Seriously, NSB...

I normally don't complain about the much-harassed Norwegian railroad. I love trains, and one of my big complaints about living in Norway is that the country is so hard to build railroads in. I want much more of it.

But today I realised that NSB really could be smarter than it is. I am trying to find a way to travel from Oslo to Karlstad. I know there are trains there. But NSB refuses to let me see anything beyond the Norwegian borders, and this is just at the other side, 2-3 hours into Sweden.

When I use wideroe.no, I can book tickets all over the world, whether Wideroe or SAS fly there or not. With NSB I don't get any help if I want to pass the border. Perhaps it deserves some of the criticism after all? When I checked the Swedish railroad, going from Oslo to Karlstad (and back) was no problem at all. Go figure.

Hey, NSB, how come the SWEDES can do it, and not you?

(Oh, and if it IS possible to check the time-table on this distance from the NSB site but I was too stupid to find it - well, then a hard look at the user interface would be a brilliant idea.)

Dead blogs

There are a lot of dead blogs out there, and some of them are in otherwise live newspapers. The norwegian paper Dagens Næringsliv - a wannabe Financial Times, right down to the pink paper - has an impressive list of bloggers. Sadly, the last blogpost was written in 2007.

This makes me wonder, again, about the weblog and its function in the public debate. In this case the high-profile, eminently competent people who were asked to blog obviously did not find it worth while to follow up the task. This, while others are still blogging in many a little corner of the universe, calmly talking from much lower soap-boxes in more remote corners of the online public sphere. Is the weblog the commoners' medium? Is the prestige gone out of blogging with the hype, now that the big agencies are all thinking about how to twist the power of facebook to their service?

Hmmm.

I know what to do now

This week-end, things fell into place. I know what to do now. It's a really odd feeling, kind of a mixture between waiting for a dentist appointment and being in love.

I have been trying to write abstracts for AOIR and the Nordic Media Research conference, but not successfully. Every time I have tried, I have ended up with this huge project that has been getting in the way of any small things, like papers and articles. The project is horribly ambitious, it's going to demand a network of researchers and lots of funding, and there's no way I can do any of it before either conference. But it doesn't want to go away.

So, I am giving in to it. I am going to start planning a large research project. OK, fates, I am giving in, do you hear me? Stop nagging!

And yes, that worked. Now that I have put the PROJECT into my schedule - my pretty immediate schedule - I can start working on other things. It's going to demand some compromise. I will, for instance, for the Nordic Conference of Media and Communication research, base my abstract on a talk I gave this fall. I have the material ready, the research almost all done, all I need is to write the paper/article. Easy-peasy, and I was planning to do that anyway. For AOIR I'll run with an idea I had quite recently - and nope, I am not announcing it here just yet. That would ruin the whole blind-review process. I'll let you all know if it's accepted :) If it isn't, I'll pretend I never meant to go to IR 10.0 anyway. It's in Milwaukee. How does one even GET to Milwaukee?

Well, now you know. I just wanted to say this. A purely therapeutic blogpost for me, but at least you got links to a couple of conferences out of it.

All your typoes are belong to us

Have you typoed an url lately? Where did you land? The last times I have tried that, I have ended up in a site of mega religion cristian somethings, where the big news on the first site is something along the line that the bible is true. They now have testimonies proving that.

I have to admit that while this is great advertising, I am shocked by the way one organisation, this time a very fanatic religious one, has been able to hijack the Internet. There must be a mechanism somewhere that redirects all typoes that would otherwise lead to a "file not found" to this site. How has it happened? Have they bought the spot? Can it be bought? If so, what did it cost? Or have they hacked it, planted a bug that infiltrates your machine, and then sends you off to their site, rather than just google search site or something. Are there thousands of religious fanatics that keep creating websites with typoed versions of every website out there, which then redirects to this page? Have they taken over explorer? Did Bill Gates receive Jesus in his heart, and started preaching through the error messages?

It's quite scary. Fanatics are no more reassuring just because they are Christian.

And yes, I deliberately did not use exact phrasing or links in this post. They get more than enough hits out of me as it is.

I want electronic books!

I have started to look at electronic book readers, as I am one of those who like to write outside of the office, but the office is where my library is. Now, if I had a nice electronic book reader, that wouldn't be a problem, because I could just bring my books with me. Even if the limitation on the book reader was, let's say, 100 books, that meant I could empty it into an electronic library on a hard drive, and just bring the books I wanted. Or have them in an online bookshelf. It would really change my life. Why have nobody thought about this before?

Right.

Perhaps the best supported electronic book reader is the Amazon Kindle, . It can contain about 200 titles, is wireless on the satelite band and so is always connected if you want to update newspapers or download books, and there are 230 000 books available. The weight? 300 grams. It sounds like a dream come true! The price? Well, not as cheap as a book, but 260$ I'd definitely pay to have all the books I need available all the time. Now, just as I was getting exited, I checked if I could get this in Norway, and use it in Norway. No. I can't. Bummer.

Sony has a lovely reader though, and although it's a little bit more expensive than the Kindle, it looks very interesting. It's not as proprietary as the Kindle, reads more formats, which makes it a lot more available. My electronic journal access suddenly means I can download the relevant articles to the reader, and drag with me whole years of relevant publications to places where I'd never take a computer. What's that but major cool?

From the webpage: "You can also create annotations with a virtual keyboard, highlight text with a stylus pen, search for text in your digital book, and easily adjust the font size." Oh yes, I'll happily shell out 300$, even now that the Norwegian krone has dropped, for the opportunity to carry 2-300 texts with me in the backpack when I am off to work elsewhere. This has to have a downside. "Note: Use of companion eBook Store limited to U.S. and Canadian residents. Certain titles may not be available for download based on place of residence." Lovely. This is probably why this item doesn't show up at all on the Norwegian Sony site.

One should think that these days, with the tight economy, the enormous number of free hands and the need for cash flowing into the United States, buying things from abroad should be a tad easier. What are they afraid I'll read? Benjamin Franklin's autobiography?

That I could read, if I want to, though. Manybooks.net contains 22,900 free e-books, many of the same as Project Gutenberg. If I mainly wanted the reader in order to always have a great novel available, I wouldn't worry about the restrictions, and just buy one. Come to think of it, that's a great thing to have. Thousands of books available to be packed into a tiny space. Would save a world of searching for English book-stores when we're on vacations.

However, what I really want is the books we use, regularly, the ones standing in our bookshelves. The ones I have already shelled out thousands and thousands for, so I can have them close, and the ones I will pay as much for in the future. They are the books that stop me, when my colleague talks enthusiastically about a month in a remote village in Greece, to write articles. I would love the village, sure, but I'd not write much. This is why when I travel, I go somewhere with bookstores and libraries. I don't know exactly which books I'll need before I go, and the nature of my work makes it hard to write without a reference library. And it isn't available online.

Our books, the ones we want, the ones we read and use and cite and think about, they haven't been put online. No matter how savvy we feel, how updated on the cutting edge of net use - we publish on paper only. Yeah, dinosaurs. Lovable, useful, reassuring dinosaurs, which I don't want to be without, but still...

So, dear scholars, dear scholarly publishing houses: How about those electronic books? Wouldn't that be a great idea?

Professional data miner

No, that does not mean a herb-stealing, saronite-ninjaing gold miner, but an expert in quantitive data gathering in large databases. Such as, for instance, World of Warcraft. Would you like that job? Sifting through the information hidden in their huge storage sites, finding ways to gather, represent and analyse that huge stock of raw data, turning it into knowledge? Then by all means, apply for the job!

Pregnancy in games

I am flabbergasted. (Great word, I just had to use it.) I never thought to even look for this in games, and it's right there! Thanks Rene, for pointing to this great article on pregnancies and how it's treated in games.

DAC 2009

The website for the Digital Arts and Culture 2009 conference is up. This year it's in Irvine, California, in December.

DAC09 will be held on the campus of the University of California Irvine, for three and a half days in mid-December 2009

The Themes for this iteration of DAC:

* Embodiment and performativity
* Mobile/locative/situated/wearable practices
* Software/platform studies
* Environment/ sustainability/ climate change
* Interdisciplinary pedagogy
* Cognition and Creativity
* Sex and sexuality

Organiser and chair is Simon Penny.

Ja, vi vet alt for lite

At times I feel like giving up on what we in Norway call "forskningsformidling" - popularising and communicating research. All the efforts done, nationally and internationally, to understand what gaming is and how it influences society are made invalid to the Norwegian debate by plain and simple lack of knowledge and critical sense in Norwegian media. Friday's news item on games at nrk.no is another example of amazing lack of a critical approach to certain opinions. Forgive me, English-language readers. The rest of this post will be in Norwegian.

Fredag morgen, 6 februar, hadde Dagsnytt i NRK en nyhetssak om at kulturdepartementet setter av en million til opplysning om og forskning på problemskapende spillbruk. De sa imidlertid ikke "problemskapende spillbruk", de sa spillavhengighet. Mange mener dette er det samme, i alle fall ville en eventuell spillavhengighet være ganske problematisk. Imidlertid finnes det ikke noen diagnose som sier spillavhengighet. At norske media og enkelte grupper i den norske offentligheten, her representert ved NRK, på død og liv vil påprakke en gruppe en diagnose gjør den ikke til noen faktisk sannhet.

Det de gjør er imidlertid å skape en sosial sannhet. Saken slik den ble sendt på radioen var ganske ille. Den inneholdt alle de forventede ingrediensene, en bekymret mor, en interessert forsker som stort sett fikk si noen omtrentligheter og en ikke helt godt forstått melding om forskningsmidler om spillbruk. På Torsdagens Joingame møte ved universitetet i Oslo presenterte seniorrådgiver i Kulturdepartementet, Dag Asbjørnsen, nyheten saken sannsynligvis bygger på. I den sammenhengen presiserte han at Kulturdepartementet snakker om "problemskapende spillbruk". Han sa ingen ting om det NRK påsto i nyhetene:

Kulturdepartementet øker satsingen på dataspill, og jobber nå med en ny handlingsplan for å bekjempe avhengighetsproblemet.

Forsknings- og opplysningsmidlene som Kulturdepartementet satte av var, slik jeg oppfattet Dag Asbjørnsen, midler som skulle brukes til å finne ut hva problemskapende spillbruk er, og til å spre informasjon om dette. Når NRK presenterer dette som om Kulturdepartementet endelig vil utrydde spillavhengighet vil jeg i alle fall se/høre kilden til deres utsagn.

NRK påstår at et fenomen som er svært omstridt, og som spesialister som har arbeidet med feltet lenge avviser, er et faktum.
NRK trekker fram, først og fremst på nettsiden, andre problematiske saker som alle på ett eller annet vis har blitt tillagt spillavhengighet, mens de ikke trekker fram saker som sier noe annet. Dette er en form for ensidig rapportering som er noe helt annet enn god journalistikk.

Kanskje har NRKs reportere misforstått hva det vil si å være kritisk. Dataspillbransjen er i ferd med å bli veldig stor, og det er all grunn til å være kritisk til den. Et norsk eksempel er Dagbladets fokus på arbeidssituasjonen i Funcom. Internasjonalt er det flere ganger rapportert svært dårlige arbeidsforhold for ansatte i ulike spillfirma. Lange dager, lav jobbtrygghet og dårlig arbeidsmiljø er ikke uvanlige forhold for ansatte i bransjen. Med tanke på de svært mange programmererne og designerne som spesialiserer seg mot spill i norske utdanningssinstitusjoner er det grunn til å spørre om ikke nyhetsmedia forsømmer sitt samfunnsansvar når all kritikk av spillbransjen handler om kritikk av spillenes suksesskriterier, og ikke for eksempel ser på de framtidige arbeidsforholdene for alle disse entusiastiske studentene.

Det er all grunn til å spørre hvor pengene for spill går: hvem tjener på spillene? Spillbransjen er adskillig mindre dekket på dette feltet enn for eksempel musikk- og filmbransjen, og det sier ganske mye. Store multinasjonale selskap kjøper opp gode ideer og gjør dem til sine egne. De tar også over ideer gratis, ved at spillernes innsats integreres i spillene uten at de får betaling for det. Svært mange entusiaster arbeider mye med å gjøre spillopplevelsen bedre for seg selv og andre, og dette er gratis arbeidskraft for spilleiere som allerede tjener godt - hvorfor finnes det ikke et lett tilgjengelig system for å belønne denne innsatsen?

Forskerne får ikke tilgang til opplysninger om spillermassen, om sentrale element i utviklingsprosessen og om arbeidsprosessene i produksjonen: Er det akseptabelt at så store organisasjoner er så lite tilgjengelige for innsyn?

Dette er kritikk av spillbransjen som blir helt oversett i journalistenes "kritiske dekning av dataspill." Det er ganske enkelt å forstå hvorfor dette skjer. Det er veldig lett å finne folk som spiller mye, og andre folk som er bekymret for disse. En hvilken som helst journalist kan prate med foreldrene til noen ivrige dataspillere på ungdomsskolen, og vips har de en "kritisk sak" til et stort og kjent fenomen. Det er adskillig vanskeligere å sette seg inn i sosiale, økonomiske og politiske forhold som spillene blir produsert innenfor.

Det vi får er dermed en situasjon hvor journalistikken stempler en stor gruppe svært aktive spillere, påfører dem en ikke-eksisterende diagnose og er med på å rettferdiggjøre noe som kan være overgrep og frihetsberøvelse i godhetens navn. Når barn blir tvangsinnlagt på grunnlag av avvikende adferd blir det vanligvis knapt nok omtalt i pressen. Barn og ungdom har svært få rettigheter når deres foresatte ikke er fornøyd med deres adferd. Det hjelper ikke denne allerede svake gruppen at det blir akseptert i nyhetsmedia at enkelte blir tvunget til å kureres for adferd som vi faktisk ikke vet er det faktiske problemet, eller bare et symptom på helt andre og adskillig større problemer.

Utgangspunktet for den aktuelle nyhetssaken, og dermed denne bloggposten, var en rapport om at det skal komme litt penger til forskning på problemskapende spillbruk. Ja, det er veldig nødvendig med slik forskning. Det er imidlertid svært tungt å initiere forskning og forskningsformidling om hva spill er så lenge journalistikken er så ekstremt vinklet i en bestemt retning at det kan se ut som en systematisk fortiing av all uenighet med det rådende medieparadigmet. Hvor er det mediekritiske perspektivet i denne saken? Må vi som forsker på spill begynne å rapportere alle tilfeller av misrepresentasjon av våre utsagn til PFU? For å sitere fra vær varsom-plakaten:

1.4. Det er pressens rett å informere om det som skjer i samfunnet og avdekke kritikkverdige forhold. Det er pressens plikt å sette et kritisk søkelys på hvordan mediene selv fyller sin samfunnsrolle.

Nei, jeg kritiserer ikke pressen for å stå på sin rett til å skrive om at mange bruker spill på en måte som bidrar til problemer, nå og i framtiden. Jeg kritiserer pressen for å ikke oppfylle sin plikt til å se på hvordan den utøver denne retten.

Mythbusting

In this picture: Torill Mortensen, Faltin Karlsen, Jessica Enevold, Rune Klevjer and Snorre Bryne.


Links for an afternoon of discussions about myths around computer games:

Studies from NOVA on youths and computer culture - in Norwegian mostly.

NRK interview with Ole Jensen, concerned grandfather, Dagfinn Nordbø, childrens ward specialist, Leila Torgersen, researcher and psycholog and Rita Brudalen, from the Norwegian Media Authority: Verdibørsen, 24 januar 2009.
Dagfinn Nordbø argued against the idea that children are so impressionable that they don't see the difference between games and society.

Leila Torgersen presented her study of 12000 children and youngsters, and their use of computer games. She had found that children who are interested in violence in general are also interested in violent computer games, and that children from families that did not interfer with the childrens' media consumption and let them play as much and what ever they liked had a slightly higher preference for violent solutions after a some years. It was however not possible to establish a causal relationship between violent computer games and violence in real life.

She had a few very important points to add: Over the last 10 years youth violence has been decreasing in Norway, it is not increasing. In the same period children report less loneliness. This is the opposite tendency of the myths about the lonely, violent youths produced by the increasing use of computer games.

An interesting curiosity: Action games where the player identifies with a character who needs to solve his problem through violence showed a slightly larger tendency to create positive thoughts about violence than the much more directly violent first-person shooters. The difference was not big, we are talking small margins here, but it does change a few ideas about what kind of violence is really violent.

Her findings are also supported by C. J. Fergusons findings in his study of school shooters, which I wrote about recently.

Active gamers and health: Swedish research, which I wrote about in 2008.

Ragnhild Tronstad's blogpost about "interested or addicted" - "Hekta eller avhengig" at forskning.no. A good discussion about addiction and overwhelming interest, and the importance of making a distinction. Here she refers to the report by Jonas Linderoth and Ulrika Bennersted: "Att leva i World of Warcraft". This is a study of very active World of Warcraft players, where ten young players describe their lives.

Violence and violence...

A new study claims that there is no causal relationship between videogame violence and real life violence. In "The School Shooting/Violent Video Game Link:
Causal Relationship or Moral Panic?", C. J. Ferguson studied the people who were perpetrators in school shootings, and their relationship to video games. From the study:

Indeed, related to violent video games, the FBI report specifically stated, “The student spends inordinate amounts of time [although inordinate is never defined and is left subjective] playing video games with violent themes and seems more interested in the violent images than the game itself ” [italics added].

This confirms what media studies has been saying about entertainment violence for a very long time. It is a lot more relevant to the use of violence whether the person is interested in violence than if the person is exposed to violent media. If they are interested in violence (for instance through learning that violence is an acceptable tool to solve problems), they will seek out violent entertainment. It's not the violent entertainment that causes the violence, if anything, it's the other way around.

Tag this article, fellow media scholars. It's one of the few that looks with a critical eye on the methodology of other studies, and which looks for more than the one, simple and obvious connection.

Article found by way of Lisa Galarneau's notice on facebook. Thanks, Lisa :)

Torill talking this spring

While we're talking about where I will talk this spring:

February 6th I'll be in Oslo, at a seminar organised by JoinGame, a Norwegian network promoting game research and development. I will be there on the 5th as well, but then I'll just be your regular participant.

February 19th I'll be in Trondheim, for a meeting at the Norwegian Technical University (NTNU) - no public talking (I think), but I'll meet the always wonderful Sara Brinch.

March 6th I'll be at something which it surprised me that I was invited for: Leangkollseminaret, a meeting for medical doctors and psychologists, a traditional meeting place for discussions of addiction. This year's topic explains a lot however: "From technical spirits to facebook" (Fra rødsprit til facebook). I am a little apprehensive about this, as I am trying very hard not to talk about addiction, but I still want to go here. This is my best chance to talk to the people who really know what addiction is, to learn something from them and to perhaps be able to teach something about games, too.

Blikk

"Blikk" means "gaze" in Norwegian, and while it's probably a clever acronym, I haven't tracked it down to check for what. What I do know is that it's a conference for people who work with youths and culture, it's in March this year at Utstein Kloster, and I have been invited to talk. I just accepted, a little late as I had to make some decisions first, so I assume I'll be there. I was however very happy to see that Kristine Ask and Rune Klevjer, two active games researchers, had already accepted. The topic is: Games as a cultural phenomenon. This is going to be fun.

Electronic Frontier foundation

I am a little late to the party for blogging about this, as Electronic Frontier Foundation has been around for ten years. But the website is an extremely interesting resource for anybody interested in online freedom of speech, and I particularly recommend their list of legal cases.

The ethics of entertainment

This morning, as I was desperately trying to get into World of Warcraft (down for maintenance - on a Saturday morning!), the radio was on and playing Norwegian Broadcasting, program 2. After an initial discussion about the problems between Israel and the Palestinians (Norwegians are extremely torn about this issue - on the one hand, the whole European guilt, on the other hand, the very real suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza), the conversation turned to something entirely different: Entertainment violence.

I was just listening with half my brain, but almost woke up when I heard a Norwegian psychology scholar discuss game violence - in a sensible manner! I didn't catch her name, and I didn't catch the reference to her study (yes, I know), but I do have internet access. And so, for those of you who understand Norwegian and want to hear a refreshingly sane view on game violence, one which may actually be based on real and decent research, Verdibørsen, P2, January 4th. It's the second half of the podcast. Enjoy.

Weight and exercize

Now, something entirely different: weight and exercize.

People who have followed this blog for a while, know that I live with some allergies and health issues that occasionally are expressed here through recipes for low glycemic index cooking. While I don't eat low GI to lose weight, it has that wonderful effect to: I managed to lose a lot of weight and maintain my new weight when I changed diet.

This was something I did not expect. You see, I had tried it all by then: working out, eating less fat, you know, everything one should do. Working out has the effect of making me stronger, giving me more energy and generally making daily chores easier, so yeah, it is very good for me. But I didn't lose weight. I just gained muscle. So I had resigned. I'd gain a kilo or two each year, and by 60 I'd be obese. Rather depressing, so imagine my joy when I discovered that something actually worked!

Now, many years later, there is finally a piece of research that fits with my own experiences. If you read Norwegian, it's brilliantly explained at forskning.no. For those who don't, the essence of the research is this: If you try to cure obesity by taking in less energy than you use, the body will resist the process and either make you eat more, or shut down processes that uses energy. Starvation doesn't work in the long run, and the "less in, more out" strategy is basically a starvation strategy. What you need is to reduce the insulin in the body, as insulin stops the release of energy from fat, and leads to more storage of energy as fat. This was just what my change in diet did.

Now, I saw that once I had adjusted my way of eating to something in between low carb and low GI, I suddenly lost weight when I was physically active. The research explains this as well. Physical activity strengthens the insulin metabolism, and assists in releasing energy from fat. So, if you gain weight because your insulin metabolism is weak, working out will help you. My metabolism was screwed up already (I knew this, I have a condition that is not diabetes, but does mess with my metabolism), so just working out wasn't enough to help. For my family, who live on a normal, healthy diet and have a good metabolism, working out is enough to adjust their weight when ever it goes up. It's not that they eat less and use more. My son, the active climber, at times eats enough for the other three of us together, he is constantly hungry when he's active, and he's very, very skinny. It's just that they have a metabolism that lets them actually use what they eat. In the boy's case, this means that when he spends the day being lazy, he hardly gets hungry. Which is the way it should be.

Of course, in order to get to the point that I could lose weight, I had to work hard at learning what was good for my body. If I had known that one result would be weight loss, I think I would never have figured it out. We are so drilled in the "less calories in, more calories out" way of thinking, that it would have stopped me from finding the diet that eventually would help stabilising my entire body at a much healthier level. And even now I am not at what medicine says is a "healthy" weight for a woman my size. As for fashion? Forget it. Too many curves, and not in the right places, for fashion. But I am healthier, staying fit is easier, I have more energy as I can use it, rather than store it as fat, and I finish my meals with a very good conscience. Now I also understand a bit more about why this works, when nothing else did.

Discworld and World of Warcraft

Did you know there was a MUD based on the Discworld, the universe created by Terry Pratchett? I knew, actually, although I had never visited it.

The one who did visit is Faltin Karlsen, a Ph D student, and currently a doctorate candidate, at the University of Oslo. He defends his thesis Emergent perspectives on multiplayer online games: A study of Discworld and World of Warcraft tomorrow. I know, because I am one of the opponents.

As such, I don't really want to say too much about this. I just wanted to say this: The test lecture is at Forskningsparken Friday 16th at 9.15. The defense starts 11.15. I am going to do my best to make it an interesting, worth-while event.

Are you serious?

A fun email dumped into my box today, drawing my attention to a business plan that at first made me giggle happily. Then I checked the date. Nope, not April first. That's when my evil mind started looking for exploits.

The people in Seriosity, Inc. think the inbox should be a game - or at least, sorted through a virtual economy. And so, as the market economy ideal burns and crashes, Edward Castronova is an advisor to the company as it attempts to build a virtual economy by which to organise your mailbox. Prioritize depending on how much currency people are willing to pay for your attention, get Serios today!

Serios is the virtual currency you need to pay for the attention of others. It's expected that people will be careful with their serios, and not spend a lot of them, mostly splurging, according to the demo, on things like mails to the manager (50 serios).

From their white paper on email economy:

Attent users are given certain number of Serios every week. Serios are allocated equally to each user. Serios can be spent, saved or traded like a physical currency, and like an actual currency Serios are a scarce good that is valued among Attent users. Serios are traded using a secure, reliable financial system that keeps track of trades. And there are sophisticated monetary policies that insure the financial system stays healthy and the currency remains stable.

So, let's say I want to write one of my colleagues, and I want to let them know there's cake for the lunch break (no, there isn't, this is just an example!). That is the kind of information they really want to get (it's just an example! There's no cake in the lunch break today!!!), so I don't need to attach any serios to it. It's also not vital (one should think), so if they ignore it nothing really happens.

Now, let's say I want my colleagues to show up at a meeting to discuss next semester, and I want that meeting at the most peaceful time at the college: 08.00 sharp. If I want them to get that message, I would have to attach a huge load of serios, something like a million. Because it's January, next semester is almost a year away, and nobody have meetings at 08.00, as that's when the most eager of us stumble, still half-asleep, into the offices and start the procedure of waking up. I don't think they would get that message if I used a billion serios, no matter how serious the matter I needed to discuss was. Changing the time to 10 am, and adding cake, now that would get the message through at a much lower price.

Anyway. Now, as the middle manager sending off 5 emails with a million serios attached, I am broke. All out of serios. I got as many as the rest, but the others HATE the things I have to say to them (most of the time it means more work and less freedom to do their own stuff.) So the next email I need to send, which is a request for assistance in details for a letter to the students about their upcoming exams, gets no serios. I'll just have to trust that the recipients realise that this is more important than the cake during lunch (no, there is still no cake for lunch today). As a manager, trying to get the attention of colleagues who have a very different priority from mine, I'd quickly run out of serios. The system is then broken, as I don't have anything else to trade for serios - I am just a go-between and have no real power, just a big load of responsibility.

Now, I have to grind serios, by writing nice and serious emails my colleagues really want to read. I don't have time for that though, as I am working on all that stuff my colleagues don't want to know about. However, I have this contact in China, a nice young academic who is delighted to do such things as read books on public information and media theory, write short abstracts and reviews, make suggestions about how this can be used for teaching, and mail it to me - against a very modest fee. So I start my own little serios-farm, and pump out emails to my colleagues by flooding them with cheaply generated content. Soon the young academic in China is a well-established budget post, and I have all the serios I like and can spam my colleagues all the time with higly priced mails.

The problem is that my colleagues prefer the mails from the guy in China. You see - he delivers information they can use immediately, while I just make demands. So they start looking for mails with perhaps 2 or 3 serios attached, and ignore the ones with 50. The ones with big sums attached to them are now clearly mails I think they need to act on immediately, while the ones with small sums attached are fun and useful. And so even my little exploit is broken.

One of the exciting uses of the Attent system is that users have a new and extremely efficient way to give feedback to their correspondents. For example, if an e-mail recipient thinks that a new product idea sent with 50 Serios is valuable, they can reply with 60 Serios – a net reward of 10 Serios. On the other hand, if the e-mail recipient believes that a product idea sent with 50 Serios is not valuable, they can rely something less than 50, including zero Serios.

While this is a lovely thought, it assumes a lot about the rationality of human beings. It's the assembly-line taken to organisations all over again, assuming a system where all think alike, prioritize alike, and respond alike. If there's one thing organisation theory has taught us since the 50ies, it's that individually perceived importance and personal interest does not equal the best interest of the organisation.

The real problem with the broken exclamation mark on emails isn't that there is an exclamation mark instead of 500 serios connected to it. The real problem is that there is no common unit for measuring individual interest. What the serios may be good for are however to measure how co-workers feel about messages. As Seriosity goes on to say in their white paper:

In this group, outspoken members frequently clash with each other, while the ideas of other members get lost in the mix. As a result, the group is often unable to reach a consensus due to squabbling among members. When an idea is picked by the group, it is often due to the strength of an individual’s voice, rather than the appeal of the idea itself. In this environment, the talent of the group is wasted because all ideas are not heard equally. This creates hostility among team members, and slows innovation. In the competitive high-tech industry, this lack of innovation leads to product stagnation, ultimately resulting in falling sales.

Has currency ever given the world a solution to this problem? When money gets into this mix, it flows to those strongest voices, the person with more connections than talent, and it most certainly causes hostility. It creates a new, inventive way to silence the unwanted, disruptive voice: Don't respond with any serios! Soon the one with the really new and different idea will be as broke as the frustrated middle manager, and have no budget to draw on for Chinese serios-farmers.

Yes, Serios looks like a fun game I'd love to play with my friends and colleagues. I'd be more than happy to attach it to emails among folks I know will not abuse or exploit the system. The problem is: inside a flat, happy and friendly structure, you don't need that kind of a managing system, as people will respect each other's time and only write IMPORTANT in the headline when it is important. In a system with cut-throat competition, it will be broken 30 seconds after implementation.

So, I actually prefer to assume that whoever made this website and got Edward Castronova to play along, was not serious. As a joke, this is hilarious!

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Castronova has responded to people's reactions to the proposition of serios, in two posts on Terra Nova. There is also a link to a post which describes the same email that set me giggling. Apparently it wasn't a joke.

Spring term in Volda

I have just finished planning the spring term (only one day after the students should have arrived), and I am quite delighted with the course I am responsible for this year - INF213, or, in plainer talk: the final semester of the bachelor in public information. Aside from combining some of my main interests in the teaching process: the net, the users and the communication that reaches the public, I get to have two really interesting guest lecturers. And this year I am really indulging, I have invited two friends of mine: Pattie Belle Hastings, who will be here in January, and Luca Rossi, who arrives in April.

In between this I will hopefully have time to produce a couple of articles - I have some half-chewed material that deserves to be finished, and one article I have promised to write for an anthology, which is worrying me. I haven't been able to write a single sentence in the chaos that was my "Christmas vacation" (I swear: "vacation" will from now on mean going abroad, or I will call it "work camp"), and while I feel like I am about to explode with the thoughts on the topic, I don't have time to actually let that explosion happen until the 19th. That is such a frustrating feeling: I know what I want to do and have to do, but work gets in the way of work.

On the up side: The book (yes, there is only one book so far - except all the other books of course, but I didn't write those) is finally really finished, and sent off to the printer. Expect it in March!

About research blogging

This autumn there was a slight stir in the Norwegian blog arena, as the forskning.no, the web site associated with the Norwegian Research Council, started a blogg with invited guest bloggers. Jill criticised the style and approach, while I said "yes please, and can I bring some friends?" when I was approached and asked if I wanted to blog for them.

It's the "bring some friends" part I am the most happy about, and it's also starting to spread on the blog. At first we (Ragnhild Trondstad, Kristine Jørgensen and me) were the only ones who blogged under a common name - spillforskerne, "the game researchers." Now there are more groups popping up, such as the sports researchers and the welfare researchers.

At the beginning, the blogs were an odd mix of too long and too heavy articles which could just as well have been printed in a journal, and too light articles which looked like "sex-in-the-city-goes-to-university." Now, a few months into the project, most of the bloggers have learned. Today's blogger is a typical and very good example. He's the dean of the medical faculty in Trondheim, but just before Christmas he slipped on the ice, fell, and broke 4 ribs. This leads to reflection on his field - medicine. A personal experience combines with his expertise to a process of contemplation and reflection which leads to sharing with others.

While this is not exactly blogging about ongoing research, it definitely communicates research. He links to other people's research, he puts it into a larger context, and he personalises it through sharing his thought process. By doing this he also describes how integrated research and reflection is in the life of researchers. He opens up to the process. Instead of spending his time dwelling on his considerable pain, he searches for a distraction through his job. Most researchers recognize this feeling. It's why we work until we get repetitive stress injuries, until we burn out, or until we are numbed with pains from the neck to the butt.

Also, he answers the question "when do you get time to work?" We get time to work all the time. Most of the researchers who publish regularly, who search for new projects and are active in their fields display a deep and abiding interest in the field, and can work while having a conversation with their children, going for a walk, or reconvalescing after accidents.

Of course, this means that we never really get to work. When you have the job pulling at you constantly, you're also constantly interrupted. The child does not want to listen to your lecture, your partner needs to talk about his own things while walking, the painkillers takes away your ability to really focus. Not to mention the distractions during the work hours. Students, lectures, meetings, colleagues, phones, assessments, reviews, deadlines, budgets, equipment - where are the ivory towers when we need one?

All of this is very nicely displayed on forskning.no. The system used for blogging is still not the best, and the approval process is comparably slow. But it has a good balance between the personal and the professional, it presents the people behind the research, and it's the most popular page on an already quite popular website.