Participation

I got an email last week from a dude who says his name is Christopher Wienberg and that he is a doctoral student at USC who is researching the experiences of people who write about their everyday lives on the web. "Your weblog came to my attention," says he, and he would like me to participate in his research.

He provided all kinds of contact information, including the email address of his adviser, so I figured it was legit and decided to partake. I took a short survey, and Christopher is going to analyze what I write "using natural language processing technology" (the kind companies use to search their employees' emails for dirty words) in an attempt to correlate my survey responses with what I write about in this here blog thing.

I don't quite get what he's after.  He wants to see "how the thoughts and experiences written by people like you on weblogs ... can be used to make conclusions about society as a whole." Okay, well, good luck with that.

I suppose this is what sociology majors are doing these days to stay trendy. I don't know if I want to hear what he concludes about me or not.