Following Piece 2.0 -- Day Three

Today's subject is a law student at our local law school.  I was a little nervous about this one, anticipating that I might risk antagonizing someone with the expertise to cause me legal troubles for this experiment.  But I stick to my own protocol and the cautions of @Platea's prompt for Following Piece 2.0 and trust that I am truely not violating anyone's rights, legal or otherwise.

Both Acconci's following piece and this cover of it are meant to be a little unsettling, inasmuch as they investigate the fine line between public and private space, real or digital.  Like Acconci, I have not notified or asked permission of the folks I am following this week.  I do officially follow them on Twitter (although potentially I could track their tweets without actually clicking the "follow" toggle), so they could do the digital equivalent of looking over their shoulders to see me tweeting about them.  So far that hasn't happened; I am prepared to deal with it politely and professionally if it does.

I choose my subjects from a function on my iPhone's "Tweetie" app that allows me to view only local tweets.  I suppose I might have followed anyone on-line, but there is an extra component to my particular take on this project that, while keeping the following on-line, still flirts with the possiblity of an IRL encounter.  We trace our individual trajectories through a shared local landscape, but I am only following these people digitally.  In this way, I experience the porousness of real and virtual in similar ways to how the following pieces (1.0 and 2.0) negotiate the pourous boundaries between public and private.  Or, at least, that's how I am processing it all today.

Lawyer in Training presented an extra challenge: he tweets a lot in dialogue with fellow classmates and friends.  I wondered if I should focus on his side of the conversation alone or if I should consider, as the technology so easily allows, what his friends were tweeting.  I opted for the latter, although I kept my focus on the original subject.  

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

8:06 a.m. Lawyer in Training expresses concern that lawyers should have basic math skills.

9:21 a.m. Lawyer in Training laughs with friend over her child's pronunciation of "hymn" as "hymen."

11:02 a.m. Lawyer in Training finds Appellate Court arguments convenient. I'm sure that's a matter of perspective.

11:45 a.m. Lawyer in Training decides his class is improving and that he might actually be learning something from it.

11:49-11:54 a.m. Lawyer in Training and friends make fun of a fellow student's difficulty with fractions. 3 out of 4 lawyers are mean.

8:03 p.m. Lawyer in Training appears to be drowning in Torts. It doesn't sound fun.

8:46 p.m. Lawyer in Training shows an incredible memory for sports stats, particularly Aaron Rodgers's.

11:05 pm Lawyer in Training impressed with Phillies performance. Decides the series might be worth his attention now.