Blame the game
Another murder-case is blamed on a computer game, this time Manhunt by Rockstar Games. The horrible killing of a 14 year old boy by his 17 year old friend made the parents of the victim blame the violent video game. Today Dagbladet reports that it was not the killer who played Manhunt, but the victim! The killer's motiv was the age-old motive of greed. The victim owed him money for drugs, and the killer wanted his money back.

I can however see why the parents would prefer to blame the game. It is a much more comfortable explanation to say that a killing was irrational and happened under the influence of a mind-controlling game, than to admit that your own child was using drugs, owed money to a pusher and this same pusher was somebody you knew, another child in the neighbourhood. Nobody really want to know that kind of truth.

Invasion of the Huns
Three very civilised descendants of the Huns arrived last night, this time adults from the choir Psalmus. So I am playing hostess again. Combined with a birthday I have to prepare for Saturday, that means I go on a serious baking binge today. Chocolate chip cookies, carrot cake, and when I am done with that I have to decide which chocolate cake to make for the guests, I can't fill the house with scents of baking and not share with those who live here. So, for the rest of the vacation, imagine me in the kitchen, flour to the elbows - or dishwater. Monday I go back to work. I am already looking forwards to a restful week in the office.

Farm Animals
From the weblog of Vidar Sandtrø, a movie on modern animal farms and slaughter-houses. I have to admit I didn't manage to see it through, just knowing what I would see was enough to make me sick.

Vidar hopes animals don't suffer like that in Norway. Well, I am afraid our chicken farms are not that much better, although Norwegian rules about medication in animal food are very strict and we won't be puffed full of growth hormone by eating chicken or beef here. But for pigs and cows - at least the farmers I know do not treat their animals like that. Which is why I like knowing that the meat I eat is Norwegian, and I am willing to pay more for it than for imported meat.

Domesticated
The last week before getting back to work is being spent doing "things that need to be done but I never have time to during the work-year". Today, that meant cleaning windows (I admit, I am very selectively domestic). Yesterday, I actually made new curtains!

For the measuring and cutting part, I had exellent help.


And we managed.


This afternoon it seems like all the urgent things are in the sunlight, on the porch, and include a comfortable chair, a sunhat and a glass of cool liquid.

Jill in the paper
Even while in France, the guru speaks to the people of Norway: Don't knit, blog! Article in Norwegian, in the paper Bergens Tidende.

Norsk medieforskning
For å være helt sikker på at jeg ikke glemmer dette, setter jeg denne linken her. andre som driver med bruks- og resepsjonsforskning kan kanskje også ha nytte av den. CFP til gruppe for bruks- og resepsjonsforskning, frist 15 august.

Eastcoast Westcoast
Two coasts, facing each other an ocean apart and several latitudes off.

A beach, not yet sunny but already warm, as I first saw it on the Long Island North Shore:


Same beach, and the blue blue blue of the water of the west side of the Atlantic:


Looking west and north from the livingroom in Volda, the first night home from vacation:


The mountain overlooking the hidden paradise where I spent the day, getting a new dose of sun, salt, wind, peace, light, beauty, and something not to be had in a motel just at the road - quiet:


The same ocean, two shores, and my cheeks burn with the same heat as two weeks ago from the same sun at a different latitude. I love summer!

Super heros
I have been used for a little quote in Dagbladet.no today, about Super heroes. A couple of journalists have read Gerard Jones' book Killing Monsters, which appeared in a Norwegian translation this year. They have taken the time to call several different researchers and people who work with children, and found both people who agree with Jones and people who make the picture more nyanced. A cute little piece.

(And Anne has an oddly appropriate post, wondering what her superpowers are. Anne, you obviously have an odd sensitivity to what questions are being asked by journalists in countries at the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.)

Blogging from Boston
A very good article from the Washington Post tech column Filter, Bloggers type it like it is in Boston. The article contains a long, long list of links, and has the qualities of a really good blogpost: researched, contextualised and with personal opinions.

Free registration needed. I have no idea how long until they archive it.

Games and health
Remember Dance Dance Revolution and weight loss? Seems like there is another game out there, Yourself|fitness. Is it just me, or does the personal trainer resemble Lara Croft?




Game found by way of an article in Dagbladet.no

Reading at risk
The Reading at Risk (pdf) report from the American organisation National Endowment for the Arts describes the decline of literary reading in the United states.

The report has already been exstensively blogged, but I want to point to two responses. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum drafts a response to the report on behalf of the Electronic literature organisation. This is a polite and levelheaded response, pointing out that reading on the screen is reading, too, and that literacy is not necessarily declining just because the reading shifts from the traditional paperbound novel and onto the screen.

A more knee-jerk response is Mia Consalvo's reading of the report, but this is a response I fully sympathise with: Reading is down, let's blame video games. Gaming is being blamed as a too simple solution to the problem of "entertainment".

I would like to know how many of the people who write reports like that
1) read electronic literature
2) play computer games
3) use the computer for keeping up with news
4) use the computer to chat and network

One little thing the report does mention, and this also comes up in their press release:

Contrary to the overall decline in literary reading, the number of people doing creative writing increased by 30 percent, from 11 million in 1982 to more than 14 million in 2002. However, the number of people who reported having taken a creative writing class or lesson decreased by 2.2 million during the same time period.

This indicates that the role of the reader is indeed changing. Perhaps Barthes was more of a visionary than he thought, when he envisioned the death of the author, and we are heading towards a society of participants, as I keep mentioning.

Norwegian Fetish Divas
A website named Fetish Divas, owned by women working in different areas of the erotic/pornographic industry, has commented on an article in the Norwegian women's magazine KK - Kvinner og Klær.

The article, in Norwegian, but scanned and linked to from here, basically makes the women behind FetishDivas and several established porn magazines stand out as stupid bimbos, according to the site. The female editors of pornographic magazines can hardly be stupid, it isn't like this is a job that only requires a pretty smile. And Anniken, photographer and fetish diva site owner, writes an angry mail to KK.

Years ago I noted that the computer gives women more power over the publication of their nude pictures. At one hand, of course, you have to remember that the net means a picture of you can be published over and over again in a million different contexts. At the same time I have met several women who have their own pornsites where they do all the work of publishing and photography as a group, and who share the costs and of course, the money. No pimp between them and their audience.

Now the net gives voice to the women in the established business. A place to talk back as persons, not just as stereotypes caught in the set structures.

Do I exist?
Occasionally I am told by online contacts that I am not real. I can't be, I have to be a male geek trying to fool the world. Occasionally it feels like they are right. Today is one of those unreal days. I am barely in touch with reality, tired and far from the things that anchor me to the solid rock I am used to seeing at all sides.

But my pants feel tighter than they should be. That wouldn't happen in unreality, would it?

Equal Share
Frustrated with the options of the US presidential election? Seems like you are not alone!

Woman Crossing
Satan's Laundromat has a great little collection of pictures from Manhattan, with stickers as art. This is my favourite.

Gaugin and Van Gogh
I was going to reply to Anne's question: Which person in a painting would you like to talk with, and I was looking for a picture I vaguely remembered to be by Gaugin. That's when I stumbled over this lovely little site from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, telling the story of Gaugin and Van Gogh. It is a little slow for me, and I towards the end I feel a little bored with moving through it the way they have planned it, but all in all this game-inspired ergodic pedagogic text of music and pictures is very pretty and definitely one of those windows you like to see on your monitor.

As for who I would like to talk to?

I think this woman, in the Blue Interiour by Harriet Backer.

Optimal experience
I keep reading work by Csikszentmihalyi, trying to figure out if I think his work is a cheesy modern explanation to why so many people are unhappy, or a really important contribution to understanding human experience. The research seems to be solid, even if I have not yet encountered any of the books where he introduces and discusses his methodology. This means that the reported experiences are likely to be correct.

The question is whether his conclusions are correct. Is the road to happiness to control your consciousness and impose more discipline on the human mind? This sounds like a very individualistic, 20th century solution, a reversal of religion or collectivity - do not seek happiness in the multitude or in spirituality, but find it for yourself, in your own actions and in your own achievement. It is a path to happiness that creates good little workers of us all, seeking to achieve as far as we can within the limitations allowed us by society?

I am slightly sunburned, lounging in bed at 7.08 am on the Long Island North Shore. I have been swimming, sunbathing, eating a lot of wonderful food and generally experiencing an intense and deep sense of relaxation and happiness. In many ways, it has been an optimal experience. But I did nothing for it, the pleasure was very different from the rush of research, the fervor of gaming, It was a sensual experience: skin, flesh, taste, scent, eye stimulated by the environments. Does this mean that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is wrong, and the optimal experience, the flow, does not come with discipline and achievement? Or does it simply mean that the experience is not optimal, just one of the more optimised ones?

Protection and communication
This time, protection from the heat. It is one of those things dragons are no good at, even frost dragons. so for that, I needed a Tilley hat. And it seems that with that hat, I also received a communication device:

"It's way beyond a hat; it's a communication device. With what else can you walk up to a stranger, begin a conversation, and be confident that the stranger is of like mind and similar taste. You can also be quite sure that this is not the first time that it's happened to that stranger."
Mark Schneider, Kenner, LA

I have to admit, I am curious to see if that is ever going to happen in Volda.

They are NOT fluffy stuffed animals
I don't even like fluffy stuffed animals. Sleek, meanlooking stuffed dragons, on the other hand, is a totally different story.

Blue Tatsuko


Green and gold Yu


They are going home with me. I need somebody to help control the weather and fight passing knights. And if you want them for yourself, you will just have to go to the website and search for your own.

What was lost is found
It is quite fitting that the pictures from Michal Rovner's exhibition in Stone at Pace Wildenstein gallery in Chelsea New York are the ones that went missing. The exhibition illustrates the two states of the old and the new writing: the permanence of that which is written in stone and the transcience of the modern media. But I will not show you the pictures just yet, as I am on a vacation in the vacation, only carrying the little PowerBook G4 that caused the whole frustration.

Still, the incident of the lost pictures resonates with the subject matter of In Stone. Little movies where images that are very human-like have been animated into motion walk across the surfaces of books and stones, projected onto the paper. In one book a drawing swirls and shifts, in another the careful chinese calligraphy moves, elusive and impossible to keep in focus as you watch. The same technique is used on rocks, and elusive, shifting rosetta stones stand next to heavy runestones and shiny rocks that seem to have fallen from outer space. In one room are two large stone tablets, perhaps with the ten commandments, only these commandments are constantly shifting. In another room of the gallery there is a well. When you look into the well you see red shapes, perhaps humans, perhaps scorpions, scuttling in a whirling, panicky motion across the white, white sands.

I walked through this exhibition with a sensation of amazement and awe, struck by the force of the contrast. The heavy stone, the elusive light, the reference of the everlasting and permanent battling with the fluid and fluctuating.

Yoko, lovely, entertaining and bright companion in NYC adventures, heard about this exhibition from an artist friend - whose work we visited later, in a different gallery. It was the last day of the exhibition, and I am still lost in the marvel of it. when I have a chance I will try to post a little movie that I made of the stone tablets, to give you a tiny little impression of the quality of this work.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid
When I am done kicking myself for not being used to apple computers, but seduced by the beauty and speed of my NYC connections brand new tiny tibook, I will let you see some of the pictures I managed not to ruin, from my trip around Chelsea Galleries Friday.  And I think I can dig up links to the artist who most impressed me with her wonderful works - the pictures of which I lost because I didn't want to wait for my no longer all that new and quick Dell to fire up, using the pretty shiny toy instead.
 
Stupid stupid stupid.  Apart from me being stupid, New York in summer is warm and exhausting, which is a new experience for me.  So I spend time eating salads in the shadow, enjoying the airconditioned cars in the subway, drinking iced coffee at Barnes and Noble and trying on two-piece bathing suits in Paragon Sports.

A lot of places to go
It is a little reassuring to know that there's still a lot of places I have never seen.



create your own visited country map

A little late to this bloggers' meme, but it's such a nice one.

Dark chocolate
This is a public service post for people eating dark chocolate in Norway.
Are you one of the many who have discovered that really dark chocolate is a great way to have your chocolate and eat it too / as in not gaining weight? I have used that trick for sating the chocolate craving for years, and it works! The chocolate has to be at least 70% cocoa, and no, you can't eat without control, but who can really eat that much really dark chocolate anyway?

I was oh-so-happy when Freia of Norway started to make a really dark chocolate. It was easier to find, and cheaper than the stuff I got in health/speciality stores. But hey, what was this? I gained weight from it! I would eat a few pieces of Valrhona, for instance, and not gain weight, and then a few pieces of Freia Premium the next week, and gain weight. This was odd. This required serious study.

I did that study by turning the chocolate bar over, and reading the fine print at the back of the box. On the front there is this large mark saying 70%. At the back you will see that it is 70% cocoa in the outer layers. The inner layer is 35% truffle something. If you break off a piece of Freia Dark Premium, you will see that the sides and the middle layers split apart.

So now I know. And I am back to the exspensive stuff. But somebody really should let Freia know they have been found out. I am just wondering: should I call one of the health/lifestyle journalists first, or Freia?

Vienna flashback
So how was Blogtalk 2.0?
First of all, I want to say that Thomas Burg has done a tremendous job putting it all together. He made it very easy being in the program comittee, as the members' job mainly consisted in agreeing with him, and occasionally expanding a little. I wish there had been an opportunity to thank him for his efforts publicly, without jumping up and making a spectacle of myself. Contrary to what some people believe, that does not come easily to me, sso it didn't happen. It should have though.

When that is said: even something good can be better. I want to address a few areas which could have enhanced the experience.

The program was too uniform and too tight. This is something I could have influenced if I had thought at the time, so this is self-criticism. I think there should have been greater differentiation between the keynotes and the panels. For the panels to have presentations 20-25 minutes long, while the keynotes were half an hour, created a long series of uniform lectures rather than quick presentations accompanying papers broken up by longer lectures. The panels were not real panels. They were collections of more or less randomly connected speakers, who then took questions not all of them could really answer. The questions directed at all of the panel became awkward, as the case was frequently that only a few of the panel could reply. This could have been avoided by making the keynotes independent of the presentations, letting all the presenters take independent questions, insisting on having full papers ready for the conference and posted on the net or distributed in print at the conference, and by making the option as participating in panels with particular topics rather than having everybody at one panel or another. This would have made the schedule more dynamic, and helped avoid conference overload from sitting through two days of pretty much the same thing.

Since this was a bloggers' conference, and we knew there would be a lot of computers in use with all its potential for an active backchannel, this could perhaps be used more effectively. Others have suggested a designated blogger. I think there should be more than one - a team of bloggers who blogged on a conference blog. And their job should be more than just bringing summaries of the talks, because that is not as interesting as the discussion, comments and disagreement that might arise. This might also bring the backchannel into play. One of the most important things with being at a conference is that you can get face-to-face response from the people present, you don't have to write them or ask somebody else what they meant. By having a designated backchannel blogger bring the discussions and the questions more into the light, it would be possible to create a better dynamic between the different mode. An alternative would be a designated backchannel speaker: Two or three people designated to present the questions of the backchannel or the opinions of the backchannel to the entire audience, and connect the two different discussions.

What I really missed was common meals. There is something about the mingling that happens over a meal, a snack or what ever that just was lost in Vienna. I am aware that this is a financial question. However: the benefit of not having to run in different directions for a meal and the opportunity of meeting and talking to people you would not invite to go to lunch with you is substantial.

Now it may look like I hated the conference. I didn't. I really liked the topic, the collection of people with wide and varying interests. I like the dynamic of a new field opening for academic research and commercial exploration both, and blogs are definitely in that area. I would love to see blogs used as research obbjects as well as tools in other conferences discussing and addressing media, new media and internet culture. The blogtalk conferences take blogs seriously, and gives a chance for crossfertilisation, something which is vital to a new field. I hope it can expand and become something other than a cult conference. There are different ways of achieving that. One is for the Vienna conference to aim at growth, and have really diversified topics from year to year. Another is to move the conference around to different administrators and different locations. And yet another is to have Blogtalk combined with some other conference from time to time, for instance an AOIR blogtalk. But what ever happens, I want to see user-driven publishing as a topic for serious discussion and research in the future.

Gadgets for a geeky girl
Some people seem to know just what a woman needs - while some know how to make that inner playful girl happy. And when the digital camera broke in an accident and it turns out it may not be repaired in time to bring it with me when I go home to Norway, my NYC connection whipped out his card, pulled it through the right slots and then handed me a new digital camera. I did the right amount of happy exclamations to satisfy the proud pusher of gadgets, and then I stopped pretending to care about anything but the camera. And yes, if you are looking for a 5,1 mega pixel camera and have been wondering about the sony cybershot, then I am happy to recommend the DSC-P100. It's quick, small and has had some of the flaws of the sony cameras picked out of it. But most important: it's tiny! It fits into my pocket! WEEEEE!!!!

Wireless in Brooklyn
Gone are the days of awkwardly searching for the æøå on a foreign keyboard, or crouching over an imac, trying to figure out how to convert files back and forth, or where is that function again. Through the cooperation of my New York connection, who just loves gadgets, the college IT staff who love to fix things so that I am not such a pain in their collective - umm - somethings, and a nice lady at the apple support, I am online from the newly activated hotspot right in this apartment. So here I am, eminently comfortable (note the beanbag chair, found abandoned and almost empty and now repaired), testing out the connection. Now, off and out into the sun!

Captain Annie Kristensen and her crew...
It was just an other morning at Ørsta-Volda airport. The sun was shining brightly, dawn hours behind us, despite the early hours. A mottled crowd is waiting for the plane, a lot more women than normal, and even some children. A taxi pulls in, and out comes three persons in uniform. It was one green of the Widerøe stewardesses, and two navy pilot uniforms. Only something was slightly off. Had the uniforms changes? Suddenly the day took on a different luster. The world had shifted, subtly. Nothing big, more like the faint sound of a battle heard at a long distance, hinting that in some areas of our society there are still battles to be fought, and prejudices to overcome.

The crew of Widerøe flight 144 from Hovden to Gardermoen July 9th 2004 was all female! I had to ask to make sure, and yes, it was. Both the captain and the first officer, as well as the steward. The steward went through the announcements, and it gave me a tiny little thrill each time she said "Captain Annie Kristensen and her crew..." At one point, in her english announcement, she slipped though, and said "Captain Annie Kristensen and his crew." But she was flustered, as she had announced our landing to the wrong airport as well. Still, it showed how ingrained the "his" is in that phrase, what a long way that all female crew had come, and how far we still have to go until the "her" slips as easily off the tongue. Pilots, particularly captains, are male.

Me, I just sat there and enjoyed. Annie Kristensen, Captain, and your crew: you made my day!

Tomorrow night, NYC time
I have another day of waiting in airports before me tomorrow. I am trying to figure out if Schiphol has a wireless connection or not, since I will be spending 4 hours there. Oslo has, at least. And I have a book. I bought it on my way to Vienna, and started to read, but it frustrated me. I wanted to click the links. While this is an interesting document, it also illustrates that peculiar distinction between a blog and a book: the book is not yet connected.

I think that day will come though. And I will pull this book out of my bookshelf and tell my grandchildren about how I read it when the war in Baghdad was really happening, online, and how they had to print it to reach the mass audience, and how yes, it was true, people didn't click links in books back then. Hopefully, they will understand the concept of "reading" and "book", and be able to bring that antiquated knowledge to my great-grandchildren.

Weather in Volda
The district veterinarian is taking a summer vacation, so voldaveiret (weather in Volda) will not be regularly updated with his magnificent pictures. He left us fans with a great bonus summer picture, enjoy.

And he quotes James Taylor to explain why the updates will be sporadic, so I guess we have to forgive him:

Summer's Here
(James Taylor)

Summer's here
I'm for that
Got my rubber sandals
Got my straw hat
Got my cold beer
I'm just glad that I'm here

Dennis and the blogsphere
Dennis G. Jerz is reading Into the Blogosphere, and gives his thoughts and opinions on each article he reads on his blog. Fascinating at two levels: One: I love being able to see what the bright and brilliant think about the articles I plan to plod through, two: I am fascinated, again, with this man's capacity for processing information.

That was my powercord!
I didn't realise at the time, but the cord they held up asking if somebody missed it must have been mine. This is typical for this conference, things were just too tight and too much going on. I'll be back later with some of the thoughts (brilliant, of course) that crystallized Tuesday night in one of the worn-down cheap Austrian bars Anja specialised on finding, but typical was too little time to talk and think, too much time and energy spent on organising things like food, long, tight schedules all around. The good thing is that this means a lot was going on. Anyway: no powercord, no luggage, and aching feet from searching for quality sleazy bars with Anja and Lisbeth. Eventful, it was.

Dialogue in slow motion - links
These are the links used in my keynote for Blogtalk 2.0 in Vienna 2004.

introduction

Why do I blog
Anders Jacobsen's "Why I blog" post from March 6th 2003.
Elmine Wijnia's "Why do I blog" post from March 31st 2004
Aldo de Moor and Lilia Efimova's working paper An Argumentation Analysis of Weblog Conversations
phaTTboi's "why I blog" post of June 16th 2004.
Simpleton's "Why I blog" answer May 26th 2004. Quote

The virtual and the factual other
Abraham Maslows's pyramid
of needs.

The original slime

Time, space and blogs
"Blog this", two comments and links to Henry Jenkins' article of 2002. The article is today only available to subscribers of Technology Review.
Spitting Llama, Dave Winer
Since 2003 Technology Review has a blog, where Henry Jenkins is one of the writers.

Astri Heen Wold, Quote 1, 2 and 3

The tyranny of here and now
Some (in)famous conversations
Dave Winer and the Winer Watcher
Jogin.com on the conflict between Dave Winer and Mark Pilgrim
Jonathon Delacour on "Doing a Dave"

Dave Winer took down 3000 blogs.
People were unhappy.
Dave Winer replied in an audio file.
People were not any happier.
Dave Winer presented a new plan for hosting.
Some people are still not happy.
Dave Winer thanks the professional sites for clearing up what the bloggers didn't understand.

Sidewalks and gaps
Anne Galloway: First Count

Wolfgang Iser: quote

Danah Boyd: The privilege to not fight
Pete: Again with the "Women and blogging meme"

Challenge, mastery and pleasure
Steven Johnson: Quote
Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi: Quote

Back to the beginning
Summary

Vienna
Anyway, I am in Vienna, as are Lisbeth, Anja and Mark. Well, and a whole lot of other bloggers, this is Blogtalk after all.

I arrived late yesterday evening, and woke early this morning. So I have wandered Vienna, and went to the Leopold Museum, where they have Goya's "Los Caprichos" exhibited at the moment! If you have a chance, go look! I was delighted, I wrote about Goya for my art history subject - umm, way too long ago - and loved his prints. Or - I guess I didn't as much love them as was became engaged in the black, bleak humour and the twisted shapes. Some of the pictures made lasting impact back then, and walking through the exhibition today it resonated with that string of sarcams and cynicism which I occasionally find in my line of thoughts.

One picture I wish I could have blogged for you all. It was of a mule having his picture painted. The text said: Now that he has his picture painted, all will know about him and know he is an important man, because he has had his picture painted so people know who he is.

I guess, in a way, that's what happens with blogs too. So here I am, having my picture painted...

Journalism, again
Kaye Trammell is frustrated with journalists who don't get it. A recent article about blogs causes her to complain, and the complaint sounds familiar. As a teacher of journalists, I have to say - I am not surprised.

It's not that they are stupid. At least in Norway, to get into a journalism study, you need top grades. It isn't that they don't know what to do. I think the problem is that they know it far too well.

Ketil Jarl Halse, associated professor at Volda College, wrote an article years ago called "Journalisten som strateg" - the journalist as a strategist. It explains some of the many pressures journalists are under as they are to create a new edition of the news. It is heavy peer pressure, intended to maintain the standards of the newspapers.

Journalism, at least in Norway, is one of the free professions. Anybody who can write are allowed to do so, if a newspaper prints what they write: great! This means that in order to maintain a certain standard and a certain level of trust, there are two harsh mechanisms in use. One is the social control, the peer pressure. This decides things like "what is news" "how do we write about that kind of news" "who do we interview". The other mechanisms is the editing that happens before the copy goes live. This is done by specially trained people who are taught to look for certain clues accepted at "good news," "good journalism" or "good stories". Both of these are good. They ensure high ethics, remove babble, exclude dubious sources.

But.

There is always a but, and this is where Trammell's frustration hits right on the head. " For the past two years (wow, can it be that long?!) media articles haven't told us anything new about blogs." For a topic to be accepted, it has to get over the "news" treshold. Blogs did that years ago. But once it is over this treshold, changing the story rather than repeating it demands creativity. A system that functions through heavy peer pressure and high-pressure editing does not invite creativity. Once you know what works you stick with it, pack it up differently to make it look good, but you don't really think a new thought about it.

And this, sadly, explains at least to me what happens to all those brilliant, adventurous students once they get out there and start writing for their bread and rent.

The blogosphere
Into the Blogosphere is online. It is really an impressive number of articles, no wonder it took a while to set it all up. Go, read, enjoy.

Sex and games
Terra Nova had a post a while ago about sex and games. I have to say: It's about time it was talked about!

Ren Reynolds talks about rape in online games and sex in online games.

All the MUDs I played for my research addressed this issue. The first, World's End, didn't permit sex beyond making out, babies appeared miraculously. But they did exist. The second and main one, Dragon Realms, addressed the sexuality by not rewarding it. Rape roleplay was not permitted. Torture play had to be consensual, by way of a note to the administrators. Sex, cross-species or what ever, was just ignored. There were warnings posted though: don't give out your address, you never know who you are playing with. Aarinfel had MUDsex rules, as T.L. Taylor pointed out, quite ambivalent. There was a long list of warnings, and then it ended saying "Mud sex is safe sex". The many rules (mainly about rape) and warnings were an indicator of exactly the opposite: it isn't safe.

But it can be. As long as people use protection... erh, don't give out email, addresses or names, it is as safe a mutual fantasy as you can get into. And it happens, all the time. We should aknowledge it.

Leaving the office today
For all those who might want to catch me at the office, I am leaving today, in about 10 minutes. I will be online from home and from airports here and there (if my poor abused laptop manages the strain). The route is Vienna, Volda, New York, Volda - and back at the office 9th of August. That's one week after most of my colleagues. But the last week has been very, very quiet here. A good time for writing and reading. Now all I need to do is read through the keynote, and time it. Should have been edited a little. I guess that will happen ink on paper.

Panic
My tabulator key just fell off, just as me and my laptop are about to go travelling for a month! It seems to work though. I'll just have to stop freaking out when the left little finger hits the little rubber tip where there should be a comfortable key...

Busy
When I try communicating with my brain, all I get is a busy signal. No dialogue between me and me at the moment... OK, lame joke, because I am stunned by trying to get all my thoughts on this down on paper before I get on the plane to Vienna. I leave Saturday, and will be travelling for 11 hours. I think that's longer than the time some of the Americans will spend on getting into town. OK, enough of this chatting thing. Back to work.

Conferences 2004
Finally got the "go" from our dean, and I can start registering to conferences.
Yes, I will be at Blogtalk 2.0, but I didn't need to clear that with the dean, except to make sure it didn't clash with anything at the College.
Next will be Ubiquity, the AOIR conference in Sussex. This will be my first AOIR conference, so I am thrilled about it.
After that it's the conference the dean wants me to attend - and which I am very happy to go to: Norsk Medieforskerlags 11. medieforskerkonferanse i Trondheim - Norwegian association of media researchers' conference 2004.
Next is something I am very happy to attend to: Jill Walker, Eirik Newth and Thomas Brevik are arranging a seminar in Bergen in November. I am looking forwards to that! I miss Bergen, have been going too much to Oslo lately, but going to Bergen is like going away and still going home.
Finally: Other Players. I am wringing the last drops out of my brain to write a paper before August 1st.

Professional communicators
One of the other things I do is educate professional communicators: PR-consultants and -workers, information advisors, public communication consultants - you name it, if they work in the borderland public/media/organisations I educate (at least some of) them. This is an area fraught with conflict between journalists and consultants, a conflict which in Norway is both aggressive and ugly.

So it's with a great deal of pleasure I introduce today's link, a commentary (in Norwegian) by Kathrine Aspaas: De lærer oss å snakke - "They teach us to talk", a sober, clear expression of her opinion about the conflict journalists/information workers, printed in Aftenposten, one of the leading national newspapers. Her main point is that everybody wins when both sides in a communication process know how to communicate. Thank you, Kathrine, for being a wise woman.

And thank you Trygve, for the link.

Dreams in the shortest night
If you are a young girl, unmarried and eager to know if you will ever find your true love, you should have picked seven different wild flowers last night, put them under your pillow and gone to bed. You should have done this in silence, and as you fell asleep he would be there, in your dreams: the one to share your life.

I did this many times, in the midsummer nights of childhood, but somehow I never managed to stay silent and draw the dreams in. Instead I was awake way past midnight, watching the bonfires. The fires burning along the fjords and in the mountains this night are to scare the witches, who gather to celebrate, as well as any other dark spirits, who would start gathering strength as the sun turns. There is a fierce optimism and a whole row of fertility rites connected to midsummer, St. John's day, Jonsok. To ensure your fertility until next summer, you should walk three times around a natural spring, naked, and then you should bathe in it. To keep pestilence from your sheets (and so, your bed), you should spread them on the churchyard and leave them past midnight. But at the same time it is a night of melancholy and loss.



After this night, the shortest of all, darkness approaches. Last night was the most beautiful midsummer night in many years, and I sat on the veranda until sunset, watching the pink and purple fade in to pale delicate blue, as the shadows lightly touched the darkgreen mountains. In this pale imitation of a night, the potential of darkness is perhaps more powerful than at midwinter, as summer and light feels so fragile. A cloud can darken the long days, rain can wash this pale palette into grey.

And so, it is a night for dreams, for sleeping uneasily and for waking up with your mind filled with portents of the future.

What I dreamt tonight? Oddly, I think I had wings - slick dragon wings of steel-grey ribs and silvery membranes. They would mirror that pastel sunset and reflect a flash of fading sunlight as I soared above the mountains.

Picture nicked from Munchforlaget.no

Life"blog"
From my moblogging colleague Erling Sivertsen I got a link to an article in the Norwegian newspaper aftenposten.no, Bra nok bilder for folk flest, about the new Nokia 7610 and its accompanying program Lifeblog. Under the heading "browse your life", nokia invites: "Simply and easily save your mobile images and other data in Nokia Lifeblog on your PC to start your own, ever-growing, life log."

This is however not a service connected to the internet. There is no offer of server space and no system for publication included. What Nokia calls a Lifeblog, interesting though it is, is a program to organise your pictures and text messages on you own PC.


Nokia Lifeblog takes care of the organizing so that you don't have to. You don't even need to leave your mobile phone software open. Just install it on your phone and let it start building your diary as you take photos and videos, and send and receive messages. Then, Nokia Lifeblog makes sure that you don't have to delete memorable moments in your life just to make room on your phone. To clear up space on your phone, connect to your PC and let Lifeblog save and display your items securely and efficiently.

What we have here is a classic personal diary, but on your computer. Which, by the way, I think is a neat idea, particularly if you have a camera phone and it also connects with your organiser on the cellphone. Then I could match my college calendar on the college organising system with my cellphone every time I dropped by at the office, and I wouldn't have to write everything twice. However neat I think it may be though, it is not a blog. The log function exists, but the web part, which creates the (we)blog, is non existant.

Somebody at Nokia didn't do their research before naming the thing.
Or, somebody at Nokia have wicked plans of selling server space and net connections, and are just testing the software on peoples' unsuspecting PCs.

Dreams
No crocodiles in my dreams. As a child I used to dream of wolves, chasing me through the night forest and on to the lawn in front of my parents' house.

A wolf stands for aggression, instinctive urges and cravings. In men's dreams a wolf indicates difficulties in controlling his sex drive; he may be out of control. Seeing a wolf is a warning of false friends. A wolf attacking: a well-known person will make a lot of trouble.

Now I dream of lions.

In the positive sense, a lion represents dignity, intensity and valiant energy. If you dream of a lion in a positive light, it means that you need to call on courage within yourself. If you are being attacked by a lion, be careful, you might be in danger. Seeing a lion: your friend sometimes looks dangerous. If you defeat a lion in the dream, you will eliminate your enemy. Seeing a lion in the cage: your enemy has no way to attack you now.

In my lion dreams I see the lion from a distance, then it comes hunting me, but I manage to trick it and close the doors on it so it is trapped. Now the house this happens in flows fluidly from my mother's house and to ours, as if the places I have called home have melted into a kind over "hyper-home" in my dream mind.

To do
Got to put this list here, or I lose it...
This year I may have said yes to too many things. But after years of the College waiting patiently while I finished my PhD, everybody now wants a piece of my time. I suddenly have responsibilities I did not expect, and find that I have to somehow make time for work vital to running this college, but not associated with teaching or research. I hate it for taking me away from the things I really like about my job, and love it because it gives me a chance to change the things that annoy me as I try to do the things I find are most important. And so I am ambivalent in this as in everything else. And my to-do lists now mirror this wide range of responsibilities:

Finish the keynote
Finish the information study plans for the autumn term (includes calling those guest teachers)
Look at the media theory plans, and plot when I teach
Read the papers for the reorganisation comittee
Attend the organisation theory seminar for the reorganisation
Read the papers for the college hiring board
Write a suggestion for an article on games and culture
Write a suggestion for a new course spring 2005
Finish the description of another, accepted new course spring 2005
Submit the reading lists by the end of the week
Check if I can order tickets for the conferences I want to go to this year
Clean up the office
Pack, and get out of here!

Now also in Danish!
Danish BT has an article called "Unge flygter inn i en fantasiverden" (Youths escape to a fantasy world) where they interview Espen Aarseth and quote an article by Pal Kvamme, where the part they used was where I position the responsibility for computer games on the adults, not the children.

Iser and the play of the text
The following essay is an attempt to raise play above representation as an umbrella concept to cover all of the ongoing operations of the textual concept. It has two heuristic advantages: 1)Play does not have to concern itself with what it might stand for. 2. Play does not have to picture anything outside itself. It allows author-text-reader to be conceived as a dynamic interrelationship that moves toward a final result.

From Iser's "The Play of the Text" in Languages of the unsayable.

The passage of time
My daughter collects "things". Not systematically, but items which are souvenirs of her life. I used to do this too - tickets to the theatre, special coins, the top of a soda with significance - it all had meaning and referred to some even in my life. I felt like I needed to hold on to them. My life was so short, how could I know there would be larger events, deeper emotions, souvenirs of more mystery, and that they would be found, experienced, cherished and lost - and still life would go on?

At this point in life there are too many things. I need to lose them. But how can I? I want to get rid of the plates we bought when we first moved to Volda, scratched and chipped dinner-plates. But for that to make sense I have to replace them with something. I know what. I just don't see myself throwing out the old ones. I have to make it a major operation: old out, new in. Smooth easy refurnishing of the cabinet and the old crap is gone, long live the new style.

But those were the first plates I ever bought for myself. Until then I had lived with the odd spares my mother didn't want to throw away. And I bought them when our life as students living in student housing ended, when we both had work, real work, for the first time. It's not a soda top. Time passes, and I really need to learn that new events will have as much or more significance, if I just make room for them.

Academia frontstage - backstage
In five days I went twice to Oslo and had two totally different academic experiences.

The first trip was the frontstage.
Ragnhild Tronstad defended her thesis Friday 11th of June. She did a good lecture, clear, but her point where she addressed the topic came a little late. I was worried there for a few minutes, if she would actually get to the point within her given time. The suspense kept me awake though, so I was alert as Ragnhild concluded authoratively.

Then came the defense, with two lovely and skilled opponents. I tended to agree more with Cynthia Haynes, which of course would make her the harder opponent to oppose, and disagree more with Niels Lehman, which I think Ragnhild did too, as that is when she got into the discussion. Afterwards: reception with the Institute of Media and Communication in Oslo, and Ragnhild's party.

I am starting to really appreciate the pomp and circumstance of academic rituals. The Dean proceeding was a masters' student in Bergen when I started the media studies, and I have known and admired her for.. hmm.. 19 years. She looked like a gothic priestess in the velvet robe, and her stately nod was only slightly marred by the giggle that was bubbling behind her eyes as she saw her old friends leap back up in order to wait for the signal to be seated from the Dean.

Tuesday was academic backstage.
As a member of the board of the local group of the researcher's union, I was invited to a conference on the upcoming negotiations about wages for academics. It was complicated, and not really very uplifting. I was very far from the showpiece of the public defense, where academic achievement is celebrated. When it comes to paying for the same achievement in something more substantial than pretty words, it's a different story.

Scholars have long expensive educations that we pay for through loans, and then have to pay back out of wages that are as low and lower than those of blue-collar workers in the industry. Now, I don't want to start working on an oil platform, because I happen to like my work. Still, it sounds kind of wrong to pay the most educated people, the ones who are supposed to educate others and develop the base of knowledge in Norway, less than the rest.

(For spesielt interesserte: En prosent av lønnsmassen skal deles mellom medlemmene i lokale oppgjør. Det er halvparten av 2002-oppgjøret, som jo var eksepsjonelt godt. Alle forhandlingene må i år være ferdig før 30 september. Det er to måneder tidligere enn vanlig.)

These two experiences were both interesting. Together, they demonstrated the span of the concerns of an academic in the Norwegian system of higher education.

Until Saturday
I am in Oslo. Meetings, Ragnhild Tronstad's defense, party, meetings.

Going commercial
In May 2002 I was a participant in an experiment in the Eyebeam atelier. They were testing name-tags for social interaction through electronic interaction. Yesterday, the lovely japanese girl in the story sent an email with a link to the website for the nTAG, the commercial version of the tags we tested.

I really don't know what I feel about the commecial version. I mean - it was fun to play with as an experiment, where i could let myself go and get into the joy of the experiment. For a conference or a more formal party where I'd expect to employ a minimum of manner - I am not sure how it would work. But I guess, at geeky gatherings with holodeck karaoke and interactive dancefloors, I can see the people checking their tags and comparing scores, definitely.

Meme revisited
Remember "All your base are belong to us"?

Digital deception
Larry's face

Are you awake for it?
Today - RIGHT NOW - you have the chance to see a very rare natural phenomenon occuring on our skies. They call it the passage of Venus. What happens is that Venus passes between the sun and the earth. You can see the live webcast here. Oslo is one of the places in the world where you can see this best, but there are webcasts from several different cities in Norway, linked from here. The next passage is scheduled in eight years, but the last one happened 122 years ago. Track the transit of Venus here!

I appears that the passage of Venus plays a role in Mayan mythology. And of course there is a very different kind of Venus pasage, this one including Adonis.

Sensuality in paper
First Person edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan just arrived. It is weird, how some of these books about new media are such wonderful examples of the sensuos experience of the bound, fleshworld paper book.

My heroic strength
"Now in this extension of my volition and my physical frame into another animal, my tyrannical instincts and my desire for heroic strength are at once gratified."

Bruce Rolston quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr in the article The Killer App Of The 19th Century. Rolston writes of cybersports, and links to the original ideals of developing the mind and soul through sports, rather than the body - which was, at the time, well developed through manual labour.

Online sports can be understood as online sport-simulator games or even as collections of sports memorabilia, available online. But Rolston speaks of the developing community of competitive gaming, where some few professionals are able to make a living from their passion. The Norwegian player "Slayer" (real name Fredrik) was offerent a contract in 2001, of playing professionally in Korea for a year. (The picture isn't of Slayer, but of the world's best Quake player at the time, "Zero4".) Some of our students made a documentary about him, Alias: Slayer, and it was sent on Norwegian Broadcasting.

This emphasises the importance of understanding sports, team-sports strategy and competitiveness when we explore gaming, and not just the intellectual and very academic game of mastery and understanding.

We repeat: games are not dangerous
Some articles in Norwegian newspapers, June 1st: Espen Aarseth about the new reality created by technology, an article from may 6th comes up with some interesting statistics on media use among Norwegian children, and me, June 1st, saying that the modern society has no secret rooms for children, yes, very Henry Jenkins inspired.

A summary for non-Norwegians: Espen puts an emphasis on the connection between culture, virtual representations, technology and economy, and shows how technology is interweaved with modern culture. The article with the statistics shows that children who use computers a lot are as active in other games and activities as children who don't. It shows that children still use television a lot more than they do computers. See also Jill's blog for statistics on Norwegian media use. I am repeating the "don't blame the technology, it is a product of our culture (or at least, someone's culture)" mantra I have been pushing for years.

Warning: violent and gooey
This example of linux bashing should really speak to the media watchers out there. Look what games get us to do: equip uncorrupted polar bears and take it all out on innocent cuddly creatures!

(PS: highscore so far: 619,74)

Seduction
Sometimes you find that there is an other mind so close to your own that it is as if the thoughts could have been yours. It is a feeling of thrill and terror - a sensation of seeing boundaries slip and the self become diffuse, blurred. Today I received a book in the mail that gave me exactly this experience.

Ragnhild Tronstad, who defends her thesis Friday 11th of June, in Oslo, has a chapter that makes me feel that intellectual boundaries are dissolving. Chapter six: "Questing as a Deductive Discourse" uses Baudrillard, and discusses seduction and seductive quest objects. I don't know whether to get jealous, or all gooey. I started to plan a chapter/an article on Baudrillard, seduction and games in 2000/2001. There's an old draft on my computer, waiting for me to immerse myself in it - and here Ragnhild writes it. Well, not exactly - I never connected it to quests. Interesting, very interesting connection.

So, as you understand, I am eagerly leafing through her dissertation, but most of all I am just looking forwards to my trip to Oslo, for her defense.

Procrastination
I have a slight sunburn around my eyes, from taking off my glasses and turning my face to the sun yesterday afternoon. It was pure procrastination: I have to finish grading, and I don't like doing it! But that's the life of a college teacher, it has to get done! Anyway: today and tomorrow, oral assessment and student parting party, Saturday will be spent in the car driving to Trøgstad, a flat spot close to the Swedish border. Sunday; confirmation for one married-in niece, Monday; driving all the way back. Good thing the family likes to spend time together and rarely argue, or twenty hours in a small car in three days might get just a liittle tense.

Australian voices
I noticed another gaming blog the other day, Gamely Manner by Stewart Woods and exploring it led me to Helen Merric's blog on net studies. She uses the word "networksing" as one of her categories, and points out that it is not a gollumification of language, but something more than that.

Both blogs look clean, crisp and informed, but not all that frequently updated. Still, worth a peek!

Career change
Or just an expansion? Here is how to become a webcam whore!

Weblog design
Makiko Itho, who is not a nameless cat, posts on weblog design. She has a very pretty design herself, which in my eyes gives her much credibility in this topic. She also has an interesting post about blogger template designs and gender.

Interpretation, Performance, Play, & Seduction: Textual Adventures in Tubmud
Ragnhild Tronstad, brilliant, exiting researcher that she is, now defends her dissertation in Oslo, June 11th. Opponents are Cynthia Haynes, Niels Overgaard Lehmann and as third opponent Espen Aarseth.

People watching
Years ago, I spent a week in the company of a spanish film-maker in an office at the University of Bergen, the media department. We had a few interesting experiences; one night we let ourselves be hijacked for a cosmetic demonstration party in a suite at one of the best hotels in Bergen, an other night we skipped dinner and went on a cake-tasting spree in every cafe in Bergen. But the night we spent people watching at a bar was the most fun.

She played this little game everywhere. She made up stories about the people she saw. Fantastic stories about lost love, dark family secrets, fortunes won and lost... When a nice gay male couple joined us the game changed, simplified, into guessing peoples' occupation. This too was fun, although different.

A couple of years later, travelling with a colleague, two teachers and 30 students. We visited Brussels and Amsterdam, a frozen winter week of walking through two large, lovely cities. This colleague also makes films, and when I told him of the people game, he caught on immediately. We spent the student-free evenings creating long, involved narratives, weaving tales across borders.

Since these two experiences, I have been an avid watcher of people. And with Desmond Morris' book, now I am looking for details:

4. The Intention Power-grip. The speaker who is seeking control and is striving in his speech to master the situation, but has not yet done so, performs his batons with his hand held in the frozen intention of the power-grip. This is the Air Grasp posture, with the digits stiffly spread and slightly bent. The hand grabs at the air but does not follow through.

I can hardly wait to find a busy cafe, settle with my book and a cup of coffee, and just look!

Journalist factory
Volda college has been called "the journalist factory", due to the way we process students and send them out to attack the unsuspecting Norwegian public. That's not true, it's not journalists that are our largest output, it's media theory students! Today I am about to walk the "comforting route", and visit students writing exams in media theory. There are more than a hundred students, positioned in 7 different locations. Just finding the rooms they are in is a challenge, I have no chance to actually recognize the students. I just hope they recognize me.

I don't know if this routine is common outside of Norway, but for exams like this - school exams - we always visit the students in the morning, in order to help them understand the questions, give them a hint if they have misunderstood completely and nudge in the right direction if they feel insecure. I have also spent time as an ad-hoc therapist calming exams nerves, I have called for an ambulance for a student who went into diabetic shock from stress, and I have been strict and told lazy students to get back in there and make an effort - suffer through the exam and take a chance at a weak grade rather than leave and be guaranteed to fail. It is one of those things that marks the seasons.

Spam and threats
Jarle Dahl Bergersen (in Norwegians) has used his blog to critizise a spammer, been threatened and considered getting a lawyer, before they finally came to a compromise.

It's an interesting case, so I want to point to it, even if it is all solved now.

Typical May week
Norwegians like May. It's the month with the most holidays all year. Yesterday was 17th of May, and Thursday it's ascencion day - the day Jesus went up to heaven, you know. That means most Norwegians work two days this week, because we all have a little extra time to take out Friday. Those two workdays I am spending with the department, in a cabin on an island, talking about more or less serious things concerning teaching and administration - but also fishing, chatting, having fun.

The weather conspires against us though: there is a gale blowing, 8 on the Beaufort scale (sterk kuling), and it's been raining steadily for the last three days. Wish me luck - I'll be stuck in a cabin with the men I argue with the most frequently! The rest of the week will be spent with family, in various locations at Sunnmøre, all of them without an internet connection.

Vindstyrke
Beaufortscala, Deutsch
Beaufort wind scale

Are weblogs journalism?
Online Journalism Review organised a roundtable with a group of "blogologists" (don't just dislike the term, I am biting my tongue hard not to use the kind of language I would like about it, while I remind myself "it's supposed to be funny, it's supposed to be funny"). One of the questions asked is:

OJR: Do you consider Weblogs to be a form of journalism? How do they differ from other forms of journalism and media?

The interviewees made good attempts at replies to this question by saying blogging is more than journalism, blogging may be journalism, blogging can challenge journalism, all of it correct. My question is however: where was the editor when the journalist made that question? Is a question like that journalism? It is asked by a reporter working in a review of online journalism published at a college of journalism, but it is clumsy, unprofessional and pretty impossible to answer in a way that does not make the interviewee seem pedantic or trying to avoid the question.

As a public service for all who have considered asking that or a similar question, I am going to do some pigeonholing. I am even going to talk about the size of pigeon holes: which small holes fit into which big ones. Sometimes it just has to be done.

The problem with OJR's question is that we could just as well ask: is writing journalism? Is printing journalism? Is videotaping journalism? Is filming journalism? Is soundtaping journalism? All of these manners of recording and communicating can be journalism, given certain criteria met. The same goes for blogging. We can adjust this question so OJR doesn't need to ask it again in the future, when some other online medium becomes popular, by rephrasing it to: "Is communicating journalism?"

Now, pay attention to the pigeonholes: Communication is the big box. Journalism is a little one that fits inside the big box. Blogging is a box that is smaller than communication, but bigger than journalism. Concept-wise it is comparable to television(ing) and radio(ing), and a lot of different genres of recording and reporting from the world of facts and fantasy fit within each of these boxes.

So: is blogging journalism? No. But a blog can be a medium for good reporting, good newscoverage, good investigative journalism. It is also a lot more.

Syttende mai
The significance of syttende mai. What lacks in this description is how pretty Norway is in spring, and how suitable a celebration is in May, when the light, warmth and life has returned after a bleak, dark, cold winter.

Webcams from some Norwegian cities:
Oslo, Karl Johan's gate
Bergen, Torgalmenningen
Ålesund, Brosundet should give the most interesting view today.

The parades start at different times, the first one in Volda at 10 am Norwegian time. So I have to go prepare breakfast. I have already ironed two shirts, and have to make up my mind what to wear on a cool, rainy day since I have had my national costume refitted for my daughter.

Students don't do what you want?
Colleagues unruly and ignoring you? Your partner refusing to do his part of the chores, or treat you the way you wish for? Perhaps what you need is a new tool in your bag of persuation tricks...

Spelt flour
Spelt is old-fashioned wheat, with a higher content of protein and a somewhat lower content of carbohydrate than normal wheat. Hildegard von Bingen mentions spelt as a particularly good type of grain, for all purposes, and particularly for healing and strengthening the body.

I have been using spelt rather than wheat in baking for about a year. After a year of testing, I find that I am not as sensitive to bread, cookies and cakes made from spelt as common wheat. I can even have occasional waffles! Particularly with my own specially made strawberry jam. But I am still looking for recipes, and today I had the brilliant idea to make a search for it online:

Steep Hill food recipes
Spelt flour organic recipes
Spelt noodles
Blueberry muffins

And a bonus recipe, Angel Food Cake with fructose, rather than saccharine.

A Doctor of blogs!
Kaye Trammell defends her thesis today - a few hours ago, according to her post. Kaye Trammell's research is on celebrity blogs, contents and user surveys. Congratulations, Kaye!

Planning the autumn
It's the season of planning ahead, and I have spent a delicious little hour finishing the pland for a tiny little course in New Media. I started these plans last year, delirious with happiness that I had received The New Media Reader. Due to a mix-up, that tiny little course never ended up as part of the department curriculum. However, when the media group leader frowned at the plans for next year and muttered "We need one or two more topics here", I volunteered (!) my little plan. For those lovers of lists and plans out there, here it is, Torill's little pleasure project this autumn:

Old news on new media
Dr. Torill Mortensen
The development of the hypertext and the non-linear text from Vannevar Bush and the Memex Machine to the World Wide Web. The ideas behind our understanding of the web.

Three lectures, each 2 x 45 minutes:
The Computer and the thought
Society, technology and structures
Breaking with linearity

Bush, Vannevar (1945): ”As We May Think”, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, på http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm

Douglas C. Engelbart. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Summary Report AFOSR-3223 under Contract AF 49(638)-1024, SRI Project 3578 for Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Ca., October 1962. på http://www.bootstrap.org/augdocs/friedewald030402/augmentinghumanintellect/ahi62index.html, disse delene: I: Introduction, A og B, III Examples and discussion, A2 og A3 og B4 og B5.

Baudrillard, Jean (1981): “Requiem for the Media”, in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 164 – 184, Telos Press, og trykt på nytt i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 278 – 288) Også tilgjengelig på: http://www.calarts.edu/~bookchin/mediatheory/essays/19-baudrillard-03.pdf

Williams, Raymond (1972): ”The Technology and the Society”, I Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 291-300)

Nelson, Theodor H. (1981): “Proposal for a Universal Electronic Publishing System and Archive”, i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 443-461)

Turkle, Sherry (1984): “Video Games and Computer Holding Power”, i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 500-513)

Moulthrop, Stuart (1991): “You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of the Media”, i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 692 – 704)

McLoud, Scott (1993): “Time Frames”, i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 712 – 735)

Aarseth, Espen (1994): “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory”, i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 762 – 780)

Berners-Lee, Tim, Robert Cailliau, Ari Luotonen, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and Arthur Secret: “The World-Wide Web”, i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 792 – 797)

Images of pain
The images from Iraq are powerful statements that may change the path of the war. They have made Tony Blair apologize for the behaviour of the British soldiers involved in the abuse of the prisoners. George Bush calls the abuse a stain to the nation's honour. I think Mike might feel it is somewhat more than a slight discolouration, and that it takes more than a quick trip to the laundromat to clean this up.

I am as stunned as everybody else, and the news resonate through every western society like a shockwave of sadness, horror and fear - fear that the values of the society we try to live in are crumbling, falling apart and giving way to - what?

To me, the true horror is that I feel I have seen these images before - and not from prison camps in dictatorships in Africa or South America, but from the "civilised" west. One of the topics I have studied was images of sexuality. Among those are images of deviations: humiliation, sexual torture, sadism, masochism. Consensual games between consenting adults - but still, a rich source for images of pain, degradation and dominance. And I watch the pictures with the gleeful smiles on the faces of the American soldiers, and I find myself asking: is that what they think they are part of? Is that the frame of the prison and the torture? Is torture and degradation so far from the soldiers who find themselves in that situation that the only frame for understanding their reality is by interpreting it as part of sex games?

Growing up with parents who actually experienced war, and reading Mike's deeply felt essay, I would never claim that war or the military turns humans into automatons, unfeeling machines with no empathy, or shallow shells who only act. But at the same time: military discipline is supposed to install frames for particular situations: given A, you do B. That's what you train on, that's what you do in a tight spot, if the training is right.

Running a prison in wartime is a very tight spot. Was deviant porn the only possible frame for the soldiers' actions in that position? It might work the other way around as well - sexual sadism takes its imagery from the darkest basements of human imagination and emotion. Perhaps is what we see here the very source of all images of pain: the human with too much power and no control. It is not like our culture does not recognize and know about the capability of cruelty inherent in humanity. Read the Lord of the Flies.

Indiana in September?
If you are, you can catch the WWW@10 at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

Changes
And Eeeek! Blogger has changed looks! Feels strange. They refer to the main log-in screen as dashboard. Inspired by the drivers of Grand Text Auto?

Different options
Next time around, I will make different choices when the turn comes for me to return to the worldly pursuits. With the increase of population over the last few hundred years, I can't imagine souls are allowed to stay in storage long, so some of my plans may still be valid. At the moment, the plan for the next life is to learn languages. I want to be the child (daughter is fine) of a couple with one spanish and one russian speaking parent. They should live in Japan. They put me in an international school where I have to learn French and Arabic. Then they move to Italy, and I study classical languages in Rome; Latin, Greek.

Then, when I meet interesting looking online publications like neural.it, I don't need to feel stupid and frustrated. Luckily, a link can be recognized in most languages, and it links to a varied collection of online resources. Enjoy!

So much for burning out
Four things happened since yesterday:
Most important - following a link from Dennis' blog I read the NYC times article about Mary Ann Buckles. She dropped everything and quit academia after her PhD on the game Adventure. That dissertation was the first work I read on text-based games, and I sat down and plunged into the MUDs myself afterwards. I was sure she had to be a highly paid tenured professor at some fancy, progressive University by now. Why does it make me feel better that she isn't? Because it legitimises my own occasional academic overload. The only role models visible to me from this vantage point are the ones who finished their PhDs and went on to become powerwielding professors way above me in the hierarchy. Mary Ann Buckles shows me that it is possible to turn the back on all of it and do something else. Perhaps my secret shameful dream of being a nail designer isn't a sign of failure after all, just a sign that this is a rough field and if you feel battered it is because you ARE battered, not a trick of your (failing) mind. The article lines up neatly next to the goodbye of the Invisible Adjunct and confirms that yes, this really IS a rat race.

Did the last of the how-did-I-ever-get-into-doing-this lectures on organisational theory. I guess I am the most competent person the department has on organisation theory. That doesn't say much about my level of competency, really. Lucky it is at a very basic level, or the students would have been better off just reading the book. Why did I do it? I didn't find anybody who both spoke Norwegian, knew the field and were willing to do the lecture, not for money or for threats or promises of payment of other kinds. Or actually I did, but the email never reached me, and I didn't know until four days ago. The irony, the irony.

Booked the flight for my vacation. Guess where? New York in July. Sounds horrible, really, but I am not familiar with the combination heat/metropol, so it will be a different experience. And so nice to get back to the cool clean quiet fjords afterwards. So if you know of interesting events around NYC between 9th and 28th of July, I'd love to know! Nick and Noah have both already pointed me towards the Ars Electronica exhibition.

I read my own blogposts. Not as much gloom and doom as I feared. Looks like I have managed to keep most of it out of the blogspace. Good. Internal super-editor still working.

Minor burnout blogwise
I feel like I do nothing but post about how exhausted and overworked I am. Not fun for you, not fun for me. I will probably (very likely) be back when I have managed to clean my desk again.

drawing machines
12 machines draws pictures 2 months each, online.

Paying my dues
An organisation like Volda College is small enough that each individual has a lot of freedom to create our own job and control our own day. This is the great advantage of working here - in this tiny little pond it's easy to become a big fish among other reasonably large fish who all are pretty autonomous within our territories.

This does, however, in the best spirit of social democracy, entail a duty towards the collective. In other words: I have to pay my dues to the organisation for the trust and freedom it gives me. Now that I have finished the PhD it's payback time. This happens through taking on the tasks vital to the running of the Collage: be on minor or major boards, taking on leadership and responsibility, working for the union. So far I am, apart from being back to leading my by now preteen baby the information education; on the boards of the department, the local researcher's union and the board of employment (for all of the college). I have done my duty time in the arrangement comittee for the Christmas party, and entertained the masses with my eloquence in social contexts. But I haven't even started paying yet. The next big project is the organisational comittee. Due to the changes in the Norwegian educational system over the last 10 years, Volda College is in dire need of restructuring. I have said yes to be part of that. With three other faculty members and a secretary, our job will be to make a suggestion as to how to re-organise a 200 strong organisation with tasks ranging from building maintainance to large-scale socio-political research, with all the quirks of a 130-year-old organisation forcefully joined with another organisation 100 years younger thrown into the pot.

I have to learn a new word soon. I have to practice using it fluently and politely, but with conviction. I desperately need to learn when to say "no".

Disappearing in plain sight
What magicians do with mirrors, Baudrillard claims we do through other media:

In fact, all this corresponds to the inalienable right or desire to be nothing and to be regarded as such. There are two ways to disappear. Either you demand not to be seen (the current issue with image rights); or you turn to the maddening exhibitionist display of your insignificance. You make yourself insignificant in order to be seen as such. This is the ultimate protection against the need to exist and the duty to be oneself.

Manycoloured wigs
After weeks of feeling that nothing makes sense, it is interesting to find that a site with a picture of wigs in many different colours and a list of links to summaries of books by Baudrillard, Barthes and Marcuse gives me a feeling og nostalgic recognition, reminiscent of coming home. Parry and First seems to be a place for storing lecture notes and summaries by some anonymous graduate student, a little online pocket in a fold of the net, found by google and my command, while looking for links on Seduction by Baudrillard.

Somehow the wigs in the window touched me, as I feel like that at the moment: Like I am only surfaces, that what others think is a head is a plaster lump carrying a wig, a seductress who does not love, only scheme for the effects of learning, not the spell of it.

Back to grey
And that was it, spring in Volda is over: it's darker and cold, even the fresh green of the new leaves is dull as the light changes and the fjord turns lead grey. Business as usual!

Spring
Today is a green and blue day: green buds bursting into young leaves, blue sky framed by dark green mountains, green lawns stretching towards blue waters - I couldn't keep the strict red-and-black today, while the colours of grass and sky press themselves so eagerly into my vision.

Grace was her nature
I never really knew her. She knew me though, in several different aspects. I was “that girl” her son went out with. I was the strange guest she needed to treat politely. I was the mother who performed the tasks to keep a household running. I was a source of sweets and treats, an excuse for yet another cup of coffee. At one time I was “the nice lady with the hat and the flowers”. Another time I was “she who brought the white hair.” But most of all I was the maid.

Everybody told me what a wonderful woman she was. Daughter of a doctor, from the times when being a doctor was really something, she was well spoken, educated, intelligent, interested and very, very considerate. Since I loved these traits in her son I was looking for what they told me about her. And once in a while I would see a glimpse of this woman, the competent social worker, the warm friend, the concerned citizen of the world. Those were the moments when she saw me as a stranger, without some lingering sense that she should know me. But long before we met her past had started unravelling like a knitting from her most recent memories and backwards.

At first they all protected her and refused to see that she was sick. She was herself, only more so, more fuzzy, more endearingly impractical, she asked her polite questions a few times more than normal. When I said that something was wrong I was told to shut up, stop being so critical, be happy I had such a darling mother-in-law.

The first years I was unhappy, and felt that I was the one who couldn’t make enough of an impression on her. Then, one visit, she started ranting about how I didn’t do enough work. She had decided who I was. You see, I speak the way their maids had always done – a west-coast dialect. So much more reliable workers, the girls from the west-coast; strong, thrifty and efficient. Her mother always had a maid speaking somewhat like me.

Sociolects guided her understanding of the world as she lost more and more of her memory. By the time her softly west-Oslo speaking son became “that very nice young man”, I had resigned to my role of unskilled labour. I would clean, cook and look after the children. One Christmas I washed her hair, and she obeyed me like a child, the way she had obeyed the maids and nurses of her childhood. There was nothing else I could do for her, and she felt safe with me that way. It confused her when I sat down and had dinner with them, but as I acted as nurse for the children at those occasions, she translated me into some kind of nanny.

I could not help her family into an equally clearly defined space in her world. Her loving, doting husband became “that nice old man”. She thought her son was my son, my “boy”, and cried when in a clear moment she realised that he was hers. My children mainly remember that she stole their candy. At least they were too small to realise their grandmother forgot them.

I never knew the woman her family grieved. But having lost everything, she was still magnificent, dignified. In the end she had no real language, only fragments: “Oh, really? No! What is…? MmmHmm? Yes? Is that so?” This was her entire vocabulary, and she was still able to charm strangers, acting the perfect lady. I can’t even do that with my brain at full speed and my well-mannered husband as a coach. When everything else was lost, grace was her true nature.