I have been thinking what kind of research is suitable for me. I have done something on online privacy issues. In order to get my full professor, new and promising fields need to be explored. Information ethics and digital human right are also interesting topics; however, it would be difficult to have empirical research at this point. My PhD advisor might suggest me to stick to something which really interested me. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of topics, such as how technology change content and format, how to revise the curriculums based on the changes, users' behaviors. As my professor in graduate program said, Julia, it seems that you are interested in SMCRE all. Indeed, I am. Information overload makes me anxiety. Recently, I just cannot calm down myself to revise the paper which deadline was past several weeks ago. Hope I can find a way out or back to the track asap.

I have maintained a blog for my son on Babyhome since 2005. All of sudden, I am overwhelmed with his stuffs, not mine any more. I need to pick up my own life. In addition, I promised myself to post in English as more as possible. Today is my son's birthday. This is a gift for myself to start a new life from now on. Hope this will not be another new year resolution again.

I was too lazy to keep my blog "alive." After finding RSS, I cannot wait to feed it again. The reason is that I want to feed someone else who needs my words.

Happy Valentine’s Day

I have been learning that technology is socially shaped. Today I figure out one more thing is also socially shaped. That is Valentine’s Day. Given that we are all from different countries in my office, we share our different experiences of Valentine’s Day. My Dutch and Finish colleagues told me they don’t have this day when they were teenagers. It seems to bloom recently. Therefore, they are still in the stage of observing. When I were in the U.S., I got chocolate from my students, colleagues, and some friends even though I am not so significant to them. In Taiwan, we usually give gifts or chocolate to partners or important persons to us only. There was no one bring chocolate to share with colleagues in my office. In Korea, Valentine’s Day is a day for men to give women gifts. Next month at the same day (called White Valentine’s Day just like Japan), men will get the girls’ responses. If the response is kind of negative, men will try again and wait for their responses one more month. In April 14th, if the answer is still NO, those failed men will get together to have special noodles which source color is black. Therefore, they call the date Black Valentine’s Day.

I jump to the conclusion that the way people celebrate VD reflects their values. Korean is comparatively conservative; therefore, people are afraid of showing their love and use this day as an opportunity. Taiwanese are not very shy as Korean; therefore, they show their love to the significant others naturally. One more thing to top it off for Taiwanese, they are basically from a showing-off culture. They use this day to compare with others to see who get more gifts. As for the US, too generous! One of my friend interpreted that they just don’t want to miss any possible candidates. Is it funny?

Why? Suddenly, I have no mood to write something on my English blog and I am not enthusiastic about my Chinese blog and epaper either. I conclude with two main reasons: first, I am far behind my daily work and cannot *waste* time on it; second, if you read *Being digital* before, I am just like the example in the book. When people get their first DV, they try to use the functions as much as possible, such zoom, fade, mosaic and still. After a while, they will just do it less and less. Why? The nature of people? I am going to have a English roommate. His research is about DTV which is also my interest. We talk a lot about the status of quo in UK. Although people in UK adopt DTV gradually, they tend to watch BBC 1 and 2, which they can watch without STB since they are analog. This is a interesting research topic.

To sum up, in my case I am just becoming lazy!

Happy Chinese New Year.

Finally, I submitted the draft of the literature review. Sally told me I could put it aside and get into other chapters. She asked me if I could feel the difference between literature review of the proposal and this one. I am not sure if that is a PASS for my literature review. But she gave me some confidence. At least, I can put it aside till I finish the whole draft. My volunteer advisor encourages me to condense the literature review and send it to a journal by which I can get more useful comments. That is how he finished up his dissertation.

In order to survey the top web sites in each country, I spent so much time on recruiting students and training them but haven’t seen any result yet. It is really a pain. The worse, I cannot find enough students to take my questionnaires. That is why some researchers prefer to study non-human subjects. Tired out~~