where is…?
I have so many things I want to blog and can’t find the time to do it. Most disheartening.
Meanwhile, here is one of those charming little poems Google sometimes generates for you when you start typing a search phrase into the browser window.
Now I just have to remember what I was REALLY searching for. Nothing on this list – I think!?
Oh, and just for the sake of research: how personalised is this? I don’t recognise any of it, but maybe it’s somehow connected to my Google + friends and my gmail or something?
Update at 3:44 pm: Solveig tried it in Norwegian, and got
“Hvor er det varmt i februar
Hvor er det varmt i desember
Hvor er det varmt i januar
Hvor er Willy”
Very well suited to Norwegian conditions! So of course I had to try, and was surprised to see that my results were a little different.
Where are you?
Where is my wife lyrics
Where is it warm in February
Where is it warm in January
Where is blåfjell [note: Blåfjell is a fictional mountain in a kids TV series]
Where is there snow
Where is Willy
Where is it warm in November
Where are my trousers [this quotes a kids song]
Where is my appendix
This clearly has not only great potential as an art project, but could actually yield a rather fascinating scholarly paper about cultural differences. You could run this search for dozens of languages, maybe all languages (why not) and run them all through Google Translate (of course) and compare and contrast. What fun.
I wish the second query in the Norwegian poem didn’t include the lyrics. “Where is my wife” is a much more interesting question to be asking Google.
And in fact, it seems my Facebook friends are doing the cross-cultural analysis in the comments to my post there 
Wikipedia and Craigslist (and thousands of other websites) blackout in protest of SOPA
Wikipedia is on strike today, to protest SOPA and other proposed legislation that would censor the Internet in order to attempt to prevent piracy. The ways in which lawmakers (frequently pushed by the movie and music industry) are attempting to cripple the Internet are staggering, as I mentioned on Monday – Douglass Rushkoff even argues that the Internet is ALREADY so encumbered by censorship, surveillance and commercialism that we need to build a new, truly p2p alternative.
The Wikipedia protest is beautifully conceived. One of the most popular websites in the world, and such a hub of information for people who are experts and ignorant of these political issues. This is certainly going to let a lot of people know what’s going on. I loved that when I tried to get to an article I could see the text I wanted, for just a second, before this black screen took over my browser. There is one Wikipedia page still accessible – the page about the SOPA initiative.
Craigslist (the US versions) and Google are also protesting. And thousands of other websites, and people on Twitter and Facebook and everywhere are discussing it.
Google’s not doing a blackout – wouldn’t that be something! But there’s a line of text under the search box today, linking to a very clear and simple page explaining why SOPA and similar legislation would be a bad idea.
The US Craigslist is completely blacked out, with less elegant but more informative text about SOPA than on the Wikipedia site, and a link to “MORE INFO & EASY ACTION ITEMS“. Always a good idea to provide easy ways for people to act.
Americancensorship.org has the best list of actual things you can do I’ve seen so far – including a code snippet you can use to put a censorship band across your website for the day, like the one I’ve installed above. They also suggest non-US citizens write to the US State Department: “The US state department constantly speaks out against internet censorship in other countries. Pressure them to speak out against America’s new domestic censorship system.”
Although this is US legislation, it affects us worldwide, not least because things like this pave the way for Europe and other countries to accept greater censorship online.
visualising my LinkedIn network
I’m not sure how useful this visualisation of my LinkedIn network is. They say I can use it to figure out which areas of my professional network I need to work on. But it’s pretty. And fairly accurate at grouping people. The blue people are all electronic literature or Digital Arts and Culture conference people. The brown ones are mostly other US academics in game studies, digital culture and social media. The pink ones are Digital Culture alumni and the eggplant colored ones at the bottom are all at media at the University of Oslo. The light blue people at the bottom and the green people at the top are all Norwegians who apparently are in two separate groups that never mix.
Tomorrow I’m teaching networks, and I was looking for a video animation of how scale-free networks emerge, based on Barabási and others’ work – the readings for tomorrow are Barabási’s introduction to A Networked Self, where he explains random networks, scale-free networks and power laws, and Granovetter on weak and strong ties. Unfortunately, this is the closest I got to that video animation. I’d better figure out how to explain it on my own!
Program or be Programmed?
A link-filled post from Kristine Lowe (descriptively titled Will we see state-controlled intranets start replacing the Internet in 2012?) led me to Douglass Rushkoff’s argument that we need to create a genuinely peer-to-peer internet to replace the irredeemably state-controlled internet we have today, and from there I discovered his recent book, Program or be Programmed, which sounds like it might be a good one for our students:
I’ve downloaded it to read on my iPad (yes, I know, hardly a showcase of open architecture) and will report back when its read.
And that truly peer-to-peer internet reminds me of the xboxes the teenaged dissidents hooked up in Cory Doctorow’s wonderful Little Brother. Is it possible?
teaching pre-schoolers to create digital media
I heard somewhere that 50% of pre-school kids in Norway have access to smart phones and tablets like iPads at home, and are proficient in using them. But what about the kids who don’t have access? In theory, preschools in Norway are supposed to be teaching our kids “digital competency”, but in practice, most pre-schools don’t have access to the technology, or if they do, the adults have little training in or time for using technology with the kids. A 2009 report found that while all pre-schools in Norway have computers and digital cameras, the children only rarely have access to them and they’re not really used pedagogically.
Myrertoppen barnehage is an example of a pre-school that really does use technology with the kids, and they blog it all so we can read about it. Their ambition is not simply for kids to use technology; they want to teach kids to create with technology – hooray!
Today they posted a GPS map of the kids’ skiing trip yesterday, created by popping an iPhone running Endomondo in one of the kids’ pocket. Lots of zigzags going up and down the hill by the base where they settled down, and a total of 5.32 km skied on a four hour trip – pretty impressive for four and five year olds. They’ve also written about how they encourage kids to create digital stories.
This makes me wonder how we could introduce electronic literature to very young children. Reading it, sure. But creating it as well. Any ideas?
If you have young kids at home, like me (Jessie and Benji are 3 1/2 and nearly 2 years old), you might also like some of the websites recommended by the Book Chook for encouraging young kids to write (or dictate!) stories.
New semester, new courses
This semester just properly started with our program’s orientation meeting today. It’s great to see so many new and familiar faces!
I’m teaching a new to me course this semester: DIKULT251: Critical Perspectives on Technology and Society with Bachelor Thesis, and I’ve just completed the schedule for the semester. There are still some gaps to fill in, though. Luckily, it’s a perfectly-sized seminar class, with around 12-15 students, we’ll be able to adapt our discussions to the students’ interests.
I’m combining general social media theory with digital methods workshops from the Digital Methods Initiative in Amsterdam, and am excited about this practical aspect to the course. More details on that will follow.
I’m sure a lot of ideas from the course will leak into this blog, and vice versa. If you have any ideas or suggestions, let me know!
What would Jenny Holzer’s mother tweet?
I love Jenny Holzer’s truisms, but I think I like @JennyHolzerMom even better!
I’ve decided to drastically lower my threshold for what I think of as blog worthy. Just because I already retweeted one of these tweets doesn’t mean it’s not also useful to put it up on my blog. It might entertain you–and I will almost certainly forget about it if I leave it in the immediate yet forgettable Twitter-verse.
How much substance do you think a blog post needs?
Hva mener du hindrer eller støtter digitalt innhold og digitale tjenester i Norge?
This post is in Norwegian, asking readers to contribute their thoughts on the challenges to digital content and services in Norway on behalf of DIGITutvalget.
DIGITutvalget er nedsatt av Fornyingsdepartementet for å identifisere hindringer og barrierer for vekst i den norske digitaløkonomien, og i dag er jeg på vei til Oslo for å delta i utvalgets fjerde møte. På vei til det første møtet skrev jeg litt om hvem som er med i utvalget og om mandatet,
Mandatet til DIGITutvalget er bredt, og vi er interessert i å høre dine meninger både om hva som er det viktigste i mandatet og om hva du mener er de største hindringene og utfordringene for de som vil skape verdier i den digitale sektoren i Norge. Har du innspill, tar vi gjerne imot dem – ikke som kommentar her eller på Twitter, men først og fremst i dette skjemaet.
conferences and writings providing criticism of social media
I read Mark Andrejevic‘s article on “Social Network Exploitation” yesterday (in Paparcharissi (ed) A Networked Self, Routledge 2011), and its marxist critique of the ways companies might and/or do exploit our use of social media is excellently chilling. I’m going to be teaching this article this semester, and have a half-written blog post on it, so more of that later.
But anyway, inspired by Andrejevic’s article, I poked around a bit and found two interesting conferences this spring:
Critique, Democracy, and Philosophy in 21st Century Information Society: Towards Critical Theories of Social Media is an academic conference to be held in Uppsala near Stockholm on May 2-4. Andrejevic is on the list of speakers, as are many other interesting thinkers, including Christian Fuchs, Trebor Scholz, Ursula Huws, Andrew Feenberg and Charles Ess. I’m not impressed that only two of the listed 14 speakers are women – you’d think balanced representation would be key in a critique of social media, and I certainly hope they improve upon that before the program is final. They do also have an open call for papers, with abstracts due Feb 29. Here’s some of the topic description:
This conference deals with the question of what kind of society and what kind of Internet are desirable, what steps need to be taken for advancing a good Internet in a sustainable information society, how capitalism, power structures and social media are connected, what the main problems, risks, opportunities and challenges are for the current and future development of Internet and society, how struggles are connected to social media, what the role, problems and opportunities of social media, web 2.0, the mobile Internet and the ubiquitous Internet are today and in the future, what current developments of the Internet and society tell us about potential futures, how an alternative Internet can look like, and how a participatory, commons-based Internet and a co-operative, participatory, sustainable information society can be achieved.
Unlike Us 2 is an event to be held in Amsterdam on March 8-10 which is hosted by a “research network of artists, designers, scholars, activists and programmers who work on ‘alternatives in social media’”, with the subtitle “Understanding Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives.” David Berry tweeted this one to me after I mentioned the Uppsala conference, and he is one of the confirmed speakers. So is Anne Helmond, whose research blog I’ve been following for years. There are also some interesting videos from the first Unlike Us event on their blog.
Andrejevic’s chapter, and in fact the whole of Papacharissi’s anthology, is available as a PDF on Scribd, which is presumably not even remotely legal, so I won’t link.
All the books our University Library bought for Digital Culture in 2011
Our research librarian just sent a list of all the books the University Library bought for Digital Culture in 2011. There are 97 books on the list, which says something about how fast this field is growing, and browsing the titles I really wish I had time to read them all. Sorry about the plain text and truncated titles – if you’re interested you’ll easily find more info about the books at your library or bookstore. I <3 our library!
Most of these books are new, some are older, and of course we already had a lot of books before 2011. Leave a comment if you see glaring omissions and I’ll suggest the library buy those books as well.
- Peer-to-Peer video : the economics, policy, and culture of
- Ethnographies of the videogame : gender,/ Thornham, Helen
- Computer-Mediated Communication for Ling/ Bodomo, Adams B.
- SpecLab : digital aesthetics and project/ Drucker, Johanna Continue Reading →