jill/txt

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.

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.

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.

Sara Kjellberg is doing her PhD on research blogging and has written several very interesting looking articles about this, listed on her website at Lund University. She also blogs now and then at SAKJ.

When Demi Moore posted photos of herself at the dentist with one of her front teeth missing, she made the paparazzis superfluous. When Salam Pax blogged from Bagdad and US soldiers blogged their experiences of fighting in Iraq we were excited to hear directly from people involved in the war. Having direct access to the actors in an event rather than reading the media’s filtered and often somewhat simplified version (disintermediation) can be immensely empowering to the people involved - and to us readers.

But what if the people blogging their versions of the story were involved in a crime?

Today’s papers here in Norway tell a tragic story of a pregnant 18-year-old who lost her baby after being beaten up by the child’s father and his friend, a 17-year-old girl. The 17-year-old had blogged about the attack, and several newspapers note this, quoting just enough of what she wrote to make her seem even more of hardened criminal - just the lines describing what she remembers of the attack. Here’s a translation of the quotes in Bergens Tidende’s rendition: “X (the 18-year-old) wanted the child put out of the world, to kill it in the womb and to make Y (the pregnant woman) have a miscarriage. (..) I walked up behind X, pulled her hood back and hit her head. Then I blacked out.”

A few hours after I read the story, a journalist called from VG. Did I think - as a researcher of blogs, and in relation to this case - that people are too naive about what they blog in public? Journalists have asked me that question quite a few times before. I started off saying that it did seem pretty stupid to blog about something like that - but then the journalist mentioned that actually the blog post was an very upset apology to the victim. That was not at all the impression I had got from reading a couple of quotes, torn out of context, in the media.

The journalist emailed me the text of the attacker’s blog post, which is long, anguished and gives a far more nuanced impression of the 17-year-old. Certainly I wouldn’t agree with some of her basic ethical principles, but she doesn’t come across as a hardened criminal as in the newspaper.

A bit more googling and I discovered that almost everyone involved in this tragic case is (or was) a blogger: the 17-year-old girl, the pregnant girl, one of the pregnant girl’s girlfriends (who gives a fairly full description of events from the pregnant girl’s point of view) and even the ex-girlfriend of the unborn child’s father. The ex-girlfriend has a daughter by the male attacked - a little girl whom he apparently worships.

I’m not going to link to these blogs, because the women are clearly ambivalent about the story being this public. But I think there are some really interesting principles to discuss here.

First of all, it’s a wonderful example of the people directly involved in a “news story” actually being able to - and to some extent wanting to - tell their version of the story. The 17-year-old wrote (translated and paraphrased to protect her identity):

I think almost all rumours about me have been started by people who dislike me. Rumours are like fire in dry grass and getting people to believe the truth is like finding a needle in a haystack.

This is a woman who wants to tell her version of the story. She’s also fully aware that by blogging her version of the story, she’s also outing herself publicly as the person who committed this crime. She writes that she hopes the victim reads her blog post (the victim did, and in her own blog writes that she commented to correct a factual error in the story).

I want you to know that if you’re going to give me a lecture of whatever, use your own name. I’m not hiding, you shouldn’t either.

The victim of the attack likewise writes about the value of truth:

I never intended this to come out in this way, but since she [the attacker] wrote about, I let [girlfriend’s name] write about it too. I didn’t comment on the attackers blog to provoke her but to correct some errors. When a story is published like that it should be true. I wasn’t anonymous because she asked me not to be.

The girlfriend’s blog gives a full account of the event as experienced by the victim, whereas the victim herself and the ex-girlfriend are much less direct in their initial- they refer to the event but in a way where you wouldn’t know what they were talking about if you didn’t already know. But reading more highlights the lack of nuance in the media’s rendition.

The standard take on young people being “too” open on blogs is that they’re foolish. But I wonder if there isn’t something almost opposite going on. If you’ve basically grown up blogging, won’t you assume that the right to speak directly, in your own words, is yours? Why mutely allow the media to describe you? The media wants to sell newspapers and needs narratively interesting stories that can be told quickly, matching our stereotypes. A conflict, two opposing sides, good vs evil. That doesn’t really match reality with all its nuances.

And that brings us to press ethics, the second issue. Now that the 17-year-old has deleted her blog, all that remains of her words is the quotes republished by the media. Those words, taken out of context, are basically all that we see of her. They paint a far worse picture of her than her long and emotional blog post. Perhaps she shouldn’t have deleted her post. Perhaps the media shouldn’t have quoted her blog. Perhaps their quoting it actually violates the Vær Varsom poster, the set of rules that Norwegian journalists are supposed to follow, which among other things states: “Show particular care when dealing with people who are expected to not understand the effect of what they say. Don’t abuse peoples’ feelings, ignorance or lack of judgement. Remember that people in shock and grief are more vulnerable than others.” A 17-year-old who blogged a confession and apology immediately after killing an unborn child could reasonably be said to fall into that category.

A third issue is what effect blogging attackers and victims have on the court case. Already we deal with people being, in effect, judged by the media before they even get to the courtroom. What happens when people argue their own cases in their blogs and in the comments, long before the police have even investigated?

This is a tragic case for all involved. Does blogging make it even more tragic, or give those involved at least a little agency in what is now a matter for the media, police and courts?

I’m teaching a 5 credit (ECTS) course on Communicating with Social Media this autumn (in Norwegian!). I’m really excited about the course. It’s a short, intensive course - three full days followed by independent work, so should be ideal for people who are busy doing other things most of the time. And it will be very practical. Students will be graded on a portfolio to consist of:

• A profile on a social website (e.g. Facebook or elsewhere) for an organisation or company. The organisation can be fictional and the profile set up simply for practice, or students may choose to create a profile for an organisation or company they’re affiliated with.
• A blog with posts discussing topics dealt with in the course. The blog must have at least ten posts. Students will select three posts for assessment, with a minimum of 1200 words in total. One of these posts must discuss choices made in creating the organisation or company profile in the first part of the portfolio, and must also outline a plan for how the organisation’s social media strategy should be developed.

Here’s the complete info on DIKULT110: Kommunikasjon i sosiale medium (in Norwegian).

I’m excited both because I love the topic and because I think these assignments will be useful and interesting - and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do with this. (I just realised we’ll have to have some ethical rules - probably no setting up fake sites for Statoil, for instance. Hm. What else could go wrong?)

The planning of dates has begun. What do you think would be the ideal time for a short, intensive course like this? Early in the semester - say the last week of August? Or later in the semester?

Any other comments or ideas? Would you be interested in taking a course like this?

Benjamin arrived 10 days after his due date, on February 16, and is absolutely beautiful. We’re busy sleeping and eating and spending time with eager relatives and learning how to be a family of five - the latter probably posing the most challenges to Benji’s not-quite-two-year-old big sister, who is sweet and gorgeous and intensely in need of attention these days :)

iPhones are great for reading while nursing, so I’m still reading blogs, but I’m taking a break from writing. I’ll be on maternity leave until August, and then Scott and I will each work 2 1/2 days a week until March next year, when our parental leave runs out.

This autumn I’ll be teaching a short, 5 ECTS course on Communicating in Social Media, which I’m really looking forward to. Here’s the outline of the course (PDF) that I sent to the department for approval - there may be minor changes, but this should give you a pretty good idea of what the course will look like. There’ll be three days of intensive classes, followed by three weeks of independent work. Finally students will hand in a portfolio including a profile page on a social network site and an outline of a strategy for how this specific (real or fictional) organisation will continue to communicate through social media. Lectures (but not labs and feedback from teachers) will be open to people who would like to learn more about social media but who don’t need the credits. I’ll post more information about this course in late spring, when we’ll also have dates and details figured out.

I’ll also be teaching into DIKULT204: Digital Culture and Digital Media with Scott. This course will be a survey of electronic literature and digital art, and is taught in English.

Look at this! I think that the symbols on the blue banner, to the left of the word “Blogging”, may spell out my name. Or part of my name.

Does anyone read Korean? I can’t even figure out how to google to find out whether there’s a Korean webpage about the book. Silly illiterate Westerner.

I feel myself sinking into that inward nestingness that happens when you’re expecting a baby. Twitter holds less fascination for me, and I forget to blog or read blogs for weeks at a time (except for my “life, not research” category in Google Reader…) But the baby won’t actually come until early February, and I’m still at work until mid-January. A few things do catch my attention. Like Regine Stokke’s blog, which had me wiping away tears. She wrote in Norwegian, but Google translates it reasonably well. Regine was an eighteen year old Norwegian girls who died of cancer last week and had blogged about her illness for the last year. (I’m pretty sure this is real, unlike the Kaycee Nicole case). Or, on a completely different note, June Breivik’s post about privacy and school students (also in Norwegian/Google translated to English), which is an issue I’ve been far more aware of after reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. June Breivik is the project leader of “Digital School” for our region in Norway, and links to a great website about privacy in schools, Personvernskolen (translated). I’m so glad this is actually being discussed - finally!

And then there’s this graphic of how big the internet is. I’m sure some will use this to fuss about how much bad quality nonsense there is on the internet. But I think I might use it anyway, in presentations or teaching somewhere.

Created by OnlineEducation.net

Here are the slides I’m speaking from today at the The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice here in Bergen today. There’s already video up from the performances and readings last night, and some ongoing discussion on the Twitter hashtag #network09. A short summary of my talk follows the slides.

Literary narrative genres develop from personal narrative practices. The first novels were based on letters and diaries, though the genre developed into something independent in time. This presentation discusses contemporary personal media and narrative practices, such as those we see in social media. Some of these practices are constrained by corporations such as Facebook or Twitter, which steer our expression in specific ways. Others appear free, yet are heavily influenced by cultural templates, copying and voluntary rules. Often, corporations or organisations provide systems to automate some of these voluntary rules. We’re also beginning to see some examples of social media sites that take our contributions and create their own visualisations and representations of an aspect of our life. For instance, Dopplr.com generates reports on your travel, Flickr.com shows you your photos on a map or as a calendar, Trixietracker.com graphs your baby’s sleep patterns and Google Web History visualises your search activity in time. What happens, then, when our personal narratives and self-documentations aren’t hand-crafted as with diaries and scrapbooks, but are automatically generated? What would literary narratives following these personal but computationally assisted practices look like?

The talk builds upon and extends an essay to be published in the European Journal of Communications in December this year (Preprint available).

Today’s class is the second day of students presenting their projects. Two students can’t make it; they’re home sick with h1n1 / swine flu, the poor things.

Many students have worried about how to define a remix. The best article we’ve found that does this is probably Eduardo Navas’ The Three Basic Forms of Remix: A Point of Entry, published in Remix Theory on April 26, 2007. He starts by looking at defining it in music: “A music remix, in general, is a reinterpretation of a pre-existing song, meaning that the “aura”� of the original will be dominant in the remixed version” - so as remixes started, they were generally only remixing a single source. Navas then argues that there are three main kinds of remixes: extended, selective, or reflexive, where the remix “allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original; material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact to be recognizable”. Extended or selective remixes might be similar to the homages we see on YouTube, where someone fawningly pastes in lots of images of their heros from a movie that are shown with a music track, while the reflexive remix would be the critical or parodic kind that’s common in political remixes. Other things than art can be remixed too - Neva found a discussion of how concepts and information can be remixed, and Elisabeth is writing about biological and genetic remixes.

[Elisabeth showed us another article with a further categorisation, which I can’t find now… will add later.]

Some students will have to discuss whether or not their examples are remixes at all - is the collaborative BlueSfear.com art worm that Neva’s writing about a remix? Is She’s the Man a remix of Twelfth Night, as Franziska wants to argue?

Next week, Maria Engberg is coming from Sweden to talk about appropriation in avantegarde art of the twentieth century and how it relates to current digital culture. I’ve posted some readings she’ll be using in Studentportalen/My Space. The following week is the conference which you’re all welcome to attend (if you want lunch and/or dinner, there’s a fee), then we’ll be looking at your videos on November 12 and November 17. Your final paper and video are due on November 20, and we’ll have a premiere party in the evening of November 20, with a screening of all the videos!