wellington that I’ve stayed up past midnight. No wonder I’ve been waking up so early.

Twenty, Part III

So. Remember that platform that people were jumping off way back on my first day here? We all decided to reconvene there after work today. And since I made a promise to myself, I decided I was going to jump off.

It was entirely backwards from what I expected, in that the jump itself wasn’t that bad, but the fall was bloody terrifying. I took the smaller jump first. I jumped, closed my eyes…. And waited…. And waited… and wondered why I hadn’t landed yet because wasn’t gravity faster than this? When I finally did land, the breath I was holding was forced out of me and I scrambled for the surface. My thoughts consisted of THIS IS BLOODY COLD with a hint of oh yeah, this is saltwater, isn’t it.

But that wasn’t the promise I made myself. I needed to jump off the top platform. So…. I did. And even though the shorter jump should have prepared me, I still felt like I was falling too long, and I still inwardly freaked out. I also leaned back too far and unwittingly drew my legs to my chest, so when I crawled out of the water, I realized that the backs of my thighs hurt. A lot. Who knew that water could cause so much pain.

Worth it once. Don’t think I’ll be doing it again.

Twenty, Part II

An hour and a half later, we finally returned to our desks, but we only had half an hour remaining before our first meeting; not really enough time to get work done on the writing. Instead we went over our agenda and planned the meeting.

Our sponsors seemed pleased by our definition just as our advisors had been. Stephen (the person officially in charge of the project) nit-picked it a bit, questioning our choice of certain words. As he put it, it was good stuff; he liked to argue with good stuff. Which was encouraging and frustrating at the same time, because we realized his arguments were valid and would need consideration. But he also said that he thought it was solid enough to take and run with. We didn’t need to test it or validate it; we’d already used expert sources to synthesize it, and we weren’t going to get any new information.

The next step, then, was to figure out what to do with it next, and as the meeting went on we grew more and more frustrated as we realized we were about where we had started—feeling like this was beyond us, like it was an impossible task, like we didn’t even know what we were trying to achieve, much less how to go about achieving it. We had the definition, and we needed to figure out how to apply it to social media in a tangible way. But how? They gave us a deadline of next Wednesday to present them with some ideas of ways to test it. Whatever ‘testing it’ actually means.

So instead of working on our writing, we spent the afternoon discussing Stephen’s criticism and trying to get our heads around our next step. We figured there were two ways of looking at it—measuring people’s behavior, or measuring content that is posted—but realized that it wasn’t possible to have or even measure one without the other. You can’t figure out what one person’s behavior means without knowing the content that was posted; but you can’t know how much content is worth without understanding what caused someone to react to it a certain way. If each relies on the other, but we can’t measure either one… It’s another impossible question.

All the while we had it in the back of our minds that we were running out of time for the writing. None of us wanted to work on it over the weekend. But we couldn’t really do much more work on it until we answered these questions.

We reconvened with our sponsors and our advisors, and spent the better part of an hour talking over those very questions as a group. Everyone seemed to have a different idea, a different understanding of our goal. The only thing that all of us agreed on (sponsors, advisors, and project team) was that we had been thinking about it too long, and should go get a drink after work to take our minds off it. Take that for what it’s worth.

The meeting finally adjourned, with just over an hour left to work on the writing assignments. But with our advisors there, we had some questions we wanted to ask them, since we had the opportunity. And so the conversation resumed, and we talked in more circles, making no more progress, except to realize just how convoluted this whole project is. The conversation was summarized in one ten-second exchange:

Advisor One commented on how he almost felt we should be sitting around smoking pipes, since we were discussing something so philosophical.

Teammate One muttered that we needed something stronger than pipes.

Advisor Two remained silent, but wore an expression that left no doubt that she agreed completely with Teammate One’s analysis.

By the time they left, there was no hope of getting the writing done. While we didn’t go out and smoke or drink anything, we did desperately need to give our minds a break. So we reluctantly accepted that we would meet over the weekend to finish the writing. It wouldn’t be the end of the world.