jill/txt

Hey, a post from my blog is used as the example in the DK Handbook, a visual guide for English composition that looks like those visual guides to StarWars or pregnancy or whatever but deals with grammar and how to reference sources.

Why, though, have they put two different dates in the citation, and neither date is the date of the post? I’m guessing that the first date is wrong by mistake (5 May because of confusion about European dates - the month was 5 but they put that as the date as well?), and that the second date should have had an “Accessed” before it?

I’m thinking the correct citation would be

Rettberg, Jill Walker. “The Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Blogs Differently to U.S. politicians.” jill/txt. 22 May 2007. Accessed 27 May 2007. < http://jilltxt.net/?p=2026>.

Anyway, I’m enjoying being the example. Thanks to William Wend for noticing!

Discovering Janet Murray is now on Twitter I also discovered this very clever interactive video ad she linked to. At first it looks like a pretty simplistic choose-your-own-adventure style thing, but then the guy in the hat complains at your choice and reaches out of the video frame to grab some whiteout from the ad next to it to edit my choice. I hadn’t even noticed the ad until he did that, but that certainly got my attention. Have you seen other examples of videos on YouTube spilling out of their frame?

This is a lovely example of a fictional character crossing between diegetic levels, or jumping out of the story world. Not only does he talk directly to the viewer, rather than staying “unaware” of the fact that he’s a fictional character in a fictional world, he even reaches out of the box his video is jammed into. Beautiful. Makes me want to return to my PhD project about second person address and the relationship between readers and characters in interactive art and narrative.

I’m reading old documents to prepare a first sketch of a paper I’m writing on early (pre-2000) electronic literature communities. I was intrigued to find Jakob Nielsen’s trip report from the very first ACM Hypertext conference held in 1987.

By now, the real difference between Nelson and most other hypertext proponents is that he still argues for the universal hypertext which is to contain all literature in the world with interlinked references. To do this, he has invented an addressing scheme called tumblers which has the potential to give an unique address to every byte in all documents in the world. Of course such an open, universal hypertext system should expect to accumulate 100 Mbytes of info every hour and this may seem unrealistic at the present moment. But Nelson reminded us that it had also seemed unrealistic to have several 100 millions of telephones all over the world, all able to call each other.

Nielsen’s focus is on technical and not unsurprisingly, usability aspects of hypertext, but he also has a summary of the discussions about hypertext in the humanities, and a short mention of Jay Bolter and Michael Joyce’s presentation of Storyspace, the hypertext authoring tool that became the primary tool for hypertext fiction until the web. (Read the full paper in the ACM digital library: Hypertext and Creative Writing)

Another talk on the use of hypertext in the humanities was by Jay Bolter from the University of North Carolina on the Storyspace system. It is implemented on the Macintosh and is intended as a vehicle for creative writing of interactive fiction. Interactive fiction has existed for some time in the form of adventure games, even the simples of which can be viewed as a hypertext structure as the computer presents a different text as the result of reader/player action. Other movements have also tried to break down the traditional structure of text, e.g. the DADAists.

Mind you, Stuart Moulthrop talks about how he and his friends and collaborators stressed that hypertext is not a game, and that they distanced themselves from interactive fiction in those early days. That all changed in the 90s.

I’m going be delving deeper into early hypertext fiction history for a paper I’m writing for the ELMCIP project. We’re researching how creative communities develop, using the communities of electronic literature as our main object of study. At this point, I think that the early community revolved largely around the technology, and in particular around Storyspace. With the web, that community was somewhat dispersed as technology opened up and many alternative ways of writing, disseminating and accessing electronic literature appeared. Stuart Moulthrop’s trip report from Hypertext 1996 gives some idea of the dual excitement and suspicion with which hypertext veterans viewed the web.

One of my students in DIKULT110: Kommunikasjon i sosiale medier is taking the course as part of her BA in French, and so needs to find French language sources and to write in French herself. Kristine Lowe (@kristinelowe) connected me to the wonderful Héloïse Brière (@LOeez), who gave me lots of good starters for anyone looking for the French hubs of social media. I thought I’d share them here - I’m sure I’m not the only Anglo who’s interested!

• http://owni.fr is “a brilliant website about new trends in the media industry”. This site was also recommended to me by @nicolaskb
• Emilie Ogez’ blogs a lot about social media, and is “well-known in Paris”
• There are interesting things at Webdeux.info
• These are some interesting French social media people on Twitter: @FredCavazza, @eogez, @owni

And I must say, Héloïse herself writes interesting tweets. I also heard from @NicolasLoubet who tweets about social media in French and English.

Openbook is a website that lets you search public status messages on Facebook. Try searching for “hate my boss” or “playing hooky” for interesting results. Or, as Twitter posts keep mentioning today, search for “mosk” to see how many people who hate muslims don’t know how to spell mosque.

I tried to send someone a message on Facebook including a link to Openbook, and was surprised when I couldn’t.

Then I tried to post a link to Openbook to my profile. Nope.

Of course I let Facebook know that I think this is an error. Because come ON - censoring a website so obviously critical of them? Not impressive.

Tomorrow we’re welcoming our new MA students - but I can’t be there since tomorrow’s one of my much coveted stay-at-home-with-the-baby days. So I recorded a very brief video about what kinds of topics I can supervise. It could no doubt be much better in terms of content (not to mention that I could have done with professional make-up and lighting, right?) but then again, there’s much to be said for simply doing something fast rather than putting it off forever because you want it to be perfect. Here it is. In Norwegian.

Scott and I are sharing the rest of our parental leave, and we’re each working two and a half days a week until March next year. This is brilliant and sometimes difficult. It’s hard to work 50% in a job that isn’t built for fixed hours but for people who love saying yes to new projects. But I absolutely love having a few hours of adult time to work on things that I love. It makes my time with the little ones (and my teenager!) even more precious.

This semester’s projects are my intensive course on communication in social media (DIKULT110: Kommunikasjon i sosiale medier), which I’m really excited about. It’s taught in just a week’s worth of classes (next week!), followed by four weeks of students working independently, with some online followup, and then we’ll meet in groups to discuss student projects, which will be graded and the course thus completed a week later. I’ve started up a blog for the course, which I’m busily populating with content that I plan to use as the basis for the lectures. I’m also rather enjoying writing little case studies of uses of social media in Norway. I think they’ll be really useful for me in the future, and hopefully for other people as well. So far you can read about Nextgentel’s use of Twitter, Alveslottet’s use of Facebook and blogs, and Astrid Valen-Utvik’s moving from being an avid blogger, weaving stories through posts, and becoming a social media consultant. There’s much more on its way, and I plan to continue posting this little snippets of examples throughout the next month or so.

You can still sign up for the course: in fact, you can even show up on Monday, August 31 and sign up that afternoon if you like the course - the deadline is September 1. If you don’t want to take the exam, or aren’t matriculated at the University of Bergen, you can follow lectures, which are all open to the public.

Other projects I’m involved in this autumn are:

• ELMCIP - a large European project looking at electronic literature in Europe. Currently we’re busily planning the first seminar organised by the conference, which will be held here in Bergen September 21-22. It’s on Electronic Literature Communities.
• I’m on the jury of Fritt Ord’s blogging awards. Fritt ord is a Norwegian organisation that promotes freedom of speech, and they’re giving 2.5 million kroner to blogs. The application deadline is September 15, and I’m excited to see what kinds of applications we receive.
• I’m involved in an interesting project application that I can’t really talk about yet. Very hard for a blogger.
• In November, I’m going to Sydney, where I’ve been invited to keynote the shifted media stream of the Journalism Education Association of Australia conference. We’ll stay in Australia until after Christmas. Hooray!

Hopefully I’ll get some research and writing done as well, but realistically, working 50%, there’s not going to be a lot of time.

A new mobile phone service for kids, Bipper, has just been released in Norway, and one of the features, the possibility of localising your kid, is raising some debate. According to Bipper’s founder Silje Vallestad, this is only an extra feature that you can turn off, but it still raises important questions.

After reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother I went in search of more ways in which kids today are under surveillance. Schools are major culprits. My daughter was horrified when I told her the many ways in which teachers can see what she’s up to through It’s Learning, the LMS that all kids in Bergen use. This video about the use of technology in a US school is chilling in the normality of the assitant principal showing the reporter how he can see each student’s screen, and how the webcam is often on. This year, a Philadelphia high school accused a student of having drugs - in his bedroom - based on webcam images snapped in his home on his school-issued laptop. And yes, even in Norway, schools run outrageous spyware on student laptops.

I already wrote about this on the blog (and posted a comment to the Origo discussion of Blipper) but it’s such an important issue. And seriously, isn’t this constant surveillance in contravention of the UN Convention on the Rights of Children?

13. The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.

16. No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.

Or has our society changed so much since the convention was written that we now think surveillance is just fine?

As one of the very few official blog researchers in Norway I get a lot of phone calls and emails from journalists. Often this is how I find out what the big issue of the moment is in blogging, or at least what the mainstream media thinks is the big issue of the moment. Today two different journalists called about a Norwegian woman who’s blogging her battle against cancer.

Image by Adrian Boliston. (CC)

Disease blogging is one of the classic blog genres (though I’ve not actually heard it called that - is there a name for the genre?). Kaycee Nicole, a teenager with cancer, was one of the most well-known early bloggers - although of course she turned out to be a hoax or a fiction. (Goodness, the Wikipedia page about her is very brief - there’s a bit about it in my PhD thesis (pdf) if you want more.)

The reason Mirakela’s cancer blog appeals to journalists today in particular is that her boyfriend has started a support group on Facebook to collect money for alternative treatment for her tumour that for some reason she’ll have to pay for herself, even in Norway, and despite that alternative treatment having worked better than the state-funded chemotherapy that didn’t work last time she had a brain tumour. The group has already collected 20,000 kroner.

So the journalists obviously want to know how many people blog about their diseases and whether this is a phenonemon that is gaining popularity and how effective blogs are in raising money for diseases. The media likes numbers. Instead I tell them about the narrative qualities of a cancer blog.

Narrative blogs work well when they fit into a familiar narrative scheme, an archetypal narrative if you like. As in most narratives, blogs work well when there’s a clear protagonist (the blogger) trying to achieve a goal. The goal can be many things:

• to lose weight (diet blogs, which Diane Greco once wrote about)
• to reach level 80 in World of Warcraft
• to have a baby (infertility blogs like “A Little Pregnant” - though she’s had her baby now)
• to get a PhD (I wrote that blog for a while!)
• to get a girlfriend (The Date Project)

These goal-oriented blogs work well for the reader because we know how the plotline works, and yet we can enjoy the cumulative suspense of seeing how things go, day by day, in real time. Will the blogger achieve her goal? They work well for the blogger because the act of writing helps to keep you focused on your goal. It’s a way of coping. And there is satisfaction in seeing your life as part of a greater narrative.

The most serious goal of all is to stay alive. No wonder blogs telling of the fight against cancer engage us.

Anthony McCosker has written an interesting article about these blogs, “Blogging Illness: Recovering in Public”. He sees these blogs as emphasising the shifting boundaries between private and public that blogs in general challenge. Blogs about illness are doubly interesting because being sick in itself is an abdication of privacy. Your most intimate boundaries are crossed when you’re in hospital. Strangers examine your body, discuss it with students, stick foreign objects into you, palpate you, inject you with chemicals, remove organs or tumours. Privacy is a luxury that the very ill to a great extent lose. But there is a taboo against talking about this. We’re often too squeamish to even mention the word “cancer” around a friend who is battling it.

So in some ways, blogging about your illness is to take back control over your body and your life by owning it, by expressing it yourself, on your terms. That’s certainly what the pioneering researcher of online communities (the social media of the 1980s and 1990s) Howard Rheingold is doing with his blog “Howard’s Butt”, where he writes about his rectal cancer. (He has a dedicated twitter stream too: @rheingoldsbutt. And here’s his explanation of why he’s blogging about his cancer.) Another person in the same situation might have turned inwards instead, finding it easier to manage their battle in private, away from public view.

Are there other ways of thinking about this that I should consider?

This is my first week back at work after a half year’s maternity leave, and I’m lucky to be able to attend a few sessions of the Education and Technology summer research school that’s being organised by my colleagues in Digital Culture here at the University of Bergen. I’ll only be working a 16 hour work week for the next eight months, which I think will be a fantastic transition from full time at home to full time at work. This does mean I’m missing a lot of the presentations and discussions, but at least I’m here this morning for Myriam Coco’s keynote on Action Research (”a way of generating knowledge about a social system while, at the same time, trying to change it” (Lewin)). I’ve brushed against action research many times, but it’s useful to have an overview of it neatly presented.

The summer school is a collaboration between the University of Bergen, Rzeszow University of Technology, Technische Universität in Dresden and the University of Strasbourg, and this is the third time it has been held. Twenty or so PhD students gather with about a dozen professors for two intense weeks of presentations, discussions and extra-curricular activities (this afternoon they’re visiting the leprosy museum. That’s right - you didn’t know it was a Bergener found the cure to leprosy!?).

While I haven’t had the chance to fully immerse myself in the seminar, I’m loving that intense feeling of learning and discovery that exudes from the coffee room! That feeling was what got me hooked on academia - meeting people equally fascinated by the topics your engaged in, learning so many new things, discussions, coffee, late nights.

Academia at 16 hours a week with two tiny ones at home is a little different. But luckily I can still get a lot of that fix in bits and pieces online.

The Colony is a TV series about a very serious pandemic that devastates our civilisation. As a teaser, Discovery Channel has set up a “personal simulation” using your Facebook data to show you how such an outbreak would affect “those closest to you”.

Of course I had to try; I love new ways of telling stories. But despite Discovery Channel’s dire warnings that if I found the simulation too realistic, I could always escape by closing my browser window, it didn’t really work all that well. Better for a giggle than a scare, really.

The problem is that my friends’ names, photos and locations really isn’t enough information. The main issue is tone of voice. All the status updates and comments are written in pretty much the same style. Quite apart from the fact that my friends write in different languages, they all have different ways of writing on Facebook. My husband Scott would never post an update like this one, for instance!

OMG indeed.

The next problem is that people have to give you too much back story in their status updates. Here, a friend suggests a way of charging a car battery using red wine. Of course she has to explain why this is necessary (mind you, they have power to use the internet so why not to use a starter cable?) - but most Facebook status updates don’t explain backstory to this extent.

Which also makes me think that a more authentic-seeming narrative would include more offhand jibes. Would EVERY UPDATE really be about the pandemic?

The simulation does use locations fairly well. “Kate Pullinger” talks about shops being empty in London - and this is a fairly realistic use of Facebook, too - people connect across different locations and like to share information about their local situation.

The simulation is divided into two pages. One simulates your Facebook news feed during the outbreak of the pandemic, and one shows a later stage, when a lot of people are dead already and society has pretty much collapsed. The tone of voice may not vary much from one character to another, but it does change a little from the first to the second period of time. And actually, the seriousness of the second section makes the glitches in voice less odd. This seems reasonably convincing to me - these people might actually have said those things. (Hadia Tajik is a Norwegian politician, by the way, not a friend, which makes this even more effective, in a way):

The characters also post more convincing messages with less backstory. Presumably this is because the action already happened: now they’re just showing us a scenario we’re really quite familiar with from science fiction movies and dystopias:

And yes, they do realise that it’s a bit of a stretch that Facebook is still up and running - I like this little meta-reflection:

In this case the tone of voice works coincidentally quite well - the real Kate Pullinger may well have written such a comment.

You might ask how “authentic” you’d really want a Facebook “personal simulation” narrative to be. It’s fiction, after all. But if it wants to work as a narrative, you don’t really want it to make you laugh instead of be chilled. On the other hand, it’s marketing - and actually, people are more likely to share things that make them laugh. So perhaps a severely flawed narrative is exactly right for the purpose.

I spied this somewhat different map of Bergen pasted up by Lille Lungegårdsvann. I’m not sure what all the icons mean, but I like it.

I tried out Foursquare as we were showing Rod around North Hordaland a couple of days ago. Foursquare is a location-aware social network and game - you use your GPS-enabled phone to “check in” at interesting places, you can leave tips about interesting stuff to do for other people to see, and you can collect points and earn badges by checking in at particular places. Although every tenth Norwegian apparently now has an iPhone, there aren’t too many Foursquare users, it seems. I was the first person to tag Bergen Public Library, for instance. And we drove along the coast an hour or two out of Bergen with nary a tag in site - until we got to Mongstad Oil Refinery, which had a mayor and everything. (As an aside, there’s a great photo op at the parking lot between the industrial park and the actual refinery at Mongstad - awesome postindustrial views there. Someone should shoot their wedding photos there.) I tagged Håkon the Good’s burial mound, the coastal heath museum and a good restaurant we found tucked away by the waterside - but I would have LOVED to see other peoples’ finds as we drove around exploring.

Anyway, I poked around a bit to see what there is for Chicago, since we go there pretty often. Turns out ExploreChicago has set up a whole game on Foursquare where you can earn specific badges in Foursquare by checking in at specified locations. Here’s their Foursquare profile. I’m thinking of going for the hotdog badge.

Sadly, I won’t be using Foursquare when I visit Chicago, because of exorbitant data roaming prices. Unless some of those hotdog restaurants have wifi, I suppose.

I would love for the Norwegian tourist board to launch a Foursquare campaign (or several!) - but those data roaming prices mean that foreign visitors simply wouldn’t want to use it. However, Norwegians would - and if digi.no is right that every tenth Norwegian has an iPhone, there’d surely be a market for it.

I gave a talk on social media this morning for Vestnorsk personalforum, an organisation for Human Resources professionals. Although I’ve not blogged much since Benjamin was born (he’s three months old and giggles!) I’ve been reading and thinking and I really enjoyed putting some new slides together. I tried to record my voice during the presentation to make a “slidecast”, but the synchronisation of audio and slides isn’t working right now and my voice is missing so many gestures that I probably should have rerecorded the whole thing specifically for a web audience. Maybe next time.

Right after me, Anders Øvre-Johnsen spoke about Adecco Norway’s ambitious uses of social media. Anders is the manager of Adecco Norway, and is clearly very savvy about social media. Their most obvious success so far was a social media campaign for a freshly developed iPhone app they made (a job search app since they’re a temp agency) - they made a simple YouTube video of the manager demoing the app and got 100 employees to talk about the app in their various social networks - Facebook, Twitter, blogs and so on. The push worked brilliantly, and the app was in the top 25 downloaded apps in Norway for a few weeks - not a bad achievement at all. Interesting, they were able to compare this success to a more traditional ad campaign during the winter olympics. In this campaign, no social media was leveraged but they ran traditional and extremely expensive full page newspaper ads - and for a lot more money, they got far fewer downloads of their app.

Here’s my slides and audio. Next time I’m definitely going to start more forcefully - there’s some shocking umming and ahing at the beginning there, but it gets steadier after a minute or two. I’m actually not quite sure that I like audio with the slides - what do you think?

A YouTube Bibliography - “documents scholarly articles and books that are substantially about YouTube and online video.” I asked our University Library to buy the books on this list, and our friendly research librarian answered “of course”! I love our library.