It’s official – I’m done with my dissertation! I just sent it to the printer. My defense is in a few weeks, and then after a little paperwork, I’ll be a Ph.D.

If you’re interested in reading it, here’s a preview of the first few pages. The final title is:

The Modern, Mobile Me: An Exploration of Smartphones, Being Always On, and Our Relationship with Work in the United States

I’ll post more with my findings, conclusions, interesting quotes and so on later. Right now, I think I deserve a break.

I’m honored to be nominated for an Austin American-Statesman Texas Social Media Award again this year! (I was one of the 25 winners last year, which was both awesome and unexpected.)

The finalists are chosen by an esteemed and social-media-savvy panel of judges, so I would truly appreciate any of your comments here on my nominee page. If you need any examples of my work in social media, check out the CheapTweet Twitter page, CheapTweet blog, or my personal Twitter page.  Thank you!

Good news! I’m working on the final draft of my dissertation at this very moment. I will be finishing these last revisions within the next few weeks.

I’ll be posting some of my conclusions and excepts from my more interesting sections here in the coming weeks as I prepare for my defense (which will hopefully be in late February).  With some work and a bit of luck, I’ll be a PhD by SXSW.

In the meantime, you can follow my progress on Twitter, and read some of my other blog posts on the CheapTweet blog.

This blog is in and out of semi-retirement, but you can always find me in a number of other places.

• Twitter
• CheapTweet.com, the world’s first – and best – Twitter-based deals site, and the main focus of Appozite
• The CheapTweet blog, where I post about saving money, finding cool stuff and the latest CheapTweet news
• CheapTweet’s Twitter account
• Appozite.com, the site for the software startup where I’m C0-Founder and Chief of Community Experience
• TweetReach, Appozite’s nifty tweet tracking and metrics tool
• Appozitegeist, the blog where I (used to) post about style, shopping and social software for Appozite
• Facebook
• Flickr
• LinkedIn

Plus numerous other social media sites and random corners of the web. Just Google “Jenn Deering Davis” – I’m the only one.

How many times, when you log into Facebook or FriendFeed or Twitter, do you see new photos of a friend’s “amazing” vacation or her glowing review of a “fantastic” new restaurant she found? Sure, it’s great to keep up with what your friends are doing, but when you’re continually presented with these selective portrayals of everyone’s wonderful lives, it can start to wear on you.

Social desirability bias is most certainly part of this. We want to present ourselves to others in a positive way; that’s just part of life. I do this as much as anyone. For example, I post vacation and party photos on Flickr, but I never post anything that shows the regular or negative parts of my life. Who wants to see or read about me sitting on the couch with my laptop or being stressed out about work? Furthermore, why would I want anyone to have to?

But this can lead to a pretty weird public version of our personal lives. Tools like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and the rest allow us to selectively present a sanitized and upbeat picture of our lives. If you knew me only from my Flickr stream, you’d think I was quite the popular, active world traveler. In reality, I travel occasionally and attend various social events, but I spend most of my time quietly at home with my husband or with a few close friends.

This is fine; there’s nothing wrong with a bit of image management and personal public relations. But always being faced with these near-perfect portrayals of everyone else’s lives can wear on us. We compare our lives to the lives of those around us and we want that comparison to end up in our favor. Leon Festinger talked about this idea of social comparison half a century ago, long before we had the constant status updates and public profiles we do now. We tend to compare ourselves to similar others, and when we don’t measure up that makes us feel bad, even competitive.

We want to reduce this cognitive dissonance; most people hate to feel bad. We reduce dissonance in a number of ways, some healthy, some not. We can choose to reframe the way we think about something (”It’s okay if I’m not traveling the world right now; I’m saving up to buy a new house”), we can discredit the source of our dissonance (”Joe’s an idiot for spending so much money on that new TV”), we can change our behaviors (”If it bothers me to see other people having so much fun camping, then maybe I should go camping more”). But the feeling will come back; we will always compare ourselves to others.

What’s the opposite of schadenfreude? I can’t really think of a word that means feeling bad when something good happens to someone else. It’s more than envy or jealousy; it’s feeling that you’re somehow not living up to this social comparison. You don’t want what the other person has, but you want more for yourself. I don’t know, maybe that is jealousy.

Either way, I wonder what Leon Festinger and his social psychology colleagues in the 1950s would think of applying their ideas to something like Twitter. Bet they never pictured it.

I’d like to introduce Appozitegeist, my new blog where I will write in my official capacity as a founder of Appozite. Appozite is a totally new kind of e-commerce company, focused on bringing shopping into an era of social software and smart recommendations, creating a more relevant and fun experience, both for shoppers and retailers. Appozite is a brand new company, so expect lots of changes and updates in the coming weeks and months as we get things going.

I’ll still be blogging here about my dissertation and my various academic research interests revolving around organizational communication, technology and work. The Appozitegeist blog will explore shopping, style and social issues; it’s bound to be quite different from what I talk about here. I’m very excited about the new company and my role there, so give it a look!

With the release of Roku’s Netflix Player earlier this week, and all the subsequent blogosphere chatter, I thought it might be interesting for me to explore my own relationship with Netflix’s Instant Watching service. Because I can say, completely without hyperbole, this service has changed my life. Well, the entertainment consumption part of my life, anyway, and that’s a really big part.

First, some background. I started using the Instant Watching service as soon as it became available to me. Hayes and I have been Netflix subscribers for several years now, and we got access to the Instant Watching service in March 2007. And since Netflix keeps track of our viewing activity, I can easily see what I’ve watched since – turns out I’ve watched more than 214 hours of instant content in the past 15 months. This is in addition to the DVDs we get in the mail.

Also, I love movies and television. I’m not a huge fan of sitting down and watching two hours of uninterrupted primetime TV; I’m pretty particular about what I like and quite frankly, most television sucks. But when I find something I like, I will watch it over and over and over again. We own literally hundreds of DVDs, and I’ve watched most of these multiple, sometimes even dozens of, times.

Now before you start wondering where I find the time to watch that much stuff, I want to share something about how I watch this content. I really like to have a movie or TV show on while I’m working (and I work from home), but if I’m watching something new or interesting, it tends to be distracting (duh). So my strategy is to put in something I’ve seen before, so I don’t have to pay much attention to it, but I still have something there. Normally I’ll turn on a season of Arrested Development or Futurama, or maybe a movie like Office Space or the Royal Tenebaums, but Netflix has so many other choices. Of course, if I have to concentrate or do serious writing work, then I’ll turn everything off. Also, I have two big widescreen monitors, so I have enough screen real estate to share some with a video.

When the Netflix Instant Watching service was first released to users with my particular subscription type, I was limited to fifteen hours a month of free viewing. I used that up every month. I was very particular about what I would use my time on; I remember thinking, “I shouldn’t rewatch that episode of 30 Rock, because I’ve already seen it a few times already. I should watch something new.” I watched mostly movies during that time. The selection of classic films is great. They also have a lot of independent and documentary films.

Now that I have unlimited viewing, I use it for two main things. One, I’ve found it’s great for watching television shows. I have watched a few of my favorite shows over and over, namely 30 Rock and the early seasons of The Office (both the British and American versions). I actually own these DVDs, but I still will watch them on Netflix when I’m at my computer. I watched the first two seasons of News Radio, and got a surprising amount of enjoyment from John Ritter’s show Hearts Afire. I caught up on missed seasons of shows I like such as Heroes, Weeds and Dexter, saw the premiere episode of Californication, and tried out shows I’d never seen like The Tick, The Tudors, Facts of Life. If I were so inclined, I could even watch season after season of Dr. Who and Saved by the Bell.

In addition, Hayes and I have caught up on all kinds of really excellent campy sci-fi films from the 1940s-1970s. From the classics like Planet of the Apes and Plan 9 From Outer Space to the lesser known, but still wonderful in their own way, movies like Dinosaurs! and Mars Needs Women, it’s been great to have all of these available to us anytime we want. We watched A Boy and His Dog last week. It was highly entertaining, and has possibly the best and worst last line of a movie ever.

I personally don’t see a problem with the “limited” supply of movies offered by the Instant Watching service. There are new movies every day, and the choices are already pretty staggering. There is so much to pick from that it seems like it would be hard to not find something you’d want to watch. If all you ever watch is brand new blockbusters, you will be disappointed, but if that’s all you like, then I might suggest you expand your movie-watching horizons anyway. There are a number of new movies in other genres. And so much good, older stuff to catch up on! Think of all the movies you’ve missed throughout and before your lifetime. This is great for that.

Up to this point, Hayes and I have been simply plugging one of our laptops into the TV when we want to watch something together. The Roku player is going to make that process so much easier. I think entertainment content should be on-demand and always accessible, so I am very excited. DVDs are so 2000; streaming content is the future. I for one welcome our Netflix Instant Watching overlords.