The Impossibility of Distance

It took me exactly two weeks to go from being an anthropologist who uses his blog as a research instrument, to a blogger who uses anthropology as his justification for blogging. I've gotten caught up in the game. I obsess over stats (I now get between 80 and 200 pageviews a day—last Friday, 4/13, I got 313!). I obsess over my number of followers on Facebook (30 and steadily growing) and Twitter (8 and  steadily hemorrhaging—hence the move back to my existing account). I obsess over taking good pictures, polishing my craft, and enhancing my skills. I even obsess over the visual consistency of my online brand (a subject, by the way, discussed at length by Jenna Jacobson and Geoffrey Middlebrook at one of my favorite panels at the PCA/ACA conference last week). I genuinely want to be good at street style blogging. It's no longer enough to just come to a deeper understanding of the cultural drives of others bloggers. And in the process, going deeper and deeper into the auto-ethnographic rabbit hole, I've let my research concerns fall into the background. I have fallen off the wagon, and I am staging my own intervention. Time to bring anthropology back. Stay tuned for critical observations and inspiring interviews. And of course, plenty more street style photos. You didn't think I would let that go, did you? I'm not going cold turkey. I'm just looking for more balance.

Here's what my stats for this week look like, by the way, according to Blogger.