I keep being forced to think beyond the thesis. A request from the Norwegian Media Researchers' group to speak at their anniversary conference in Oslo in September made me review again what I am doing. The topic is Text and Audience, and the other speakers will be discussing things like film criticism and the image of audiences in the production of texts. I had to sit down and think for a moment: what should I speak of? They wanted me to discuss games, but while the mechanics and the power-structures are the same with blogs and games, blogs are not as easy to shrug off. A game - no matter how important I think it is, is often received with the comment: "But it's just a game, it doesn't belong in reality." A blog on the other hand, is somewhere ambigously between reality and imagination. One can be shrugged off but not blogs as a phenomenon, because they are channels, not content. And a channel is what you make of it, but it always have potential for change, for allegiances to shift and for authorities to be confirmed - or attacked.

I might go with the blogs. Somehow I'll manage to sneak games and game-theory into it anyway.