I clearly need to update this blog more often. It’s been a while, I was busy with school, I have been travelling (San Francisco, (New York, New York, New York), and now Vancouver) but there is really no excuse except that I have many words in my head but for some reason did not manage to put them out on this blog.

One thing that has pre-occupied my braincells a lot these days is the upcoming comprehensive exams I will be taking in the last week of September. What are these comprehensive exams? The ‘comps’ as we endearingly call them, are the last hurdle before I will start writing my dissertation – basically what happens is that in one week, we get questions on three days (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). We get these questions in the morning and are expected to return them with an answer by the end of the day. These questions are usually quite large and abstract – think of things like ‘explain the information society. you may consider defining information first as a conceptual building block so as to answer your question.’ or one of my personal favorites runs in the spirit of ‘what is culture and what is communication and what do the two have to do with each other?’.

As you can imagine, I have been reading like a mad man lately – trying to organize and make sense of literally everything I have read so far on anything remotely related to communication, media and technology. The hard part is really not the reading or understanding part (although some texts can be really *really* obtuse) but the hardest part is really trying to connect all the (billion) dots lying around in my head. I decided one good way to start connecting some of the dots is by writing things out – externalizing what’s in my head, forcing myself to explicate what I am intuitively know (or think I know). I won’t be doing that on this blog, but keep an eye out for my blog on lokman.org if you are interested.