You know how online newspapers claim they want to give you their content free but actually mean they’ll only let you read it if you give them details about your name, address, household income, profession and which articles you read when?
Try the NY Times bypass-subscription bookmarklet. Takes you right past the gatekeeper. Nice indeed. (via Seb)
Make friends with bloggers and sometimes their stories also tell a facet of you: I’ve played and met Weez and spoken on a panel and eaten delicious salads and done many other things that neither I nor anyone else is likely to ever blog.
Some of the links I found I wanted to blog once I could blog again:
Astonishing! Hanna and Nick not only made stunning salads, Hanna fixed my blog! I can blog again! Life is beautiful again!
Actually I was playing cool. Yeah, you know, sure, it’s good not to blog for a while. Bit of a break, a hiatus, time to smell the roses and not write about the scent. Even reading friends’ blogs is less appealing when you can’t blog yourself. This morning my restored laptop beckoned to me, asking me to check it out before showering, having breakfast, but newspapers were bare, my blog dead, my email empty except for spam, after a fortnight of “I’m not checking my email cos I’m on holiday messages”. I read a paper copy of Wired instead, which nearly satisfied my longings. Over lunch of course I couldn’t entirely keep conversation to elegant subject matters but couldn’t help the occasional “so Hanna, if I don’t have the password to my blog or to my mysql database…” and she magically typed and fixed and I’ll admit it: I missed my blog.
A selection of rather wonderful student projects, with lots of creativity and skill and obvious enjoyment:
I’ll post the complete list to the class blog soon - there’s a lot of good work been done!
‘nother article about blog fiction. Via Lisbeth. No blogging till tasks completed. Link only. Be good. Work hard.
The list of stuff I’ve already done is far longer than this list. Could be far worse.
“I’m so glad to have you around,” she says, just as I start to tell her I’m leaving again. “You spend more time away than at home,” she says accusingly, but still brings in my mail, lovingly sorting it into neat piles of ads, circulars and bills. Each time I return she climbs the stairs more slowly, softly, pausing to tell me how adorable my daughter is and how frightened she is to see her climb so high. She can’t eat, weighs just 39 kilos now, she says, the thinness of her voice slipping away. Each morning she asks me “Did I keep you awake last night?” Each morning I smile a no, not at all, I slept like a log. How unfair that her coughs torment her, alone.
I’d been looking forward to time alone. I always do. Time to get that work done, time to take care of all the details, time to go for a run and to lie on the sofa lazy and quite sure nobody will come and want me to look play read admire come do help but then of course she leaves and all that time just feels empty and I’m quite alone. Last night I wrote a farewell speech from my colleagues to myself on the occasion of my retiring party in 30 or 35 years. Looking forwards towards hindsight it is far easier to filter out all the things that I don’t want to do today, that I shouldn’t do today. I’m not quite ready to spell them out in public yet, though. I know enough to see that I’m a long way from understanding enough about academia to know exactly how to manoeuvre my way through all the people and details and demands. I’m leaving details and demands behind in a couple of days (after checking off a lot of items on lists) for a conference, and after that, several weeks with time to look play read admire come do help love a long way from work.
Reading that Google recommends a single webpage has a “reasonable number of links (fewer than 100)”, Gina made a bookmarklet that’ll tell you how many links a page you’re reading has. This page, before I post this post, has far too many links.
I like linking.
The FBI has subpoenaed several artists and art professors after Steve Kurtz was detained and had his (biological) art supplies confiscated. The FBI is using the US Patriot act’s paragraphs against bioterrorism. The mailing lists are abuzz (rhizome, fibreculture, nettime etc) - many people in the electronic art field know these people personally and are extremely worried. Others (such as myself) only know RTmark, the site publicising this, as a site of many a hoax, where they “shift identities, [hide] their artistic practice as Duchamp did…declaring what they’re doing as non-art” (Rachel Greene: Internet Art, p 95). After dozens of scams, I’m sceptical, ya know, and this fits so glibly into a current narrative mould for explaining the universe (scary big brother government idiotically but terrifyingly attacks innocents) that emails without mainstream media backup or personal connections had me wondering. Others have pointed out that though this is a serious and frightening case, there are artists and activists detained and abused daily in less affluent countries and nothing like the current fuss about it. It’s mainstreamed now, with several journalists having contacted the people involved, and it sounds quite appalling. I signed the support letter, and perhaps you would like to, too?
Here are the links for my talk today in Trondheim, with a very brief summary.
In the days of mass media (newspapers, radio, television) you could get away with sending a message to your audience and stopping there. With the internet you need to think conversation, not mass distribution. We “don’t read online”, but the average Norwegian reads online for 30 minutes a day - between 60 and 80 minutes a day if you only count Norwegians who regularly use the internet. Usually we don’t just read, we want to write as well. A lot of our time online is spent seeking out other people who share our interests. Maybe you’re pregnant - you’ll search for other expectant parents because your friends close to home will be sick to death of your single-mindedness. Maybe you miscarried - find blogs written by women in your situation with blogrolls consisting of dozens of other women fighting the battle you’re fighting yourself. Join mailing lists, add your voice to the scores of comments, write your own blog and add your friends to your own blogroll. Blogs are interconnected and search engines read links as peer endorsement. Blogs are written in a human voice (Cluetrain Manifesto). Whether you choose to take part in a conversation on your website, or you choose to create a space that allows a conversation to grow forth (Amazon, dikt.no, Newgrounds, Dagbladet) remember that the age of mass broadcast is past. Sometimes just being able to see that other people are here too (Rhizome) really makes a difference. Derek Powazek’s Design for Community is a book that has a lot of ideas about and case studies of online communities.
I was showing the community stuff at Amazon.com during my talk today when I noticed something that wasn’t there yesterday: “Jill’s Plog,” my personalised amazon blog. I’m not convinced it’ll do anything that Amazon doesn’t already do, but whatever:
Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we’ll post it to your Plog.
The notion of “blog” is expanding.
I didn’t understand why a denial of February allegations of an affair with Kerry was on the top ten at Blogdex until I got well into the article. It’s written by Alex Polier, the young journalist who was falsely said to have had an affair with Kerry, and she doesn’t just write her version of the story, she investigates how the rumour was spread. Some important journalists and politicians spread it without knowing whether it was true or not:
“I regret it,” he says now. “I read it in the paper, I heard it gossiped about, but I didn’t do anything like reporting. I joked about it on the Internet in a way I would at dinner. Then I learned the Net is like print, not like dinner.” (David Frum, qtd by Polier)
But further back, the rumour wasn’t even started by any individual. A blogger flippantly claimed that an affair between Kerry and an intern would be leaked next week, and journalists followed up by searching until they found the most likely intern, without bothering to check whether there was any evidence of an actual affair.
It was becoming clearer: No single person had to have engineered this. First came a rumor about Kerry, then a small-time blogger wrote about it, and his posting was read by journalists. They started looking into it, a detail that was picked up by Drudge—who, post-Monica, is taken seriously by other sites like Wonkette, which no political reporter can ignore. I was getting a better education in 21st-century reporting than I had gotten at Columbia J-school. (Polier, page 5)
Polier blames the internet for the speed with which the rumour took root: “I am struck by the pitiful state of political reporting, which is dominated by the unholy alliance of opposition research and its latest tool, the Internet.” Perhaps she’s right. Maybe it spread faster. With less research. Good and bad.
Pew Internet provides lots of data on how Americans use the internet, but there aren’t a lot of statistics online about Norwegian conditions. Most of the stats at Statistics Norway are about access and speeds and employment and technical details, and I can’t find much on what people do online. SSB: Norsk mediebarometer does present some statistics, and I found this table in the PDF you can download from their summary.
Social activities or participating in communities doesn’t seem to have been an option in the questionaire. A pity, because according to Pew, 84% of Americans say they’ve “used the Internet to contact or get information from a group”. I suppose group could mean many things, but knowing that 56% of the people who’d contacted a group online say they “joined an online group after they began communicating with it over the Internet”, I think we can safely assume we’re talking about communities. It would be very interesting to know whether Norwegians use the web similarly.
I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, an associate professor at the University of Bergen, and I do research on how people tell stories online. I'm affiliated with the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies. I've been a research blogger since October 2000.
I'm usually best contacted by email.
earlier archives: 2003 february : january
2002 december : november : october : september : august : july : june : may : april : march : february : january 2001 december : november : october : september : august : july : june : may : april : march : february : january 2000 december : november : october
June 2008: Blogging, a book by Jill Walker Rettberg, published by Polity Press. (Table of Contents)
May 2008: Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, co-edited by yours truly and Hilde G. Corneliussen, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Browse my other publications on electronic literature, electronic art and weblogs. I also enjoy speaking in public, for general and specialised audiences, and I've posted summaries of many of my talks and presentations to the blog.
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