jill/txt

A parodic blog supposedly by the creators of Google. Fiction, mockumentary, whatever. Must be dozens of these kinds of things. Johnny Howard’s, for instance, and here are a few others.

“Oh, you can send SMSes to Americans, no problem!”, the phone help desk person assured me. I was trying to change my phone plan so I wouldn’t have to pay 3 kroner a minute on top of the dollar a minute style prices they’ll be charging me when I’m over there. I’m bound though, can’t change my plan for the next 16 months, oh dear. “Well, at least I can send SMSes back to my friends at home”, I said. SMSes are only a kroner each, even in the States from a Norwegian phone, what’s that, 15 cents, same as at home, see. “Oh, you can send SMSes to Americans, no problem!”, he said. “But Americans don’t do SMS” I replied, sceptically. I’ve read Smart Mobs. I know how weird exotic outlandish they think thumbing is. His comeback was almost instant, though, “Oh but they can, their phones are set up for it, their networks are set up for it, it’s just a cultural thing, that’s all, just cultural, cultural, cultural, cultural….”

I’m going to America tomorrow and I shall SMS people. Their phones will beep. They will have no idea what to do. “Message received: read yes/no” their screens will say. Baffled they’ll three hours later send me an all-caps msg in return, just as our parents did four years ago: HI STOP WHO ARE YOU STOP.

Is it true though? That SMSes are technologically easy but culturally just not happening? Or are SMSes there and the lag is just in our knowing about them being there? I suppose I’ll find out soon enough.

Instead of packing, I installed Romeo. Now I have to carry my phone everywhere, because my computer mutes itself and turns on a screensaver when I go out of Bluetooth range. And I can remote control presentations and iTunes. Oh yeah.

Grassroots infomercials: Ipodsdirtysecret.com. Keep watching. It’s great media jamming. (possible solution if you do want an ipod: get an extended warranty, they’d just give you a new one, then)

In Ballade.no, by Jørgen Larsson: Criticism of TONO’s giving away Norweigan music without asking the bands, to celebrate their own birthday, when they sue bands for giving away their own music.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired in my life. I’m still tired, two days later, though I slept and slept last night. I’m exhausted. But hey! I did it!

The defence was excellent. I was calm, and it wasn’t terrible once I was there. Everyone was there: my parents, my grandfather, colleagues from my department, from literature where I did my MA, from the media deparment where I’ve taught new media, from Intermedia, from other institutions in Bergen; Torill came from Volda and Lisbeth, Jesper and my wonderful supervisor Espen came all the way from Copenhagen. I think there were about forty people there all told. The photo of the audience below was taken by my mum, but you can’t see the front rows there. Mum took all these photos, actually: thanks, Mum!

After I’d given a short, twenty minute presentation of my thesis, Marie-Laure Ryan, the first opponent, spent an hour discussing it with me. She’s an expert on the theories I’ve chosen as my main approaches to interactivity - possible worlds theory that discusses how readers (users) relate to the fictional worlds projected by representational works - so I’d been both dreading and looking forward to hearing her thoughts on how I’d used these theories. It was an interesting conversation, though I wish I could remember the details more. I remember talking about the differences between fictional and other worlds, and Marie-Laure had some insights I’ll certainly be using as I continue working on this. The photo below shows me thanking her after she’d finished grilling me! While the actual opposition was happening, I was over at the other side of the stage.

Even lunch was pleasant. It was a formal lunch of elegant open prawn sandwiches in a hotel, with the prodekanus, the committee members, my supervisor and me. It’s not the terrifying setting I’d imagined, it’s a pleasant way of simply chatting without pressure, and there is quite obviously a strong plan here of inculturating the candidate in an academic world. You’re being accepted into the tribe.

After lunch, it was the turn of the second opponent, Bjørn Sørenssen. He’s a media scholar, who started working on interactive video in the early 80s, and he offered a whole new approach to my topic: documentary theory. I’ve heard bits of this before, but since my background’s in literature, I’ve been more likely to compare Online Caroline or Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse to Dostojevski’s or Nabokov’s introducing a novel by saying that he found these papers in someone’s attic or something, rather than to Peter Jackon’s mockumentary about Colin McKenzie, the (fictional) forgotten New Zealand film maker. Bjørn showed an excerpt from the McKenzie film, and suggested several very interesting concepts from documentary - and mockumentary - theory that I could have used to think about the spams, hoaxes and fictions-pretending-to-be-real that I’ve written about. Bjørn also asked about ontology, which I use in Pavel’s sense, as being about worlds, and he suggested that Heidegger and phenomenology would have been useful. I read Heidegger before I started thinking about fictional worlds and crossing boundaries; perhaps if I’d read it again, now, I’d find it more immediately useful than I did then.

All in all I found the defence a wonderful, if somewhat anxious, learning experience. I have a lot of new leads for continuing my research, and I’ve had help in clarifying some concepts. It’s a wonderful privilege having two experts read your work that thoroughly.

Once finished, people started congratulating me and I just smiled and smiled and smiled. I think one of the most touching things was my students giving me flowers! I hadn’t expected that at all, and they were just so lovely! The students I mean, the flowers too, very lovely, but oh, what gorgeous students I have!

By this time, the chef (mum’s present to me, a totally brilliant present!) and his assistant had already filled the villa I’d rented for the party with delicious smells.

We stopped by for a quick checkup - mum and my girlfriends had set the tables the night before and everything looked wonderful, so after a couple of minutes, I went home and picked up my daughter from school and did the standard afternoon things: stirfried a meal, helped her with her homework, watched some TV - and both she and I got all totally dressed up. She in her princess dress (white lace, pink sash) and me in my fishtail skirt and mermaid corset. Taxi to the villa, last minute preparations with girlfriends and parents, and suddenly the house was full of people and champagne and presents and congratulations and it was amazing. My daughter left with her dad at nine, when food was served (just as she broke down in exhaustion; I lasted a little longer) and oh, the food was so good! Below is Thomas (and a bit of Jon) giving me a brilliant book of photographs. Next to that you can see Bjørn, my second opponent, with Gro, head of my party committee and a good friend ever since my comp. lit. days.

The dinner may be stressful to prepare on top of preparing the defence itself and the trial lecture, but in retrospect I realise that it, along with the lunch with the professors, is crucial: social networking is absolutely necessary in academia and it’s a skill that’s not often formally recognised as part of the job. Often seeds of important ideas and collaborations are sown in these less formal settings, and getting to know one’s colleagues socially allows much more fruitful collaboration later.

And of course it’s a wonderful high after the horror of the defence (or at least the horror of dreading it) to hear generous, appreciative speeches about yourself! The prodekanus’s research field is religion, which turned out to be rather interesting since I spoke about avatars and fictional, sacred and actual worlds. She spoke about the defence as a rite of passage in her speech. Dag, the head of our department said lovely things too, one of the nicest being that they think I’m an excellent teacher! That made me happy. Espen said wonderful, generous things about me, and so did my mother, of course. Mum, who did her PhD at Cambridge in the late sixties, said that getting a PhD mightn’t make much difference in what I actually do, but that it’s more like getting an upgrade to business class. You’ll be treated with more respect, and you might get to slip more easily through the lines and red tape. That, along with my rather exuberant thank you speech, concluded the mandatory list of speeches, but Lisbeth slipped in a few words too, and oh, she was lovely. Everybody was lovely, really, I have wonderful friends and family and colleagues!

I’d forgotten to charge the batteries in my camera (ah well, I remembered a lot of other things) so I don’t have as many photos as I’d like. If you were there and took photos, do send me copies, please! Below is a cross section from before dinner was served: this is Jesper, Frank, Lisbeth, Carsten, Magne and Jon.

The Norwegian defence actually sets up a complete range of traditional, academic ways of exchanging knowledge. You’re given written response to your thesis, as reviewers do to papers you submit to (good) journals and conferences. You’re asked to prepare a lecture on a tight deadline. You go through an intensive question and answer session in the old tradition of academic debate. You eat lunch with the dean and professors in your field. You host a dinner for colleagues, family and friends, and again, you sit at the same table as your opponents, the dean, the head of your department, your supervisor and your parents. I continued my academic discussions with my opponents during dinner, but in a much more pleasant and cheerful manner.

The best, yes, the very best part of the day was after midnight, after the cakes and coffee and after quite a few people had left. I put on the music from Fame and we all, and I mean all, danced to it.

The last guests left at six. And yes, I did manage to get to Marie-Laure’s talk at noon, and I finished tidying and gave back the keys, and I picked up my daughter from school - and collapsed. We just watched videos all afternoon, eating leftovers from the party. I went to sleep right after she did.

Defences are usually on Fridays. That is a very sensible idea. You need a weekend or two after an ordeal like that.

Wonderfully, I’m the proud auntie of a newborn niece, Nara, who was born at 3:42 this morning! She’s in Harstad, way up north, so sadly I won’t be able to see her until I get back from the States. My sister had a pretty good excuse for not coming to my defence :)

YAY!

I can’t decide whether to spend the next two hours frantically revising or deliberately relaxing. Whatever I do the whole PhD defence will be over soon. By my next blog post, actually.

If I hadn’t been preparing my defence I would currently be legally downloading Norwegian, copyrighted music for free from musikkonline.no. Dagbladet reminds me which bands and songs I might want, and kindly provides direct links.

It is, truly, a strange way of celebrating the 75th anniversary of TONO, the Norwegian institution that collects royalties for musicians and doles them out in the form of stipends and so on. Earlier this year TONO sued a band for making their own songs free online - no, I don’t understand the details, sorry, but Trond posted some explanatory links. Now TONO is making everything free for a week. But only through a particular shop.

Survived part one: I officially passed my trial lecture. There were no questions, just a strange sort of end, but Marie-Laure said afterwards that she liked the golems :) I even had a nice dinner with Lisbeth, Torill, Jesper and Marie-Laure, before shooting off home to work while they, the lucky things, have another drink or two. My wonderful mother and friends have been setting the table and so on in preparation for tomorrow’s dinner. And now I’m going to have a cup of tea, some chocolate, and I’m going to sit down and make quite sure I know how to respond to the critical points in the committee’s report.

Oh, what the trial lecture turned out to be about? Well, I talked about the Hindu and digital origins of the word avatar, and argued that avatars, as projections of the user into another world, are useful concepts in thinking about represented worlds that have clear boundaries from our own, actual world. I showed how the user mirrors the characters in Magic-tree.com, and how those characters aren’t really avatars; how I don’t even really identify with the characters whose movements I’m enacting. Then I described the myth of the golem (not a projection into another world but an animated non-human in this world) and read a bit from Fuentes’s Aura (search for “ritual” inside the book, that’s the page I read), and proposed that when there are less clear boundaries between actual and represented world it might be more useful to think about the relationship between user and fictional characters as similar to that between a golem and its creator.

I am dying to get my hands on Norbert Wiener’s God and Golem, Inc. The weirdest thing about writing a paper on a set topic in only two weeks is that you get all these good ideas that don’t quite have time to unfold. And you discover potentially fascinating connections and literature the day before your deadline.

Tomorrow: the defence itself. The disputas. Tomorrow evening: the party. Then it’ll be over.

Therapy for the anxious young woman about to defend her PhD: Put on all the music that’s ever made you crazy happy, the older the better, the more memories of dancing with girlfriends the better, the more buoyant the words the better. Fame! I’m going to live for ever! I’m going to learn how to fly! Baby remember my name! will do nicely, as will I’m a racing car passing by, like Lady Godiva! I’m going to go, go, go, there’s no stopping me!Don’t stop me now! I’m having a good time, I’m having a ball… or even It’s raining men! or win a fortune in a game my life will never be the same. Is there a version of Survive that’s about PhD dissertations instead of men? I’d like that!

Today’s my trial lecture. At 4.30 pm. Tomorrow’s the actual defence. From 10.15 am till about 2 or 3 pm. Anyone who’s interested is welcome to come and listen; it’s in Auditorium B at Sydneshaugen. In Bergen. In Norway. But you’re not allowed to ask nasty questions ex auditorio. The press release explains when and where things are happening.

This afternoon, before my trial lecture, Torill’s giving a talk titled “Kontroll, innflytelse, utfordring og fryd: Flerbrukerspill som brukerstyrt medium”, and on Wednesday, Marie-Laure Ryan, my first opponent and a wonderful scholar, is giving a talk titled “Cyberspace, cybertexts, cybermaps”. Those lectures are open to the public as well.

My daughter’s got the flu and can’t go to school. It’s supposed to be my week (I’d worked out the sitter, me picking her up later, her hanging around before the party tomorrow night) and I felt so guilty asking her dad to take two extra days. He’s got important stuff at work too, but, well, it’s obvious. I think I could take almost any other days in my whole career off work to look after my sick child, but not these two.

Nah. Not too guilty now I’m off the phone with them. That’s the point of having two parents.

Nearly done with the trial lecture, except the visuals, which may end up being rather minimal. Still working on the twenty minute presentation of the whole thesis, for the actual defence on Tuesday, and the Answers to the Seven Points of Criticism from my committee.

My arm hurts as it always does when I’m scared and I’m feeling so so so tired.

But the lecture’s not bad.