Unfashionable enjoyment

Over the years I have become so jaded: New games are just new games, new software is just new software, and computers are just computers. I join my many colleagues in finding the flaws, the problems, the negative side, the aspects that keeps us all from getting all overjoyed and enthusiastic about what the internet has in store for us. Leaving Facebook and taking breaks from being online is oh-so-fashionable, and we speak about the joys of being disconnected.

This is when I have to admit it. The Internet, the World Wide Web, Web 2.0 and social media have made my life more fun, more connected, and so much easier. Aside from the long, long list of tools for a researcher, and the research opportunities for a communication researcher, I enjoy it, plain and simple.

I think the moment when I realised that I do was when I met an old friend in Tampere, and he said: "you know, it's not popular to admit it, but seeing updates on Facebook makes me feel I know what goes on in your life, and that we're connected." It's true. It does make me feel more connected. No, it's not a big help when I need somebody to carry a cabinet from the street to the apartment, and another one back down (that will happen soonish, so if you're a friend in Copenhagen, and have a relatively healthy back, stay tuned, I'll alert you when I have managed to find THE cabinet.), but it is a great way to know abit about where my friends are and what they are up to.

One old friend was in Spain for a long time, now it looks like she has moved back to Norway. Interesting. A girl I spent a large part of my childhood and youth very connected to now lives in Sweden. I never knew! An old student keeps everybody updated about her life, which means I get to see where a fairly large group of old students hang out and what they are up to. Also, very interesting. A colleague was suddenly very quiet for weeks, nothing showing on her Facebook feed. What was up? Oh, look, she swapped workplaces! Really interesting!

Facebook (and other social media) feeds are mundane, but it's the mundanity that makes life. After all, life is what goes on while we wait for something to happen. So it's in those little bitty updates it really goes on, and that's why I am no longer too cool to admit it: I love social media. Thank you, all my online friends, for every picture of cute cats and cuter kids, article read, concert heard, restaurant checked into. It's life that goes on right in front of our eyes, and I don't care that it's edited to make you look good. I love you anyway, so I want to see the good parts you want to share. And I'll hold your virtual hand over the hard patches, if I can help. That, and birthdays, is what social media are for.

"Dit barn bliver riktig dyktig til at slå ihjel"

This is my response to a blogpost by the Danish Ph D, medical doctor and author Vibeke Mannich. In her recent blogpost Dit barn bliver rigtig dygtig til at slå ihjel!  she attacks computer games violently, based on her reading of a list of articles by Craig Anderson et. al. If you have followed this blog for a while, you know that I have repeatedly cited other studies which question and disprove this research and meta-research, at most levels from methodology to knowledge about games in general to the funding.

Anyway: Vibeke Mannich was surprised at the vehement reactions to her blogpost, a post where she blamed World of Warcraft for the terror shooting at Utøya, and warned parents that their children will grow up to be just like the killer. Her blogpost was offensive to me as a Norwegian citizen who has been following the case against the Utøya-killer day to day, as a researcher who has spent the last 16 years studying games and gamers, as a gamer who has played that "horrible" game World of Wacraft for years, and as a mother of children (now adults) who have also played the game and not killed anybody yet. (Instead they are working to save the world from climate change, and care for children with social and physical problems.) She has also written another blogpost about how offensive the responses she received to the original gamer blogpost were, which is why I post my response here. She is moderating her comments heavily, and I am not convinced that my post will make the cut. So, here goes:

Update: Vibeke Mannich responded to my comments, particularly when I pointed out the criticism of Craig Anderson, and how the research and meta-research had been criticised and to a large degree disproved.  That's when I realised that I have been trolled. From her response:

Jeg må så sige, at det er tankevækkende som du beskriver Craig Anderson og hvordan han er blevet mistænkeliggjort og dæmoniseret. Jeg oplever jo i virkeligheden det samme – måske trods alt i mindre målstok. Men at jeg dæmoniseres i uhyggelig grad og udsættes for ja regelret chikane.

Translation: "I have to say, it's throught provoking how you describe Craig Anderson and how he has been drawn in doubt (made suspicious - direct translation) and demonified. I am experiencing the same - maybe to a lesser degree. But I am demonified in a terrifying degree, and am a victim of straight out harassment."

With a response like that to being made aware of criticism (he has published in peer-reviewed journals - well, who hasn't?) there's nothing more to be done. All I can do is tick her blog off on the list of online weirdos, which in itself is a learning experience. It's been a while since I was properly trolled.***

Kjære Vibeke

Jeg ser at den kjente og uhyre omstridte amerikanske forskeren Craig Anderson er en sentral kilde til din forståelse av computerspill. Da er det kanskje nyttig for deg å vite at hans forskning er sterkt kritisert både av psykologer, pedagoger og rene computerspillforskere. Hans forskning har vært forsøkt brukt som basis for å forby en rekke spill i USA, men det ble stoppet i høyesterett i California med begrunnelsen om at forskningen ikke er bred, grundig og uhildet (unbiased).
Se denne beskrivelsen av en artikkel fra 2009 av Christopher Ferguson, som kritiserer nettopp den type forskning på computerspill som du siterer over: http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/01/21/researcher-no-link-between-violent-games-amp-school-shootings. Jeg kan også foreslå at du leser forskningen til denne svenske forskergruppen, som leverer en meget kunnskapsrik analyse om hvordan vold blir oppfattet og behandlet av spillere av spill som nettopp World of Warcraft.

Breivik-saken: Når du bruker Anders Behring Breivik som et eksempel på hvordan computerspill gjør en person farlig, så er jeg også nesten nødt til å spørre om du har fulgt med på rettsaken? De sakkyndige uttalelsene sendes direkte på norsk fjernsyn, og NRK er ofte en del av danske fjernsynspakker, så jeg går ut fra at du har hatt anledning til å studere dette? Dersom du har fått med deg hva debatten handler om, så er computerspill en forsvinnende liten del av det hele. Spillenes betydning for hans handlinger har blitt tonet kraftig ned. Tvert imot er det mye som tyder på at han har fått sine meninger og holdninger fra blogger på nettet, hvor mennesker som mener de er spesialister på et felt har uttalt seg skarpt, autoritært og ensidig uten å lese mer enn et par bøker som støtter deres egne meninger, samtidig som de stempler alle som er uenige med dem som hjernevaskede og kunnskapsløse. Noe som er litt ironisk i denne sammenhengen.
For å gå videre med forskningsartikler rundt massemordere og computerspill, så har det vært gjort forskning direkte på dette. En av de som har skrevet en rapport om skoleskyttere [og] risikofaktor er Mary Ellen O’Toole (pdf)

Det stedet hvor hun nevner computerspill er i denne passagen: “The student spends inordinate amounts of time playing video games with violent themes,and seems more interested in the violent images than in the game itself.”

Som du vil se når du leser rapporten er det ikke spillingen i seg selv som er problemet, det er interessen for vold. Forskning rundt vold viser at barn og unge som har lært fra sine omgivelser (venner og familie) at vold er en god løsning på deres problemer bruker alle ressurser de har på å bli dyktigere til denne form for problemløsning. Disse bruker blant annet bøker, filmer, musikk, kurs, skytterklubber, militæret, politi- eller vektertrening og ja, også computerspill, til å finne inspirasjon og idéer om hvordan de skal bli dyktigere til å bruke vold. De er imidlertid allerede voldelige, den ofte brede og varierte mediebruken er bare en måte å bli dyktigere til noe de har bestemt seg for å gjøre.

Så til et av dine egne utsagn fra debatten om dataspill: “Tak for jeres kommentarer – desværre må jeg jo sige, at en del af jeres ganske aggressive indlæg desværre bekræfter hvad jeg skriver i min tråd – nemlig at voldelige videospil gør (nogen af) jer voldelige/aggressive.”

Til dette vil jeg svare med en uhyre underholdende leder fra dn.se: Fiktivt våld gör forskare aggressiva. 

Når du publiserer et så skarpt utsagn som er så sårende og svakt begrunnet i erfaring og i forskning som “Dit barn bliver rigtig dygtig til at slå ihjel! ” og kobler tusener (millioner) av hyggelige, vennlige, kunnskapsrike unge mennesker til et så brutalt tilfelle som Anders Behring Breivik, da er det dessverre ikke helt uventet at du gjør mennesker opprørte. Kanskje ikke alle er så høflige som de burde være, men deres reaksjon er forståelig.

Med vennlig hilsen
Torill

Still Going Wrong

The main benefit of living in Copenhagen over Volda is the easy access to theatre, ballet, opera and whatnot. I know that sounds as if I am constantly off to some performance, while the truth is that most nights are spent falling asleep before I manage to finish the episode of CSI.

I do however get to see some of what is on, and last night I went with the husband, a sister and a friend of the family to a truly funny dance/performance/theatre "thing" which challenged the idea of "wrong". Still going wrong is performed by an ensemble of five dancing for just short of an hour in a very intimate stage. It explores "wrong" and turns odd, erroneous and ugly into a performance of surprising impact and humour. The dancers wear pink socks that lets them slide around the stage, they sweat through the casual wear they dance in, they bump into each other, look shy and akward, and run into the walls - just like your average distracted and introvert scholar.

I was unprepared for the experience, I just knew it would be pretty alternative compared to the classical ballet at the scene next door. Dansehallerne is  a center for dance built in the old soda factory of the brewing giant Carlsberg, and caters to a wide varity of dance styles with dancers and choreographers both Danish and international.

Unrepared was not a problem, though. Instead of coming out feeling elated after seeing a superb performance of exquisite style, Still going wrong had me coming out laughing and ready to explore the environment. After watching the dancers battle shyness, errors and akwardness, getting up on the playful installations waiting in the yard and jumping and moving in silly poses felt right and permitted. It was a performance more about the delight in flawed humanity than about the genius of perfection, and as such it spoke to us about what we could do ourselves.

Riding the bikes back home in a pack like serious bad-boy bikers (three women and one man, all between 50 and 64, crazy folks indeed) was the perfect way to end the evening, seeing Copenhagen in the sunset, soft warm light fading into fat drops of rain.

Summer!: Life in Copenhagen #9

(This was written 2nd of June and got stuck in the process.)

It's been almost two years. I have learned to ride my bike like a dane, which includes using the bell when the tourists wander into the bicycle lanes, to not worry if I haven't shopped for three days before a long week-end, and to call to talk to people in public offices, such as for instance the dreaded "skat", the tax department.

My language is changing, I am deliberately letting it slip into a more archaic form (to Norwegians archaic = Danish), and I am trying to decide which words may make it the easier for my students to understand me come fall. Some never will think I speak comprehensively, I know that, but I keep trying. I am practicing, in my head, to use "i" and "jer" rather than "dere" (which covers both in Norwegian), and "at" rather than "å". I have already given up words like "må" and "svært" due to its different emphasis in Norwegian and Danish, but I am keeping "enkelt". That one, my darling TAs assure me, is very easy to understand. It's "nemt", as they say. Hopefully, step by step, I will be able to lecture in a language a bit closer to Danish.

Until then, I take comfort in the fact that several of my students are willing to tell me, face to face, that they love the lectures. My Danish friends say Danes are introverts, reserved and uncomfortable with giving praise. I don't see that. My colleagues are warm, joyful, funny, and my students are interesting, challenging, polite, graceful and, surprisingly and extremely welcome, quite willing to thank me directly for the semester. I get that over and over again: "Thank you, for this term. It was a great class." Sometimes, even "it was the best class, the best class ever." I cherish that. It makes every exhausting lecture worth it, it even excuses what I do to my mother tongue.

But life is good outside of work too. The heat the last week has turned Copenhagen back to the city I fell in love with when I moved here. I wear sandals all the time, and have packed away most of the winter clothing. (OK, before I posted this, the weather turned COLD). I change into a T-shirt and work-out capris at home and just throw a thin top over for decency as I ride the bike to the Pilates work-outs. The ladies at Pilates cph deserve a mention. Perhaps even their own blogpost, soon. I started with Pilates years ago, but at home, from DVDs and books. It still helped, and as long as I managed to work out, my back gave me less problems. Then I found a teacher, for a day or two a week, in Ørsta. I loved it, but my schedule and hers made it less than efficient. Here, there are classes 6 days a week, all year, and I can schedule time online. This means, for instance, that even if I am travelling to Norway or Finland more than every second week since the beginning of April until the end of June, with a conference here in Denmark, I manage to get in two sometimes three work-outs a week. I have a long way to go to control a perfect "teaser", but I can get up into it, and hold it long enough to roll back down somewhat controlled, if I don't have to stay up there, showing off.

You might think I'd be more physically active in a place like Volda, where there isn't much else to do but hiking and living healthy. The truth is: I have had less pain since we moved to Copenhagen than I have had any other winter since 1985. And now it's warm, too, my muscles feel like butter, and I enjoy moving about, something I have rarely liked. Are there no problems? Oh yes, last week I was at a conference in Roskilde. Despite the effort, I never managed to get on the right train to get there on time. Partly it was me, not being sufficiently prepared - but how can I prepare for sudden 20-30 minute delays of the trains, and the chaos that is Nørreport station? The sudden heat caused the shoes that I had worn to work without incident just a week earlier to rub my feet raw, and the conference was on a topic I didn't know, leaving me to feel alienated and odd, like a giant dancing bear among all those tiny, serious women studying culture. After three days of heat, trains, Danish lunches and uncomfortable lecture-rooms I was physically wrecked.

Before that I had, for some reason, had 50 000,- dkk of "benefits" added to my income by the tax department. I was totally unable to track down where that had come in, as the electronic tax form didn't tell me. Hence, see the first paragraph. Mastering conversations on the phone with tax officials is vital. Also, the pollution worries me. I ride my bike to work and home through a cloud of exhaust, every day. I take some comfort in the fact that most of the time, I also ride up against a strong wind coming off the sea. I try not to think of what it carries with it from Germany, Poland and the other countries to the east and north.

And I miss the mountains. That plan I had: To sell Rotsethornet to Denmark, so we could have a bit more light? I still think it's a brilliant idea, but from the other side. Imagine how impressive it would have looked in Amager fælled? And imagine the opportunities it would have offered: just the resistance from the climb, the sensation of getting somewhere, getting up - yes, I miss it. But I'll go to the summer house this summer, live by the fjord, climb the mountains, curse the rain. I'll hurt, be cold and exhausted, and long for this little apartment right here, in the city.

Piracy and academic publishing

We all need to publish. It's part of the job description: The knowledge we, the scholars, are gathering, needs to be distributed. We do quite a bit of that through teaching, but it's not enough. Society not just expects us to publish, it demands it.

This demand is institutionalised through several different structures. The different roads to degrees, jobs, titles and opportunities are all paved with journal articles, the stepping stones are monographies and the embellishments all come in edited anthologies. The Universities are rewarded by the publishing of their scholars, and so they reward us, and the publications are used for public relations and for media attention, which again covers another part of our job: that responsibility to participate in the public debate. Research and learning is ok, but we have to demonstrate that we have done so.

There are of course rules to publishing. This blog doesn't give me any points. I have had (and still have) great pleasure from it. It has brought me in touch with some incredible people over the years, and in a few cases have been immediately useful. But it circumvents the structures that puts value to academic publishing. It's not peer-reviewed, it has no editor, no isbn-number and no rejection rate. It is, in short, not an academic journal. Academic journals is where it all happens, where publishing becomes elitist and important, and, for everybody but the scholars, where the money is. Some of them get paid both coming and going: Universities pay to have the articles of their scholars published, and then they pay to display the same journals (and articles) in the libraries, physical and digital. For a small university the price of journals is through the roof: there's no way we can afford it all.

And so we end up pirating.

When I am in a library with full access, I download like crazy. You can spot the experienced scholars in a big research library or inside a flush university network by the suddenly intense look of a treasure hunter about to download two or three or five years of journal volumes, and on the backchannel of conferences there will be a quiet whisper among friends about who grabs what, while we're still connected. Now, this is a pretty legitimate "piracy" - after all, we are supposed to exchange knowledge. The piracy university libraries targets is the stealing of journals by stealing student emails and passwords, and then grabbing volumes of journals for resale. Considering how extremely expensive it can be to buy one article - Jstore often asks for 25$ or more for 10-12 pages - this quickly becomes very profitable.

I am mostly a law-abiding person, and I couldn't hack Jstor even if I really tried, but I do get a little bit annoyed with the practice of making us pay both coming and going. As it is, scholars and their universities handle all the costs of the initial production. We are talking about years of work in many cases, and decades of education and study. The scholars write the material up, often presenting it at a few conferences on the way, to get feedback. This means it's already been through one or two peer-review processes before a version reaches a journal. This means at least 5 people have been directly involved in creating and editing the materials, before it's even sent to the journal.

Scholarly journal editors often work for free, and the peer-reviewers certainly do. We read and give feedback because we know we are in a loop of favours returned. I read for you, you read for me, and in the end we all get peer-reviewed. The double-blind process stops the most immediate exchange of favours, but there are still levels at which we are mutually dependent. Anyway, the journal itself does more or less decent copy-editing (often lacking, something that skews academic publishing heavily in favour of native English speakers), some design, some legal work as to registering the materials with the relevant libraries or central archives, printing and online publishing, and a minimal amount of advertising. And the sales, of course, where the largest revenues come from libraries, libraries at the universities where the same scholars who wrote the articles have to buy their own material back.

In other discussions about piracy, content producers point to the poor creative souls who try to make a living by writing their souls out, only to be ripped off by the pirates. In academia, pirates just can't steal anything more from us. We already pay, often twice, for content we have produced and the universities and research institutions have financed. And yes, we get something back, but not from the publishers. Hence, I don't hesitate to mail an article to a colleague or a student. I dip into the stored secrets of my hard-disk, and hand articles out, mine and others.

I do feel guilty though, in a looking-over-my-shoulder kind of way, but not because I think I am doing something bad. More in a slightly paranoid fashion, as if I expect Big Brother to look over my shoulder, not in the reality show version, but the Orwellian Science Fiction of 1984.

And now, back to downloading articles.

Transformed Play

Tomorrow the conference The Transformative Museum starts up in Roskilde, and I will be there together with two colleagues from ITU, Bjarki Valtysson and Nanna Holdgaard. Their contributions can be found, among many other objects, at the conference paper site. Go read them, they have put a lot more effort into their work than I have managed to make time for this spring. My presence there started out of a desire to look at and write about everyday culture, under the working title "Mundane and digital" at the ITU, and I have been cooperating with Bjarki and Nanna, as well as Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup. The paper for this conference is an attempt to catch still half-formed ideas, and it shows. Still, it feels like a useful direction to go, if I want to combine my very varied fields, those of strategic communication, social media and role-play games. And here it is, for those with special interests: limited time only, the latest edition of Transformed Play, written for The Transformative Museum, Roskilde 2012.

Larps can change the world!

Because it's too beautiful an interview to pass on, for a game-researcher: Heikki Holmås, Norwegian minister of development, talks about his past as a larp fan and practitioner, about his roles and about how playing role-play games can lead to epiphanies of understanding within safe environments.

CFP: Play Experience workshop

This popped up in my mail, hope somebody out there still have time to plan a contribution.

***Invitation to Contribute***

March 27th, 2012 is the final Submission Deadline Extension for the FDG 2012 - Play Experience Workshop, to be held in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA on May 29 2012

This workshop will bring together researchers interested in GUR (Games User Research), including game evaluation, player experience, game-user research, game telemetry, think aloud, observed behavior, heuristics, metrics, and psycho-physiological measurements. The main goals of the workshop and the expected outcomes are to bring the community together and discuss the methods and applications of the methods involved with Games User Research on the design process.

We invite participants to submit position, empirical and theory abstracts on the use of qualitative and quantitative methods for the evaluation of digital games, and the design of interfaces that can better account for the player experience while interacting with them.

In particular, we seek submissions focused on the following topics (but are certainly not limited to):
·       Lessons learned from working with play experience – in the broadest sense
·       Theory and models for measuring play experience
·       The correlation between various play experience measures
·       User models developed based on existing games user research methods
·       The possibility of fielding different measures in the practical context of academic research and industrial game development
·       The application of play experience models in game AI and game design
·       Data analysis techniques that are best suited to process GUR data for creating optimal player experience

Workshop Schedule:
- industry keynote speakers
- overview of game user research methods from Game User Research SIG at GDC 2012
- summary from workshop on Game User Research from CHI 2012
- participants presentations
- group formation and work
- results presentation

Submission Information
We ask interested participants to submit a one page abstract. Submissions must be in either PDF or DOC format, and comply with the official ACM proceedings format using one of the templates provided at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. In addition, we ask that each abstract is accompanied by a brief biography or alternatively a 30-60 second presentation video. Biographies and presentation videos will be displayed on the workshop website (http://hcigames.businessandit.uoit.ca/gurfdg2012/).
All submissions should be done through the easy chair website at: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gurfdg2012

Journalism and precision - again

Yesterday I was interviewed by DR ,Danmark Radio, about Bitterfissen Bethany, the blogger I wrote about yesterday. The article that showed up at DR's page was however not exactly what I thought I had responded in the interview. That teaches me to insist on seeing the material before it's published.

Anyway.

DR has picked only the things I said which fit with the journalist's opinions. According to him I consider her real identity to be a disappointment, while I really felt it would be a disappointment to some, to discover that they were being offended by your ordinary housewife. After all, not everybody are in a position to really offend, and an assistant in an office shouldn't really be in a position to take on well-known media personalities. Still, she did.

Further on, I apparently think it's a bad thing to write anonymously, until you're in danger of your life. That is something I distinctly remember to have modified, when the journalist tried that on, by saying that people criticising an otherwise open society may also need to be anonymised. Of course, modifications look less impressive, but keeping that is on your editing, dear journalist, not on me.

Also in the same interview, I pointed out that the main reason why this blogger got so much attention is because she attacked the media, and the media love to write about themselves. She used the media's self-absorption to hit them hard and play around with them, until she had written her book and could use them again, to get free PR for the publication. For some reason that, which I consider to be a vital part of this whole event, was not mentioned by the media. They only mention that through quoting her (in character and rather wicked) address to the media, where she jokes about how she has been playing them. The truth is: she has played the Danish media. By being focused on their own "front", the journalists chasing her have played into her game.

Yes, I think her not being somebody famous has disappointed a lot of people. It didn't disappoint me though. I am still giggling and saving links, for future study, while I take note that journalists still listen with their agendas more than their ears.

Bitterness and anonymity

Last year I started to get phone calls from journalists about Bitterfissen Bethany, "the bitter cunt Bethany", a blogger who spoke where others would call the doctor and ask if they had some help for Tourettes syndrome.

Bethany was suddenly in the media spotlight after she had attacked the established media blogger Anne Sophia Hermansen. And her attacks didn't hold anything back, the language was about as delicate as the Danish delight of hyperbole and direct attacks could make it, as she spewed (when she didn't piss or shit, according to herself) abuse over the targets that would get her attention. Since she was anonymous (surprisingly, there is no Bethany, the bitter cunt in the phone book,) speculations ran high about who she was. I did my best to help that along, by telling the journalists they couldn't know who she was, she might be a man, or a grandmother, or a journalist with a grudge - we had nothing but speculations and guesswork. There were rewards offered for the person who could find her name, and a few potential lawsuits waiting, for when she would come clean.

That happened today, in MetroExpressen. It was immediately picked up by the Danish media, here an example from Danish Radio. So who was she, what happened, and why did she do this?

Bitterfissen Bethany is in the flesh Jeanett Veronica Hindberg, a single mother from Farum. Farum is somewhere north of Copenhagen, and I really don't know enough about it to tell you if this has any kind of significance for Danes. She is an office assistant, 39 years old. She doesn't have four children nor a farm, and she doesn't drink constantly. She also doesn't repent her actions, and she didn't come forwards until she had written a book. Now that the book is ready and can be bought, here she is.

Clever, isn't she?

I have very few opinions about this, exept that touch of glee I feel when an amateur takes the professional journalists for a ride. I suspect a few things are important here though. First, she wasnt seen until she attacked a media personality. Then she discovered, or rather uncovered, how the media really works. The most interesting thing in the world for the media is the media. So do something that puts a journalist on the defensive, and suddenly you have the whole Danish media world snapping at your heels. Jeanett (Bethany) did exactly that, and she enjoyed the trip! She was safe behind her pseudonym, while she also was (in)famous. It must have been a powerful feeling.

Now Jeanett has a shot at fame in her own name. I was never impressed by the blog, and I am not buying the book, but I suspect others will. I wish her all the best, although I suspect we're not looking at the new A. K. Rawlins here, single mother or not. Ironically, most of that fame probably comes from anonymity. As long as she was a mystery, there was a certain sense of danger and exploration, literally anybody could be behind this blog. Now it's just Jeanett.

 And to Jeanett: get used to being talked about within a feminist agenda. You may think you don't belong there, but you have done a very 70ies thing, by taking control over your inner bad girl to let her out, demanding room in the media and online. Any moment now you'll find yourself with a mirror in hand, admiring your own pussy and considering why society could ever think that such a nice little (I am guessing) shaved fold of skin should determine your right to be harsh and aggressive.

Copenhagen #8: Extreme traffic

Not everything is perfect in bicycle-land, and there have been a lot of complaints through 2011 and into 2012 about cyclists breaking traffic regulations. The police has had several campaigns in order to catch illegal cycling, and since 2012 the fines are doubled, something the police celebrated with giving out more fines.

I am still trying to learn the distinctions. In Norway a bicyclist either drives as if we're in a car, or on the sidewalk. Both are permitted, and driving on the sidewalk is recommended in heavily trafficked areas. You can imagine how well that works... But this means that I tend to take short-cuts when it gets me our of dangerous situations. There is, for instance, this one sidewalk on the way to work. There's no way I can cross the street right there, and it's perhaps 30 meters to the traffic light, where I can cross safely. So I roll slowly over a small bridge on the sidewalk, or get off the bike and walk if there are people there. In the heavy morning traffic I choose the safest, least trafficked route - which leads me to this little traffic transgression. And while I roll there, riddled by guilt, I see again and again examples of the Danish driver's interpretation of traffic-lights.

Traffic lights are supposedly very clear. It's green for go, yellow for wait, and red for stop. Yellow is for the transition between full speed and stop, for when you can't break without endangering traffic. Right? Yep, that's what I thought.

Now, if you are a bicyclist in Copenhagen, please realise that while you'll be fined by the police if you cross on yellow to red, Copenhagen yellow-light interpretations will kill you. Here's the Copenhagen car-drivers guide to stoplights.

While driving
Green: Go as hard and fast as you can.
Yellow: Keep going.
It's been yellow for a little while: Speed up, you can still make it across on the yellow light.
Red: It's only been red for 2 seconds, so it's still yellow.
Red for more than two seconds: Stop, preferably in the middle of the bike-path or the foot crossing.

While standing still
Red: It will be yellow any second, so I'd better keep prepared.
Red and yellow: Time to inch forwards.
Red and yellow if you are behind another car: Prepare to honk your horn.
Green: If you are behind a car pausing for some reason, honk.
Green: Full speed!

Now, if you combine this with the bicyclists reluctance to stop - if you stop you'll have to push off and get back on the bike, so you don't want that - what you get in Copenhagen are situations that makes me wonder why I haven't seen any serious accidents yet. On this one place on the path to work, the lights are synchronised. This means that if you keep a steady tempo, you'll reach the next light just as it turns green. However, if you're a little quicker than the mainstream biker, you reach the next light as it's still yellow and red! So, we have the Danish car-drivers' reluctance to stop until it's been red for a while, combined with the quickest bikers reluctance to stop or even pause on their way to work, sending cyclists at full speed in front of cars jumping lights.

I tell you,  I get all the adrenaline thrills I need regularly from riding my bike to work. Add the police's habit of driving like they are all in a second-rate cop-movie that relies on the car chases to make money, this city keeps the inhabitants' pulse up.

In defense of Copenhagen drivers: They take the most gentle and considerate right turns of all drivers I have seen. Normally turning  right is the easiest thing to do in right-side traffic. But when there's a lane of bikers just to the right of you, turning right becomes a hazard, and you need to make certain all bikers have passed before turning. I have to give it to the local drivers: They wait patiently. This is totally at odds with the regular stop-light behaviour, but a life-saviour. Of course, Danish television regularly sends a really scary reminder for both bikers and drivers about the danger of turning right without carefully checking the blind zone. I had nightmares about that infomercial the first months I lived here, and have now developed a healthy survivor habit of making certain the cars waiting to turn right see me before I cross.

In general, I have developed a habit of being a lot more alert as a biker than I used to. It's not just the cars, it's the other bikers and making sure I don't pass another biker just as somebody were about to pass me, guessing how the pedestrians will move, and seeing from the ripple of movement through the people waiting at a bus-stop whether the bus is approaching. Bicyclists are supposed to yield for people getting on or getting off the bus, so I need to know if I am about to be overtaken by one. Years ago, a friend compared driving on a six-lane highway with playing a computer game. Now I am playing that game, only it's a lot more complex. I have to understand and deal with so many more factors in traffic, different speeds, different rules for different participants, and the sudden moments when the behaviour changes - it's Extreme Traffic; Copenhagen Rules. The game is on.

Quiet time to do research

Denmark, like most countries, has an ongoing debate about how Universities are to get as much as possible out of the Universities. Due to very good economic support for students, many young people try to ride out the crisis by taking an education. That is not the worst way to go, and I am all for offering education as an alternative to unemployment.

However: the Universities expected to deliver this education get very little extra funding for it, no new positions and also a change of policy which rewards externally funded research, and takes teaching for granted (link in Danish, it's about the demand for more teaching in the Universities.) Now, professors are not stupid (if we were, that would indeed be a sad state of affairs), even if they sometimes are idealistic. And so, when the government says: get more research funding - well, we get more research funding, putting researchers on the case, while finding ways to keep the teaching rolling at the side.

This leads to teaching which is not research based, because all the professors are busy doing research for external funding, just like the government ordered! In order to fix this, the government insists that students need to have more classes, and these classes have to be with the professors who actually do research: research based teaching.

I am very much in favour of this, so I have no problems with the demand for more research based teaching. It's the one benefit Universities have over private research organisations: I get to meet students. Over the years, students have challenged me, pushed me and rewarded me in ways no other part of my job does. But they challenge me into doing research. Without research, which gives me something new and interesting to share and each, facing the students become a repetitive chore.

At the same time, research appears to be viewed as a time of "quiet", of "peace". "We need to give the staff quiet, calm times to do research," professor Sune Auken from the blog Forskningsfrihed says. The error in this is how it puts teaching, apparently a stressful, draining chore, up against research, a calm, peaceful, contemplative activity. In my experience, this is wrong. Of course, included in research is long hours of reading, days of checking for literature, months of analysing data, sometimes years of organising and writing up theories and findings. It may look peaceful. Still, if you're doing research worth the paper it's printed on, it's stressful, tense, fraught with doubt and built on meticulous, tedious fact-checking and proofing, in all possible ways.

Research isn't a time of calm or quiet, it's a time of immersion, introspection and tension, put up against a time of activity, communication and attention to others. In universities these two positions do not oppose each other, they play together and rejuvenate each other. The teacher needs long stretches of time protected from teaching in order to immerse herself into research. The researchers needs to come out of the immersion and communicate, be challenged and be pushed, in order to have something new to bring into her time of immersion.

Of these activities, teaching is the one that it is possible to hire others for though. Entry-level teaching can easily be done by somewhat more advanced teachers, that's not where researchers really have to engage. And so in order to meet the demands for research, universities look at the teaching hours, and move the researchers from the least demanding classes - which also happen to be the most populated. It's a matter of trying to work more efficient - as the government constantly insist the Universities should do. This way some students will get research-based teaching. Hiring non-teaching researchers to do the research while the professors teach means NO students will get research based teaching, as their professors will always be teaching, and never researching.

In order to create a good policy of teaching and research, the government needs to remember that it's the same people who have to do both. It's impossible to drain the university brains into externally funded research, and expect the same heads to have time to teach. And it's impossible to demand research based teaching, and not give the teachers time and opportunity to do research. There are only two answers to this: Fewer students, or more professors. Barring some groups in different organisations - there are always some groups that have more slack than they really ought to have, I have no idea where, but they exist, it's the law of organisations - that is the only way the government can have both more teaching for each student, and more research for each professor. I am sorry. There are no easy ways to split the professorial heads, and neither research based teaching, research itself happens without effort.

Wedding traditions in transition

What is a Norwegian wedding tradition? Currently, the idea of the "traditional wedding" is dominated by a mixture of American traditions gleaned from movies and "Bridezilla" programs, where we learn how they do things elsewhere. It's about white brides, bridal music of a certain kind, and church weddings where brides battle to the death to get the church they always wanted. But is this the traditional Norwegian wedding?

First: about half the weddings in Norway 2008-2010 were in a church, the other half was elsewhere. I am not counting the part abroad, as it's not registered whether those were church- weddings or not. So, if tradition is defined by what people do, church weddings are no longer the one, true way.

Next: white weddings. The white wedding dress was not common until between the first and second world war in the US, and was still not all that common until 1940-50 in Norway. Before that wedding dresses were all colours, with both red and black as much-used colours. If we are to look at the more recent traditions, as in four - five years old, like the weddings above, people get married in just about everything, and the strongly coloured national costumes are quite common, even in churches. Considering that only half the weddings happen in churches, where white seems to be the strongest tradition, and several of the church weddings see the bride in national costumes, I think there's a good chance that white isn't the most common (i. e. traditional) bride colour any more.

Third: Why did I write this at all? There is this beautiful article about two young women who are quite unhappy that they won't have their dream wedding, since they are early adaptors to a new law. The Norwegian church has not yet written a liturgy to include same-sex weddings, and so a church wedding will not be legally binding. They will have to marry twice if they want both a church wedding and a legally binding ceremony. While that is sad for two girls with conventional dreams, it is traditional for non-conventional weddings. Back when divorce was unheard of, only previously unmarried people or widows/widowers could marry in the church. Unless you were a king and changed the church in your country, of course. When divorce lost the taint of scandal, priests would still refuse to marry people who had been married before, and refuse them access to the church. In 1991, one of my relatives could not have a priest in her wedding in Norway, since she had been married before. This was quite common treatment of heterosexual divorcees.

What I am trying to say is, the traditional wedding for Norwegian couples that do not adhere to the norm of heterosexual, Christian, first-time marriage is an untraditional wedding. It's a wedding where the couples mix family traditions, local traditions, traditions from film and television, examples from royal weddings, made-up traditions and their own ideas about a good wedding.

So you go, girls, making your own interpretation of traditions. I suspect that is the most traditional tradition of all wedding traditions: To pick something here and something there, adjust, change and renew until you have a ceremony and party that fits with what you want. In that manner, you're traditional early adaptors. Thank you for sharing it with us. You are beautiful and brave.

Lego blondes

Almost two months ago, I wrote a blogpost about LEGO, and how the Friends series is problematic for a woman who is conscious about the gendering of toys. Since then the topic has made quite a splash in Denmark, and the Danish minister of - hmm - likestilling, what's the good English word for that? Minister of Equality? Anyway, Manu Sareen had to withdraw his criticism of LEGO Friends, because it became too problematic for the party. The argument used against his criticism was a classic rhetoric strategy to make criticism go away, as described by Benoit in his theory of image restoration. The public, very likely fueled by political opponents and the fact that LEGO is pretty much a holy cow in Denmark, told Manu Sareen that he had much more important questions to worry about.

I, however, am not elected to much, and I can disagree without losing any votes. That's why I went out and bought two little LEGO figures. I bought one regular one, that I put together from different bits, with very good help from the nice people working in the LEGO store in Copenhagen, the other part of a set of Friends LEGO. (I could buy a set with a girl baking and working as a waitress, or a set with a girl lounging at the pool. Yep. That's what girls can fantasize about when they play with girl-segment LEGO.)

I have claimed that the Friends LEGO figures don't fit with the others, but I have been a little uncomfortable with the claim, because I hadn't really studied them well enough to be absolutely certain. But let's look below:

 First, the Friends figure is taller. She will not fit into the cars, planes and many wondrous creations in the regular Lego series.

 Next, she can't actually sit in the brick cars, fit on the horses, or stick in the pilot seat of the planes. She is designed to not fit in with those objects.

She can stand on the brick sets, so building a city, for instance, she can stand on the street or in the houses.

She can't fit into the helmet, even if we remove her hair.

It belongs to the story that I had to costum build my space girl. I tried to buy the lovely little pink space-suited figure on display in the store, but it belongs to a special set that is no longer produced.

So what is going on here?

1: It's 2012. Do I really have to point out that the LEGO Friends character is slimmer and has budding boobs, while the old-fashioned one is a genderless brick figure? With the increased sexualisation of childhood, this is one more object cementing a feminine ideal of slim, tall women. Slim tall women who can't do what the small, squat, genderless figures can. The LEGO men have all the powerful options.

2: The structure of LEGO makes it impossible to use the Friends figures in as many ways as the regular ones. The version created for girls has, in game-structure language, less affordances and more restrictions. This is a game-changer, literally, as it means the girl toys offer a different game from the boy toys.

3: LEGO wants to make twice as much money off the consumers. I can understand that. Childhood is a big money machine in the western countries, and we already wade in LEGO. They have to do something if sales are to be increased. So by making certain that the figures don't match, parents of children of two genders have to buy both series if they want to offer equal opportunity building bricks to their kids.

Yes, there are other important topics out there for the Danish minister Manu Sareen to pay attention to. I am not certain if they are more important than the commercialisation and gendering of the childhood.

Feeling stupid lately?

I keep getting all these questions, as if people expect me to have been drinking from the fountain of knowledge, or eating the apples of wisdom as a regular diet. Of course, the University tap-water does come directly from mimisbrunnr, but what that has made me good at isn't giving answers, but asking questions. That is what Deep Thought and most scholars and researchers have in common, and it is why feeling stupid isn't always such a curse.

(Of course, being stupid is a curse, but those who are stupid mostly feel like they know everything, so the curse is on the rest of the world.)

Anything for money...

Some days ago, I was in a meeting where the group discussed how to attract the right type of applicants for a research project. I had pointed out that they might need to rethink their call, if they wanted new partners, because not everybody would be willing to cooperate or interested in the call the way it was presented. The response was "researchers will do anything for money."

At the moment, I responded snappy and snarky, as I sometimes can, with enough humour that there was laughter. I didn't stop thinking about it though. Do we do it all for money?

My paycheck, to start there, indicates that of the group at the meeting, I am the least motivated by money. They all out-earn me, some of them several times. Then to the things I do for them and for others. I am a pretty cheap lecturer, and a very easy partner for discussions. I travel large distances to contribute, sometimes without decent funding even for the costs. When that same group needed to make the initial plan for the research call, I sat aside a day, for free, to speak to their staff and assist them. If I had asked them for help, 1000 kr an hour would have been charity.

I respond at length to journalists, I give lectures at schools and organisations at a symbolic pay, I respond to public hearings and I publish for nothing but the chance to have my work aknowledged. While I do get a salary, I don't even get all my books and computers covered, the tools I need in order to do the work I am hired to do.

I, like most others in the same position, put in a huge amount of effort at unpaid work, reviewing for journals and conferences, and a huge amount of underpaid work, such as assessing exams and applicants for various positions - luckily some of the last work is occasionally paid fairly. That is not the rule, though. And all of this adds up to work-days which are illegal according to Norwegian law. If I registered all the work I do my employer could get in trouble for taking advantage of the work-force.

Yes, sometimes money motivates me. Like right now, while we are two people on one salary, I would really like to be paid for some of that extra work. But when I apply for research funding, it's not the money that motivates me, it's the project.

What I am willing to work 50-70 hour weeks for is the research itself. For this I am willing to write applications and argue for funding. I will patiently and politely listen to employers who insult my professional integrity, and then spread the money I get out of it so thin that it looks fake, in order to make it really, really last.

Next time people claim I (a researcher) do anything for money, I'll ask what they get paid. What motivates them, you think?

When teaching works

One of the things about being a teacher is that it's pretty hard to know when teaching works. I tend to believe that the reason things work out is because I have such brilliant students. I am a pretty privileged teacher, I have a lot of brilliant students, they participate, they share, the listen and they learn. It's a wonderful place to be in.

Sometimes, however, I get this sneaking suspicion that I have influenced them. And I am not talking about the many, many students traumatised to the point of never being able to squeeze another ketchup bottle after advertising lectures with graphic images. No, you see, sometimes I do something with my teaching because I want students to get better at one particular skill, and they get better at it!

I have just come out of a marathon of paper grading, the curse of every professor. When the students go on vacation, we hole up with supplies, good reading light and a red pen, and get to it. This is a strange and exhausting process, as it demands intense focus for hour after hour. Luckily the students I grade these days submit computer written papers - when I also have to decode handwriting, this is headsplittingly hard. Anyway.

Going into a long period of grading is like zoning into a very special slice of life. It's just you, the reading list, the course list, the demands to the papers, and this large stack in front of you. It's easy to feel disconnected from reality and worry that you're being too nice or too harsh, or believe you are hallucinating. Sometimes we are. Grading large stacks takes endurance and practice to do well - at the end of day two, the words blur and you turn pages with only a vague idea of what is on them. Again and again you go back, read over, check the notes, worry you may have been in that empty trance state too long, and can't get it all back, but you have to press forwards to the end of the stack.

Then you call the other assessor. You communicate - carefully - your idea about how the grades are this year. Surprisingly often you and the other assessor agree! This is always a miraculous moment. There is something measurable, and you have both sensed and measured it in a manner that is at least comparable!

This year I got this sneaking feeling early; that this was a generally good stack. (Now, if you are a student, no, I am not giving you your grade until all the formalities are in place, and then you have to call the administration. The papers are in the mail between me, the censor and the student administration. Wait for it.) Not that they were all brilliant, some were brilliant, some bad, some failed. It's how it is. But they were on average much better than I have been used to! I thought this was odd, because it's been a rough semester. I had to bring in several external leturers (thanks folks, you did really good by my students!) and rely on the TAs a lot (and they were amazingly reliable). So I started to pay attention, to try to figure out what had happened.

One thing stood out: They papers were organised! They had a strong and clear structure, they had developed the research questions, they had all elements we ask for from a paper, and they used literature well and correctly. I almost wanted to cry. I have been drilling this into student heads all autumn, repeating the structure of a paper, the reference systems, the reason for both and the logic of scholarly argumentation. I have linked reference systems and written outlines, and then repeated it all one-on-one for those who came for supervision. I worried I had overdone it.

If I overdid it, at least the message got through. Even the weak papers were structured. In several cases this saved them from a total crash and burn, as the adherence to structure helped discipline the progress. And this I know is different from the terms before. This one thing was drilled more, and more systematically. The teaching made a difference.

So, now I have that working for me. Tomorrow I'll be at the library, considering what else I need to spend time on. I am thinking of how to tighten up the reading list and the progress of lectures, and couple it better with the exercizes. I can't promise that it will work as well, but I can guarantee that I will try.

Remember the milk 2

One of the things that my new to-do software does, is ask how much time I need to spend on the tasks I schedule. I try to put in realistic estimates. Until March 21st I already have work planned and booked estimated to take 53,12 working days. This is before teaching, planning, administration and meetings. All of this will take between 18 and 22 working days.  In this period there are 51 working days. Perhaps this is why I feel like I never get things done?

In a recent study of the time-use of faculty at universities and colleges in Norway, it turned out that 8 out of 10 of the active researchers who are also teaching, use their spare time for research. The day simply does not have enough hours to cover the three tasks: administration, teaching and research - sadly often emphasized in that order.

Over the next weeks I will have to use a lot of non-paid hours in order to cover all I have to do, if I want to teach well, maintain a network, publish and participate actively to the running of the University, and this is nothing special.

Can I still buy Lego?

A picture from an old ad flashed around the internet with viral speed a week or so ago. It's a little red-headed girl, holding out her colourful, glorious Lego creation. The discussions and the issues this brings up has touched me both personally and as a researcher looking at play, games and leisure. Lego has long been the benchmark of free creative toys, dominating the market with their simple and sophisticated idea.

 This was the Lego ideal when I had children, and it's the lego they grew up with and loved. We still have loads of the toys, one of the few things we did not throw out in the move, and now that our daughter has more room, I expect her to take them home. I loved my own Lego pieces, particularly when my father or older sisters would get down on the floor with me to play. There was this sunny spot on the floor which was like made for a long afternoon building odd creations.

When my sister had kids, some 15 years later, we started looking for Lego for them. It wasn't really that easy any more, because it had all become extremely gendered all of a sudden. The different stories that could be told with Legos had taken off, and where my kids could have a kingdom's castle (which was great, female characters make as good knights as the male ones), 10 years later the options were much wider - and almost all for males. Ninjas, Star Wars, Pirates of the Carribean - girls could still play with them, but it was clearly aimed at the tomboy side of girls. If we wanted something neutral, it was getting tricky. For years, we actually stopped buying Lego, because buying the boy-stuff for the girls would have made it seem like a present for the boy. We did not want to encourage the gendering of toys by getting him space-legos and the girls crayons, so it ended up with crayons for everybody. But we kept looking, and once in a while we'd find a nice design, a house, some cars, some animals. We still loved Lego, you know.

The last few weeks have made me seriously reconsider that love. Lego has redesigned their toys - supposedly after four years of research - and created a girly line. I am stunned. Here I was, happily thinking I'd just have to wait out the space-ship and pirate runt of the last few years, and I'd be able to find lovely, gender-neutral Lego again. Instead they go dramatically in the opposite direction, gendering the toys beyond recognition.

Check out more pictures from the new Lego sets at Geekologie and Stylist.co.uk, and have a look for yourself. The figures are no longer compatible with the other lego sets, so if the girls want to create a pink-suited space girl to fit in the rocket and use the same gear as the boys, they can't do it. They can't put them on the horses, they can't work the farms, they can't fit the police uniforms  and they certainly can't fit a hard-top over their styled hair.

Lego, I understand that girls have been telling you they want more stuff for girls. I have been looking for more good stuff for girls myself. But I have not been looking for yet another arena where boys and girls are shown that their interests and activities can never mix. The beauty of Lego was that it could all integrate. If I had wanted to get plastic toys with more realistic figures, different shapes and standards that didn't match the other toys, I'd have bought Playmobil!

Instead I would have liked to see a bakery next to the car-wash or a complex model of a cupcake factory or a dairy - have you ever looked at those? They are the model-train enthusiast's dream come true! Why not let the girls have pink space-suits, purple cars and sturdy female ambulance drivers in the same fit and design as the rest? The Lego universe is potentially as diverse as reality as it is, and yes, a kitchen in bright colours would be cool, but can't it fit in right next to the command bridge on the death star? Even evil villains taking over the universe have to eat, you know.

This all makes me want to go stick my head into SWTOR and never come back out. In there I can be female and look gloriously competent and dangerous, in armour sets that do not bare my boobs, either. Thanks, BioWare. The next toy I buy for a child of any gender may be a digital game.

Torill in translation

I have to admit, I always think I sound much, much better in other languages. The talk at the Tokyo DiGRA 2007 conference a particular example of that. The professional translator had put a lot of effort into the translation, including interviewing me to find out what I wanted to say, and I am sure her version of my talk was a lot more precise than the actual talk! Not to mention when Luca explains what I am saying to his students, Italian is a perfect language for lectures and intellectual discussions.

Now I also look better, as Thiago Falcão has translated one of my articles to Portuguese! The article I wrote for the Journal of gaming and virtual worlds last year was originally twice as long, and sprawling all over the place, topic-wise. So when Thiago saw what I had culled, he wanted an article from it for Fronteiras, an online journal based in Brasil.

I rewrote, and created an article I (in the English version) was actually quite happy with, and so were the Fronteiras editors. Where the Intellect article discusses hedonism and games as an approach to game research and criticism, the Fronteiras article discusses utilitarian hedonism in the view of gamer ethics and morals. If you happen to read both English and Portuguese, you may be able to actually find a connection there - hopefully of the good kind.

Nostalgia, technology and Christmas

It's almost Christmas, and time for nostalgia. Everywhere people try to find or create the most authentic Christmas spirit; scents, lights, colours and decorations as "real" and "original" as possible. Here in the little Danish apartment we have been experimenting with the Danish version of "real", and we think we will make it. Testing the traditional Christmas duck some weeks ago, our neighbours commented it smelled like Christmas. That, to me, was success, even if our guest at the time was not happy about the sauce. It was not like his grandmother makes it...

And so, nostalgia creeps into everything, and reading Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, the chapter on nostalgia, put it firmly on the map. After all, I am now old enough that my memories of the past and the nostalgia surrounding it no longer match.

In Turkle's book youths long for a past when they would write and receive letters, and hold long phone conversations. They romanticise the letters, the sense of personal connection that the hand-written note held. What they know very little about is the treshold for writing and sending a letter. The physical process combined with the cost made letters rare even back then.

I used to be a prolific writer, and had pen-friends around the planet - there were international pen-pal agencies, where youths would be sent a number of addresses to write to. If you did not get a response, you could get a new pen-friend: not getting responses was part of the expectation. Getting a response was rare, the rule was nothing would come out of it. Being an active writer I was an anamoly among my peers, several of my friends who signed up and received addresses and letters never followed through - just like the people we wrote to. Receiving a letter means you have to write a letter: put effort and energy into it. The other person doesn't smoothly integrate into your regular communication habits. Yes, receiving a hand-written letter is an event, and sending it is an act of personalised effort, but this effort wasn't such a common way of staying connected as the nostalgia of youth indicates.

The other aspect of nostalgia in Turkle's book is her own nostalgia for her past, the letters between mother and daughter, with a comparison to what she experiences as depersonalised Skype or IM communication. She describes how mothers dress up and put on make-up before skyping their daughters, staging the communication, and how she misses that deep connection she used to have with her mother, expressed in snail-mail.

Again, I suspect this is a case of wishing for something other than a communication method. I miss my mother, but I do not miss the effort of communicating with her when I moved away to study at the University of Bergen. She rarely wrote letters, and if I wrote her, she'd comment on it in the next phone-call, rather than respond in writing. The calls were few and far-between, and even if I do feel a certain nostalgia about the beautiful phone center in the middle of Bergen, I do not miss the disconnected and guilt-ridden conversations between me and my parents: my father always very to-the-point, giving a short list of events since the last call and asking a few questions, mainly focused on what I wanted with the call, my mother not much more forthcoming.

To me, the skype and chat sessions with my own daughter are both a lot warmer and a lot more naturally integrated in my everyday life. Since we both work at universities where we spend a lot of our time on computers, we are never more than a few keystrokes apart. We lurk in the background of each others' everyday life in a way my parents and older sisters never did. My younger sister, however, shares much of the same qualities of presence in our communication: No painful, duty-ridden phone-calls, but easy messages for private matters and mutual comments on what parts of the daily life we choose to share online.

As for the Skype sessions with my children, they are a delight. It normally happens when both they and we have time, or we want to show each other something. We carry the wireless lap-tops through the rooms, showing each others everything from where the cat sleeps to the new curtains or where our partners work. We just chat and hang out for hours, keeping the connection open while we do other things; we discuss cooking and share experiences, or worry about research issues or health. I would never exchange those easy, personal and close sessions for a letter, no matter how well written. I want to hear and see them laugh, hear the partners banter from the side, have my husband move in and take over when he is too eager, running off with the whole machine to see or show something else. I suspect that when the time comes, I will be nostalgic about these sessions, talking about how much closer we were, how much love we shared through the often delayed images with the horrible feedback from built-in speakers and microphones. It will never be better than the real thing, being with them, face to face, but it's lightyears better than a scheduled half-hour on the phone.

Of course, my experiences and my lack of nostalgia about analogue communication isn't important, it's the young people's sense of being disconnected through technology that is important. But in these days of Christmas, it is however quite amusing to see how extensively nostalgia distorts the past.

One of the most popular pre-Christmas shows on Norwegian television is Jul i Skomakergata - "Christmas on Cobbler Road." It was sent for the first time in 1979, which was the middle of my last year in high-school. Even then it was nostalgic: An old-fashioned cobbler, of which there were very few left, in a peaceful stret where it always snowed and where colourful characters would drop by to have a chat with the cobbler over a cup of coffee or gløgg. Non-alcoholic, of course, since this was Norwegian children's television. Jens Petrus, the main character, would banter with Tøflus, the doll made from a slipper, talking about the importance of sharing with those less fortunate, showing little film clips several of which were about human rights, and in general talk about the important topics for christmas: love and good will towards all men. It's no wonder it's popular, because it is warm, friendly, generous, and the host was one of Norway's best loved actors. It was, however, even in 1979 considered extremely romantic and nostalgic, depicting a time lost forever with values we could only try to aspire to.

Imagine my amazement when I heard a radio-debate about this show in 2011, where adults claimed, straightfaced, that it had been created in a time when things moved slower, when we were less materialistic, when love of our neighbours was more important than it is today. What has happened? Are all who remember the late seventies and eighties braindead? (Actually, considering the popularity of recreational drugs, disco and shoulderpads that's likely.) In Norway, this was the time when people finally had enough money to start buying brand-name clothing. Cobblers were out of fashion, because shoes were made to be used and thrown out, repairing and hand-making was for arts and crafts freaks and really old-fashioned poor people, and the banking crisis due to over-consumption was right around the corner. It was the peak of the waste culture, when "green" was only a colour, and Norway loved America due to the wealth and surplus of the American life-style. And still people manage to claim it was a less materialistic time? If somebody in -79 had tried to give away a goat in Africa for Christmas, they would have been considered cheap and outside of the all-important exchange of material goods, cut off from the chain of reciprocity for ever.

For the record, I still think Jul i Skomakergata is good children's television, and I think NRK should definitely air it once in a while, to delight new viewers and, particularly, their nostalgic parents. It's about the ideal of Christmas. Also, I think young people should write each other and their parents paper letters, take time to call or go visit friends, and hang out face to face.

What I don't want is for people to feel they have missed out because they are alive now, and not then. I think Sherry Turkle should write her daughter and send her physical letters, for her daughter to find and read in 30 years, but remember that even back then, given the technology, not all mothers and daughters would have stayed in touch through Skype or IM. And it's almost easier to get things repaired or recycled today than it was 30 years ago. Go green, and use your local cobbler!

Remember the milk...

Like so many others in these electronic days of endless potential, I have scheduling issues. And like so many others, I have learned how to use wonderful digital tools such as google calendar or all the other electronic calendars available - synchronised over many different platforms. It seems like technology actually can make life easier, as it helps me keep track of the many complex committments of a modern life.

My husband has access to the google calendar. I then match my ITU calendar (which does not synch) to the google calendar when I make changes that influences my work-hours, since my colleagues and the administration use the ITU calendar to plan our mutual schedules. Occasionally, I even update my paper calendars (two, one diary, one overview), when I plan the term and I need some kind of visual idea of the term. Most of the time having google calendar in my pocket - i.e. on the phone - has simplified life immensely, even if it looks like I am double italian accounting - as they would say hereabouts.

It still doesn't meet my scheduling needs. A lot of my time restraints are ongoing, and flexible to a certain point. When I am working on an article, I need perhaps 40 hours of hard work, but I don't have to do those 40 hours from 8.00 - 16.00 on any particular dates, as long as it's done by its deadline. I often juggle several different deadlines, some long, some short, and prepare a series of lectures while writing one or two articles while being in several committees, a board or two, and have several firmly scheduled meetings. We all know what that's like, right?

What this means is that I need to remember the deadlines a long time in advance, just noting the date isn't enough. I also need to prioritize, and I need to sort according to type of task. While some calendars do parts of this - google, for instance - it doesn't tell me how much time I have already scheduled for a certain period, and it doesn't give me an overview of types of tasks. Also, the tasks end up like long, long bars at the top of the calendar, and given the many tasks I have running simultaneously, they end up hiding the calendar itself! I have been playing around with some other views on the google calendar, but while the calendar with its connection to the maps and the incredible locator function that comes with it is great (how many times have I been saved in Copenhagen by that combination?), the truth is - it's a great calendar but a bad to-do list.

That's where "remember the milk" comes in. It is a to-do site/software/app with the combination of many platforms increasingly important today. It integrates with Siri - the new apple wonder-app which is taking over the lives of apple users, and also with gmail through aggregating a to-do list next to the emails.

What "remember the milk" does not do is create a nice visual representation of my time restraints and affordances. It's still a list, even if I can sort these lists in a lot of different manners. Now I have spent the last 20 minutes trying to google a lovely diary/calendar design I saw not too long ago: Two circles - day and night - represented each 24 hours - the visual simplicity and speedy perception of a traditional clock face on paper.  It made me long for a very different solution, and interestingly, the technology is here - almost.

I have recently bought a livescribe pen and notebook, and play around with this almost magical technology. It combines my hand-written notes with my digital storage, adds sound and allows for the fluidity of recall based on my notes for meta-data. Now, combine my desire for a more comprehensive and fluid scheduling system with the combination of hand-written notes and cryptic data, and yes, I want a livescribe notebook calendar/diary with a circular representation of time, that can be synchronised across platforms as easily as I can make a note in the book.

The wonderful thing about new technology is that this fantastic fiction not really that far away. All that's needed is for a brilliant designer to hook up with an innovative programmer, and then somebody who can market it. I guess I'll dream on though.

An endless loop of repetition

Another research meta study was published today, about games and violence. This time it was the Swedish media council that published the study of all articles written on video games and violence 2000 - 2011. They conclusion was, as usual: No, there is no proof of a causal connection between games and violence.

A lot of the research is quite flawed, as it uses dubious methodologies and measures violence by standards that are unconnected to the context. Also, most of them ignore other possible connections. Those who do look at anything except games as causes of violence, find that among the strongest causal connections to violence are family background and psychic health.

There is a slight connection between games and violence in the sense that people with a previous interest in violence tend to pick violent games. The causality is however the opposite of the traditional view: an interest in violence leads to violent games, not the other way around.

It is quite amazing that 10 years of research deliberately aimed at proving that games create violence so far has not been able to create any good, solid evidence. Perhaps it's time to start trusting the research and settle for the fact that games do not create insane killers. Once we have that settled, let's get down to creating good, interesting, engaging games that can enhance creativity in other ways. Imagine if some of those research budgets had been devoted to studying games as an arena for promoting fair play and moral choices? Now, wouldn't that be a novel idea for all those organisations that worry about our children...

Gratinert aubergine

This is a post directed to Norwegian friends and family, a favourite recipe that people ask for frequently. Here we go:

Auberginegrateng:

1 aubergine i skiver.
noe olivenolje (et par skjeer)
2 hvitløksfedd, hakket
ett lite glass hvitvin
en boks hermetiske tomater, hakket
en stor bunt basilikum
2 ts tomatpuré. Hvis du finner puré av soltørkede tomater er dette best. Kjøp et glass til meg også.
150 g ost - mosarella eller en annen norsk, mild ost som smelter fint.
salt og frisk kvernet pepper.

Damp auberginene til de er myke. Varm litt olje i en steikepanne og fres hvitløken ved middels varme. Skru opp varmen, tilsett vinen og kok litt inn. Skru ned varmen igjen og tilsett gomater, basilikum og tomatpuré, kok under lokk til sausen er tykk. Smak til med salt og pepper og hell sausen i en ildfast form (eler vent litt og legg det i lag). Legg aubergineskivene på toppen, pensle dem med litt olje, topp med osten. Bak i ca 30 minutt til osten er gyllen.

And if you wonder what recipe that is, I suspect it's the Italian Melanzane parmigiana.

Public, private, personal, off the record, common

In February there was a flare-up in several debates in Norway, as a professor posted to facebook that she was reading the world's worst exam paper ever. No names, not subject, no quotes, just her opinion, a pretty frustrated response.

Somebody on her "friend" list screenshotted this, and mailed it to a journalist. The journalist then wrote an article about how teachers harass students through facebook. To make the article more provocative, the journalist asked some student politicians, who immediately responded angrily, and the headmaster of the University, who said something about no policy for social media use, and how this was unheard of. The article was also published in Aftenposten.no.

After a flare up of the debate around this, both online and in media such as the Norwegian Broadcasting, Jill Walker wrote a "kronikk", an opinion article to bt.no (the paper in question). She pretty much covers the case in her response, but the entire event makes something very obvious. We need to think in more modes than public and private.

Humans, particularly those of us working as journalists, like dualism. We want it to be warm or cold, dangerous or safe, on or off. A world of ones and zeroes is almost a perfect expression for this human desire for certainty and control that comes with the black/white idea of the world. If you're not with me, you're against me.

Despite this desire for duality, we are pretty good at handling shades of grey in social interaction. We are aware that there are some best friends, then there are some friendly people we know, then there are some people we know who are pretty much not that important to us, but we'll talk to them about casual stuff at the bus or over coffee if we are at the same table, and then there's people we know but dislike to varying degree, and then there are people we just don't know. With all of these people we interact in subtle, complex manners. We deal easily with this because they are all individuals to us, and we interact with them in settings we easily can position in a complex grid.

Then along comes the internet, and we can interact with all of them at the same time, if we want. At first, people didn't get this. Flame wars grew hurtful, stalkers got too much personal information, and lovers discovered their true love was a fantasy. This has of course, not passed, but people know how to deal, they understand what is going on, and some times even manage to protect themselves from the problems with different social spaces crashing into each other.

And so, we have the problem with the professor on facebook.

If the journalist had met the professor, asked how the exams papers were, and the professor said "I am reading the worst one ever right now," the journalist would never have printed it. Face it: "professor reads worst paper ever" isn't news.

If the professor had said it, face to face, to everybody from the headmaster of the University to the student who actually wrote it, or even if she was on television and got asked "what are you doing these days?" and she responded "I am reading the worst exam paper ever, right now." it wouldn't be news.

The news rests in the ambivalence of private/public.

In order to get that information, a friend of the professor had to take a screenshot and give it to the journalist. It's like a camera shot of a fashionable wedding where the press is not wanted, it's like peeking past the curtains to see what happens in an other person's party, it's a way to reveal to the public what happens in the private club. The fact that it is possible to exclude some people from seeing that post makes it interesting. It's the constructed duality of public private that makes news. The only news value is the tittilation of the forbidden.

The following discussion is then, really, all about the fact that written communication now has almost spoken qualities. In this discussion participants ignore the many other modes information can be in, because it appears to be printed.. Informal, off the record, personal, casual, all of these shifts between communication modes are totally ignored. And this happens because the written nature of the post turns it into a fact. It is so easy to make some screenshots. However, so is making sound files, and to take a screenshot of a facebook update is like taking a recording device into the lunch-room of the University, catching snippets of conversation, mailing the juicy ones to a journalist.

So, the question now is, in which direction will communication develop? Will it become more obvious that written communication can embody modes other than public or private, or will this binary understanding of communication become so common that we have to look out for recorders, and only be candid and honest when we share a shower with the person we're talking to?

Personally, I hope a wider understanding of different modes of communication. I don't want to have to check all cellphones at the door before I have coffee with friends.

Life in Copenhagen part 7: health and understanding

It's been a while since I wrote, and it's because I have been sick. Being sick in a new place and particularly a new country is scary.

The first signs arrived almost a year ago, when I was all alone in Denmark. Over the months I had some rather unsettling experiences. I noticed a lump where there shouldn't be one (spoiler: no, not cancer and nothing life-threatening), but I carefully ignored it for months. I really didn't want to know. But then I got an infection, fever and pain, and I had to go see a doctor. I ended up on antibiotics, stranded in my one-room apartment for almost two weeks. Part of the time I had fever fantasies, and some of the few experiences I had with contact to the world around me were truly surreal. Such as when the Norwegian culture-minister called, and I wasn't sure if it was a joke, a fever-fantasy, or reality. I asked her to call back after the antibiotics had time to work. She did.

Anyway: what I really want to write about here, is the part of Denmark that Norwegians think exist, but which tends to be absent, or just not seen, when we start living here.

You see, compared to Norwegian, Danish (the language) sounds gentle and warm. Danes appear to be touchy-feely and friendly, seen from the distance Norwegians tend to keep people at. Then we move to Denmark and figure out that no, it's not that simple. As a Norwegian living here, not just shopping in the large stores on Strøget or drinking in Nyhavn, we get ridiculed, cut off, excluded and ignored; due to the language difference. I felt like Denmark really didn't want me, yet another annoying non-dane here to make their lives more complicated. No matter that I am exactly the kind of person the Danish State wants: highly educated specialist in a field Denmark has prioritized for years - Denmark felt as cold as the record winter around me, except from a few friends and colleagues.

So, here I was, alone, feverish and lost, in this realm of Scandinavian distance and cold manners. That's when I suddenly started seeing the Danes as I had believed they would be. It started with the doctor: When she realised that it wasn't just a regular infection, she raced to the phone to find a specialist to see me right away! And she did, all the while doing her best to comfort me without saying anything either way. The specialist was busy, but warm, friendly and just as easygoing and nice as I used to think Danes would be. At the lab for the tests, while insanely busy, people were gentle, polite and smiling. And when I came to see my wonderful hairdresser after this rather shattering day, he looked me over once, and started spoiling me above and beyond what I could have asked for.

Best of all, through all of this, I was suddenly understood! For some reason, me being sick trumphed all language problems. And it continued. When I went to get food in one of the really fashionable take-aways in this area, the normally snotty staff took one look at me and became nice and understanding. When I was well again, this treatment disappeared. Then I went to the hospital for surgery, and suddenly it was right back again! Professional, busy and quick, yes, but also friendly, warm, polite and smiling.

It was a really weird experience. I don't know if it's possible to generalise from this, but I drew some personal conclusions.

1: Danes are as nice as we think, when we (the strangers) become an individual to them.
2: Pain and illness is a strong way of revealing our common humanity, both through empathy and through strength; it also allows others to make your life a little better, and people everywhere like to do a good thing for others.
3: The rest of the time, Danes are as busy and impatient as everybody else. Coming to Copenhagen was like moving to Oslo as a very green student from the west-coast, only worse. Soft wovels and polite phrases do not make people nicer, even if they sound like butter, cream and smiles.

All in all, it was a good experience. I know now that Danes can, when they need to, make that vital effort to connect, and so my own efforts at communication aren't necessary wasted either. Also, the Danish health system may be in crisis due to the state of the world economy, but I hardly think I would have been treated better if I had stayed in between the fjords in Norway. It's the general state of health-care systems to not have enough money, and I was in the somewhat strained, but still firm grasp of a Scandinavian welfare state. It feels familiar. It feels a little like... home?