jill/txt

Towards a Literacy of Cooperation looks like a great course. It’s running at Stanford next semester, and for those of us who can’t get to California every Wednesday, an online component is promised via a wiki and a blog which will allow us to follow what they’re up to.

[F]or two centuries — a time during which the world passed from an agrarian landscape into a global post-industrial culture of unprecedented scale and complexity — science, society, public policy and commerce have attended almost exclusively to the role of competition. The stories people tell themselves about what is possible, the mythical narratives that organizations and societies depend upon, have been variations of “survival of the fittest.” The role of cooperation has been largely unmapped.

Lecturers include Howard Rheingold, Andrea Saveri (from the Future Institute), Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) and several others.

The latest ACM Communications has a pile of articles on blogging. So nice that there’s enough out there now that one can choose to only read the articles on one’s own particular blogging focus. More literary blogging papers, anyone?

On the Association of Internet Researchers‘ mailing list, Wainer Lusoli wrote that several papers on political blogs were presented at the American Political Science Association Conference 2004 - search for “blog” from that site and you’ll see the titles and abstracts, and will be able to download the full papers as PDFs. He also recommends a report by the UK Hansard Society, which he calls “concise but useful”.

I though Amnesty’s SMS appeals thing sounded cool, so I signed up. But how on earth can this work? The messages are so innane, so totally untrustworthy in their simplicity, I mean, look at today’s:

Frances Newton skal henrettes i Texas 1. desember. Hun hevder hun er uskyldig. Stans henrettelsen! Send: APPELL <ditt navn> til 1960 nÃ¥! Les mer: www.amnesty.no (Frances Newton is to be executed in Texas on December 1. She claims she’s innocent. Stop the execution! Send: APPEAL <your name> to 1960 now! Read more: www.amnesty.no)

The first times I sent the appeal, paying Amnesty three kroner for the message, not really knowing how my text message supposedly changes things. But getting one of these every week I’ve become callous. The brevity of the claim is offensive: she claims to be innocent? I think the death penalty is barbaric, but how is sending a text message going to stop that? Usually I’m out somewhere and I don’t follow the link they give you. Today I’m home sick so I did, and sure enough, Frances Newton is (apparently) going to be executed based on hearsay and not on solid evidence, she didn’t have appropriate legal representation, this is quite probably an injustice, a murder of justice. But the SMS form leaves me cold, critical, unable to connect with this.

I think Amnesty has made at least one crucial mistake: they send out the SMSes with no sender. So while my phone usually tells me “Message from Beatrice” or, if the sender’s not in my address book, “Message from +4795021453″ the messages from Amnesty say “Message from . .” Now would you trust that? I mean, rationally, I know I’ve signed up, I do have a lot of respect for Amnesty, I’m a member, the URL lets me read more about the issue, but the coldness of that “. .” instead of a sender name or number upsets me anyway.

When I first signed up I had an idea that it would be so quick doing this by SMS, and I’d make up for all those hand-written letters I’ve always meant to send in Amnesty’s campaigns but that I’ve never, ever actually written. After receiving at least 50 messages like this I wonder how on earth SMSes are in any way equivalent to carefully thought out, handwritten letters. Will it actually make any difference? Is it just a way for Amnesty to make a little extra money off premium SMSes? I also imagined there’d be a smart mobs element to it. But there are no connections forged here, no new possibilities. It’s just an extra channel for advertising.

I’m happy to support Amnesty, but these messages make me feel as though they think I’m stupid. They’re too simplified. And I end up trusting Amnesty less. I’m sure that’s not what they intended. I wonder if others react as I do?

Oh dear. A woman to be executed. Maybe innocent, maybe not. It’s wrong to kill people. No matter what they’ve done. I guess I’ll send the SMS after all. Just in case.

I spent a day home with my daughter Wednesday, wisely deciding that a day’s rest will make an exhausted child with a sore throat better. It did, but I didn’t rest at all though, what with nursing a sick child, doing lots of extra household chores and still putting in hours of work at the computer.

Today I’m paying. Last week’s cold is back with a vengeance. Yesterday’s tiredness is replaced by a runny nose and a dizzy head and eyes that will hardly open and ears that feel a bit strange.

I’m going to bed.

Of course I followed the link left by the anonymous commenter who wrote in Danish that he could never stop himself from entering a candy store. Crafty marketer, that commenter, or just someone who knows the medium, because at the end of that link is a new blog fiction, or perhaps fiction, a secret diary written in the third person in a style that when I started reading the first entry reminded me of Pan with its feverously incessant paragraphs about a man maddened by fantasies of women but with little ability to communicate with them, or of The Diary of a Seducer maybe simply because it’s about a man fascinated by women, and it’s in Danish. By the time I’d got to today’s entry the tone had shifted to light porn, or perhaps, if I’m generous, this is the explicitness with which Hamsun would have written today. The diary follows the blogging template by including an “about” page:

Ord, der stammer fra hvem som helst, men alligevel ankommer til dig fra en bestemt. Hemmelig dagbog fra en anonym, skrevet af ingen, men henvendt til alle. Han skriver om sig selv i tredje person ental.

Det er en form for onani.

Hver dag tager han et foto af himlen over hverdagen. Disse himmelsyner supplerer hans febrilske bekendelser og lader dig ane en sprække af virkelighed bag skriftens hittepåsomhed.

Fortæl ham, hvorfor du læser hans bekendelser.

I suppose he decided to make the criticism of blogs as mental masturbation literal. While I’ll probably bore of daily descriptions of masturbation I am intrigued at the tone of this diary. And it is so clearly positioned as literary. How interesting.

Hyperfictions may not be for the literary gourmet who likes to indulge in a piece of prose in the figurative bathtub. Hyperfictions are for the addict to whom the sight of the fridge is the promise of a bowl of mousse. Who cannot pass the candy-shop. You don’t read a gripping hyperfiction like a thrilling novel: preferably in one session. Instead, you return many times, sometimes after hours, sometimes after months, and the icon that sits patiently on your desktop soon teases as much as a wad of paper with the bookmark far to the left.
(Anja Rau, “Confessions Of A Binge Reader“)

George Landow is one of the pioneers of hypertext theory, having constructed hypertexts with students at Brown University during the late eighties and early nineties and written what was probably the most important early work on hypertext theory and fiction. He’s recently written a new essay for Dichtung Digital on “Evaluating Quality in Hypermedia“, where he uses his definition of hypertext to draw out measures of what good hypertext would be. He discusses many concrete examples, mostly from hypertext fiction but also some non-fictional examples.

Last week at the Digital og sosial conference one of the workshops chose chose almost this exact topic: How to tell if electronic literature is good. The other participants in the workshop wanted more negative reviews of electronic literature. I objected: as a critic I would far rather spend time exploring good works than choosing bad ones. I’m also more interested in discussing the aspects of works that I find interesting, or productive, or new than establishing absolute criteria for determining whether something is “good” or “bad”. But obviously there are people who do want clear guidelines, and Landow’s article should be perfect for them.

I don’t completely agree with all his points. For instance, he argues that while fictional and poetic hypertext might use disorientation as a literary effect, non-fiction hypertext should never be disorienting. I don’t want to separate non-fiction from fiction like that. I’ve written two non-fiction hypertexts, both reviews of other works, actually (a review of Løding’s book Jernvev (1998) and a review of Martin’s xxxoooxxx (2000)), and both definitely use literary techniques and total orientation is not the point.

But I agree with most of his basic points, and they’re made clearly and with good use of examples. Some points are so simple that they’re easily forgotten, like his point that a single node in a hypertext (as a single post in a blog) needs to satisfy the reader all by itself at the same time as it tempts the reader to read more.

the current lexia readers encounter has to have enough interest, like any text, to convince them to keep reading, and yet at the same time it must also leave enough questions unanswered that reader feels driven to follow links in order to continue reading.

That desire to read on, to explore, is what fascinates me right now. What techniques does the most recent blog post at Justin’s Links or a single sticker of Implementation use to not only let you know that there is more but to prompt you to go looking for it? I’m curious as to how this can be done even without explicit links.
And my students will be reading Landow’s essay next semester.

Father Christmas is getting my eight-year-old daughter and me a game console for Christmas. I’m helping him along by, uh, choosing, ordering and paying for the item. Since I’ve never really used consoles I’m floundering a little. I’m going to the states next week so I thought I’d take advantage of the low dollar, order it online and get it delivered there.

How does this sound for a shopping list, gamers?

• X-box holiday pack. The bundled games sound boring, but two months of the online gaming stuff might be fun. And people tell me X-box is best, despite the taint of Microsoft.
• Quidditch for my daughter. She says she wants this. It exists for Xbox, but not at Amazon, so maybe I should find another store.
• Grand Theft Auto and Fable for me.
• Will I need a second controller?
• Wireless adaptor. Since there’s online stuff and I’d need a really long ethernet cable. But no, not for $109.

Am I missing anything? Any suggestions for good games for an eight year old and a thirty-three year old? We both like card games and stories and dancing. She loves Harry Potter and Amber Brown and Kurt and gymnastics and climbing and dancing and pretending and Ludo and Yahtzee and any board game, really, and jigsaw puzzles. I love narratives and interesting ways of interacting and relating to a fictional world or fictional characters and the Sims and Sim City and Myst and Riven, and no, I’ve not played many games in the last few years. I hate it when I get stuck in a game because I can’t figure out what comes next, or because it requires lots of practice and dexterity. I was thinking one of those physical games, maybe, Dance Dance Revolution or something, but goodness it’s hard figuring out exactly what you need to play it (dance mats? online? which version?) online. Suggestions would be much appreciated.
(Psst! Don’t tell my daughter! And no, she doesn’t read my weblog. Yet.)

Take photos of crowds at fixed intervals and the Crowd Compiler merges them for you. What fun.

I’m trying to beat my cold into submission and stay awake and alert long enough to respectably prepare tomorrow’s guest lectures in Oslo. I’m speaking to Anders’s students, and then to the department seminar, both times on distributed narrative. I know Anders will ask (as he always asks) whether there’s really any point in calling it narrative and I had so hoped that this autumn’s research would have brought more conviction to my “I think so”. Unfortunately I seem to have spent the autumn teaching, organising a conference, drafting grant applications and papers on completely different topics, oh, and organising a website, designers, coders, promotion and steps towards a future for ELiNOR. My poor distributed narrative project got neglected.

This week’s been hard. I probably should have taken a couple of days off, but see, my cold was never really that bad. It just makes me sleepy all the time, that’s all. And it’s not like the work would have disappeared if I’d taken a day off.

Tomorrow night I’m going to be in an Oslo hotel room doing absolutely nothing. I am so looking forward to it.

Have you seen the Technique group at Flickr? It’s full of simple tutorials and ideas for doing slightly different things with your photos, ranging from the complicated to the easy. The tip on using the timer on your camera to avoid shaky hands in low light was such fun that I took about twenty photos today, never quite capturing the moon I was aiming at but enjoying myself hugely. My new ambition is to fill my calendar. I’m going to post at least one photo every single day. You might not see all of them, because some will be private, but I’ll have a visual diary and a daily practice.

Are you supposed to feed a cold and starve a fever or is it the other way round? My head aches and my throat is sore and there is all this work that needs me to do it. A funding application to rewrite, people to email, payments to arrange, a website to get started, guest lectures to prepare, a paper to write, a review to write, student papers to read and respond to. And here I was thinking that oh, once the conference is over, there’ll be time. Of course there isn’t. There never is. I need to make more time for research, that much is clear - just finishing a big administrative task doesn’t automatically make time for research appear. There are always more things that want me to do them. I’m strict and tell them not now! Wait your turn! Find somebody else to nag! But then I give in to the guilt anyway.

Now I’m going to rug up and walk for a half hour on slippery frosty roads to the university where I’ll listen to students presenting their projects and hopefully, I’ll have wonderful constructive things to say in response that will send them off enthused and motivated to write more and improve and explore and think.

Maybe fresh, crisp air is good for colds?