Scott showed me George Bush “singing” U2’s anti-war song “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” - go have a look, it’s brilliant. Now I want a database of tiny videoclips of Bush, cut into word-by-word sections and catalogued so that I can type in a sentence, any sentence, and have Bush say it.
Did someone already make that?
Back in August, Torill was having trouble with her voicebox and wrote a post about her worries that she might lose her voice, finishing with this paragraph:
Yes, I am scared today. Scared enough that I am deeply unhappy about the male locker-room humour of our staff room, which I thought the last 15 years had made me deaf to. The day after tomorrow I may have a wonder drug in my hands and an arrogant laughter in my throat.
Today a journalist in her local newspaper has published a piece accusing her of unethical blogging, titled “Attacked colleagues in blog”. According to the journalist and his (of course) anonymous sources, Torill leaked internal information from a staff meeting” on her blog and accused her colleagues of “toilet-humour”.
The journalist doesn’t link to the actual blog post. Instead he quotes a mistranslated sentence out of context, making it sound as though it’s part of a long post detailing, naming and shaming her colleagues.
Who’s unethical here? Torill, for writing a line in a post about something completely different where she admits that she was upset at a meeting? (Note: she doesn’t say what happened in the meeting or who was involved.) Or the journalist for using his traditional authority in a print publication and his journalistic right to protect his anonymous sources and for misquoting her out of context? Why can a journalist publish a story like that and not even provide a link to the blog post the story centres on? With a link to that post, it would be obvious it was a non-story.
As Torill points out in a post this morning, it’s really hardly surprising that there’s a bit of locker-room humour in a department where until this semester she was been the only woman for fifteen years. That some of those men then anonymously get a journalist to attack her for saying so is, well, past absurd, don’t you think?
I’ve found the flow of writing! Not perfectly, but I know what I’m doing and where I’m going, and today when I switched from the chapter on the prehistory of blogs to sketching my article for the WoW anthology I was actually able to do so.
Now I’m at a seminar at Voss discussing and evaluating the courses and programs offered by the Humanities faculty and I snuck off into a corner to write. Yay, I love being happy writing!
Tomorrow we’re off to Amsterdam and then Vienna and Blogtalk.
I can barely believe, that in all those years of studying literature and literary theory, no professor and none of those anthologies of literary theory mentioned the rather startling fact that Barthes’ “Death of the Author”, which was obligatory on the curriculum for most of those literary theory courses, was first published as a flimsy pamphlet in a 1967 issue of a journal that was published in a box, as a fluxus kit of criticism, as it were. Barthes’ “Death of the Author” was one of the few more-or-less traditionally written articles in the box - not so radical after all?
UBU web has a wonderful web archive/documentation of all the issues of Aspen, including the one where Barthes’ “Death of the Author” was first published.
Could I have misunderstood? Perhaps Barthes’ essay was first published elsewhere, and Aspen simply requested permission to reprint it in English? If not, all those readers that include the essay are horrible examples of the way literary studies often completely ignores the materiality of the text. The Wikipedia makes no mention of the box thing, and thinks it was first published in 1968. Encyclopedia Britannica doesn’t mention the article at all, and Google Scholar shows that almost all citations of the essay refer to the reprint in Image/Music/Text (1977). Tomorrow I’ll check out what some of those anthologies say.
Oh, and I discovered this because I was peeking at Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s syllabus for a course on authorship, and noticed that after Barthes’ Death of the Author and Foucault’s What is an Author?” (old but excellent chestnuts for lit. students) she’s listed Molly Nesbit’s “Who Was the Author?” (sorry, library subscription only). Nesbit’s article includes a discussion of Aspen 5 + 6, the issue of the journal “Death of the Author” was first published in. From there, the rest was google.
Torill usefully connects my dislike of MyBlogLog’s use of my personal information on third party websites to the recent uproar over Facebooks unilateral change of their displays of personal information, or fittingly, information about connections between people. Dennis Jerz quotes Wired:
But as the Facebook example illustrates, privacy is much more complex. It’s about who you choose to disclose information to, how, and for what purpose. And the key word there is “choose.” People are willing to share all sorts of information, as long as they are in control.
When Facebook unilaterally changed the rules about how personal information was revealed, it reminded people that they weren’t in control. (Bruce Schneier: “Lessons from the Facebook Riots”, Wired, Sept 21 2006)
My initial reaction to seeing my face collected in a public list of “readers of this site” was anger because I hadn’t chosen that. MyBlogLog was using my personal information in a way that the site had not informed me of when I signed up. Thinking more about it, I think such things have further ethical ramifications that we should be wary of - do we really want to live in a society where our everyday movements are so carefully tracked that everything we do can be interpreted? I like living in a world where I can read a book or a blog or walk into a specialised shop or talk with a person without that being logged and displayed to the world as though it were a political statement or a gesture of support for whatever that book or blog or newspaper or shop argues or stands for.
This, perhaps, is the true meaning of privacy: the right to choose which of your actions are up to public scrutiny. Or at least to know when you’re entering a zone in which your actions are public. If I assume that every blog I read is tracking and publicly displaying the fact that I have read, I’m going to read very differently, and perhaps not at all.
So you know how some of you have had trouble with getting 500 Internal Server errors when you post comments? I’ve had the same trouble sometimes when posting - and when I’ve done so the problem has always been solved when I replace certain URLs in my post with tiny-URL translations of the URL. Which is weird.
I finally asked the IT department to try to figure out what was going on, and it turns out they’ve been using a spam filter at the server level to limit blog comment spam - and blogspot.com and typepad.com were on the blacklist because so much comment spam comes from blogs at those URLs! So any post or comment with a link to blogspot or typepad was causing a 500 Internal Server error. Obviously, a lot of excellent blogs blog at blogspot and typepad and so that caused trouble. This might also explain why people like Martin, who would have typed in his URL as being at blogspot, was always, always rejected. Super-sucky. But at least it wasn’t bad breath, Martin.
The friendly IT person I talked with characterised this as “a little strict” and has removed the spam filter to see how things go. I don’t know that that’s a great solution either, though - I mean, I’m very happy with my spam filter, Aksimet, which works wonderfully and has stopped nearly 20,000 spam comments since I installed it a few months ago. But other people setting up blogs at the university’s web hotel might not have spam filters - and that might cause trouble.
Mind you, Aksimet has stopped a thousand or so spams a week even WITH ModSecurity, the server-side spam filter stopping blogspot and typepad blogs. So obviously the ModSecurity and its blacklist simply isn’t good enough.
And may I apologise to anyone who’s not been able to post comments here - I’m really sorry! Hopefully it’ll all work now.
I just ordered a pack of free Flickr business cards - business cards, obviously, need some updating, and these guys reckon one way is for them to have individualised photos on the front, and the Flickr logo and up to six lines of text of your choice on the back. I don’t think I could really use a Flickr-logoed business card for work, but the idea of giving people your photos like that is quite appealing. Though do we need more things when we already have all the photos at Flickr?
They’re offering ten freebies to the first ten thousand Flickr Pro users to order them - so if you’re curious and have a Flickr pro account, go check it out!
Have you seen mybloglog.com? It’s a site that provides stats about your blog and that also has a social network thing set up. I can upload my photo and specify that I read Boing Boing or Water Cooler Games and from there, others can see I’m “in” those “communities” and so on. I’m not too enamoured of those features, but the stats are kind of useful. For instance, I saw that someone had clicked on a link to how to reference video games I’d forgotten about, but when I went to look at it, the link was broken - so I fixed it. That’s nice.
Anyway, I was reading Loic le Meur’s blog (he founded ublog.com, which hosts 15 million blogs, and runs Six Apart’s European division) and suddenly as I scroll down the page I saw my own face there, under “Recent Readers”. The face image I uploaded to MyBlogLog.com. OK, that’s kind of a cool gimmick, but I didn’t sign up for my face to be shown each time I read a blog. I mean, I don’t care either way whether people know I read Loic le Meur’s blog, but there are certainly websites I visit that I do NOT want my image permanently afixed to so everyone who visits that website thereafter can see that I was there.
So I went to mybloglog.com to figure out how to opt out of this. But they don’t mention the feature on the site, as far as I can see - not in the FAQ, not in the Privacy Statement, not in the Help. Perhaps they’re still developing the feature and haven’t released it generally. The official blog about MyBlogLog.com also has the feature, with a slightly different layout, but I couldn’t find instructions on how to install it or any discussion of privacy and ethics.
At Zenrob, I found a post that raised concerns that the Recent Reader Widget, as it’s apparently called, attracts spam. One of the “recent readers” on his site was a picture of two women kissing, which leads to a sexually explicit blog. Zenrob found the link to their site inappropriate content for his blog. Now imagine that blog has the Recent Reader Widget too - if I click on any link leading to their site, knowing its content or not, my face will be shown to future readers of the site as a reader. Do I necessarily want that? The rhetoric of it is that I’m a supporter of their content - the header for Scott Rafer’s Reader widget is “MyBlogLog has a posse…”. Simply by reading his site with the MyBlogLog cookie on my computer, he adds my face and identity to his “posse”, to his list of supposed supporters. That’s like forging my signature on a petition just because I happened to pass by.
For now I guess I’ll just stop allowing cookies from MyBlogLog.com - they do have an opt out for data-collection, which stops your face showing up, although they don’t make it clear that this is what you’re opting out of.
One of my advisees is defending his MA thesis today. I hadn’t realised, before becoming an advisor myself, that advisors get a bit nervous about this too. At our university the advisor is always in the three person committee that discusses and grades the thesis, which is good because the advisor can often clarify things for the other members, and because it’s often good for the candidate to have at least one person they know reasonably well in the oral defence. It’s also bad, or at least hard, because when you’ve read all the bits of a thesis a zillion times as it was being written it’s very, very hard to form a clear, objective opinion of the finished product as a whole. I imagine this is why the University of Oslo has exactly the opposite policy to the University of Bergen, and bars advisors from being in the committee that grades an MA thesis.
The earliest known journalistic product was a newssheet circulated in ancient Rome called the Acta Diurna. Published daily from 59 BC, it was hung in prominent places and recorded important social and political events. In China during the T’ang dynasty a court circular called a pao, or “report,” was issued to government officials. This gazette appeared in various forms and under various names more or less continually to the end of the Ch’ing dynasty in 1911. The first regularly published newspapers appeared in German cities and in Antwerp around 1609. The first English newspaper, the Weekly Newes, was published in 1622. One of the first daily newspapers, The Daily Courant, appeared in 1702. (”Journalism.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 20 Sept. 2006
.)
If blogs really do spell the end of newspapers, as many journalists seem so intent on worrying about, future editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica will explain that the first known blog was a newssheet circulated in Ancient Rome called the Acta Diurna. Heh.
Mind you, the Wikipedia doesn’t call the Acta Diurna journalism at all. (PS: I’m not using encyclopedias as references in my research, just as a starting point ;)
Interface and Society is a conference and exhibition in Oslo that I’m going to have to try to get to:
INTERFACE and SOCIETY investigates artistic strategies and practices which deal with and build upon the transformation of our everyday life through information technology and electronic interfaces.
The program sounds interesting, and I bet the exhibition will be good.
Ah, another round of this discussion - how should we react when students cite the Wikipedia in papers? I used to say no, you can’t, not unless the fact that it’s the Wikipedia is the point of your argument. Then I eased up a bit, but after spending the last couple of weeks editing the Wikipedia a fair bit, I’m disillusioned (though still in love with the thing) and feeling strict again.
A few months ago, Alan Liu sent out a draft of guidelines for students wanting to use the wikipedia, which just reached Fibreculture. Alan gives two main reasons to be careful quoting the Wikipedia:
I mostly agree, so far, and am especially glad to see the first point - really, encyclopedias aren’t sufficient references for research papers, whether they’re the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Wikipedia - but there are other issues Alan Liu doesn’t cover that have become more and more foregrounded to me in the last weeks while I’ve been editing the Wikipedia:
I’ve been working some on the lonelygirl15 article in the last weeks, and it certainly suffers under this. Lonelygirl15 is a current, pop culture, technological event and so a prime example of where the Wikipedia shines. The Wikipedia entry is clearly the most comprehensive online - newspapers articles don’t try to tell the WHOLE story, and blog posts are even more fragmentary. A very large number of people helped write (are still writing) the article and there’s a lot of activity on the talk page. But because everyone wanted to add something, the article has a lot of that “list of trivia” quality to it. The discussions about writing the entry are really rather dysfunctional - the “talk” page for the article is just another wiki page and despite conventions about how to show threads of an argument and so on the interface isn’t ideal for organising a discussion.
For instance, the article about “ergodic literature” really sucks and would directly mislead students - a couple of weeks ago it largely consisted of a list of “examples” that quite obviously are NOT ergodic literature. Looking at the “talk” page for the article it’s clear that nobody editing the article had actually read the book where the concept is introduced and defined - editors were saying hey, look, I found something by this Aarseth geezer online that says it’s the first chapter of a book about this, someone should read it and integrate it into the article. Having read the book and taught the topic, I put an hour or two’s work into trying to fix up the entry, but writing a good solid encyclopedia article is a LOT of work, and it’s really not in proper shape yet. I did at least put a tag on it showing that it’s not accurate - that’s one great thing about the Wikipedia, there are lots of ways of showing that an article is contested, or inaccurate, or unsourced, or incomplete. danah boyd wrote once that as an undergrad she contributed lots of articles to the Wikipedia simply based on excerpts from her first year sociology textbooks - a lot of the articles sure read like that’s what happened.
I found an article by Philippe Lejeune, the prime theorist of diaries for the last several decades and author of the first scholarly monograph about online diaries, “Cher écran”: Journal personnel et ordinateur. Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2000, asking “How do Diaries End?” This one is translated into English (yay) and you can find it in the journal Biography 24.1 (2001) 99-112. I’m sorry about the limited access, it’s only available for subscribing libraries. The article’s useful for thinking about blogs - I wish Technorati would track the ending of blogs as it tracks their creation.
Lejeune found four main kinds of deliberate or considered ending, keeping the simply-stopping-writing (the most common) apart:
a) a voluntary and explicit stop (to a journal that has not been destroyed);
b) the destruction of a diary (an energetic and definitive closure);
c) a rereading (subsequent annotation, table of contents, indexing);
d) publication (a transformation that assumes some sort of closure). (100)
All these could be translated easily to blogs. And as Lejeune writes, the ending of a diary is far more fraught than its beginning:
What a contrast between the simplicity of a diary’s beginning and the evanescence of its ending: the multiple forms ending can take (stopping, destroying, indexing are all different, even opposite actions); the uncertainty of point of view (is the ending the act of the person writing–and at what moment of writing?–or of the person reading?); and the impossibility, most of the time, of grasping this death of writing. (100)
Think of all the blogs you’ve read which have simply stopped being updated. Sometimes the blogger explains why, sometimes she just stops. Sometimes she returns, sometimes she explains her absence. Sometimes not.
Now let’s get back to the rituals of closure. They are part of the virtual structure of a diary, which I will call a “shuttle,” an oscillation between the past and the future. They partition off the past, like lowlands reclaimed from the sea and protected by dikes; and this structuring and protective operation that I undertake today with respect to yesterday seems to be the model of the operation that I will perform tomorrow on what I have written today. This is because the diary is not only the recording of successive presents, opening onto an indeterminate future fatally closed by death. From the beginning, the diary also programs its own rereading. It might in fact never be reread, but it could be. It’s like a radar signal that you project towards the future and feel strangely coming back to you. Without this presence of the future, you [End Page 102] wouldn’t write. The diary no longer leads to the contingency of an absurd ending, but toward the transcendence of one or several future rereadings. You don’t imagine it finished; rather, you see it reread (by yourself) or read (by another).
Unlike paper diaries, blogs are intended to be read not only by our future selves but by others as we write. Does the presence of the actual reader (indicated by statcounters, links and comments) substitute for the presence of the future, or do we still create our blogs partly as little time capsules sent to ourselves? I wonder whether my main target audience might be myself? I reread my blog constantly, especially the most recent posts which are visible whenever I check on it, but also to find specific things I wrote about, or sometimes to see what I was thinking at a particular time. I’ve never read it all in order as I sometimes read through old paper diaries.
All journal writing assumes the intention to write at least one more time, an entry that will call for yet [End Page 100] another one, and so on without end. (..) To “finish” a diary means to cut it off from the future and integrate that future in the reconstruction of the past.
There is so much in this article that fascinates me - the description of a writing that oscillates between an end and continuation - the Aristotelian story arc hastens us towards an end (death, Lejeune writes; I suppose wedding bells is another conventional option for ending a story) but the diary resists it by always intending another entry.
Or look at this comment on the fragmented form of diaries (and blogs):
It is often said that the diary is defined by a single feature: dating. Chronological order is its original sin–and ours. Certainly, the diary is also a form of fragmented writing that can be compared (and associated?) with other fragmentary genres, such as lists or musical variations, which have various [End Page 104] relationships to the notion of an ending. But with the diary, it’s different still, for at the end of it all, the idea of what comes next protects us from the idea of the end. If this is an illusion, is it any different from the illusion that gives us the courage, day after day, to live out the rest of our lives?
Then again:
People who remain faithful unto death to one and the same diary are rare. You keep a journal for a week, six months, a year, for one reason; fifteen years later, for another reason, you stop and start up again with a very different kind of journal, and so on. These are relationships, passing fancies. There are periods with a diary and periods without. Keeping a journal is often an activity for periods of crisis: discontinuity is typical. Discontinuity, for that matter, is part and parcel of the diary’s rhythm. (105)
Lejeune concludes by defining four reasons to write a diary (though he points out there are also other reasons. In brief:
Are these valid for blogs, as well? For diary-style blogs, certainly, and they are the most common kind of blog. Finally (I know, I already wrote “he concludes”, but here’s the real end, or the second last paragraph anyway) he writes:
Let me sketch, at random, a few accounts of how diaries are ended. Sometimes you feel your diary is atrophying, unraveling, dissolving. You keep it with less conviction, and then you are fed up with it, you are dismayed at the results, disgusted with the repetitions; you are amazed at having been able to maintain it, and you wake up from it as if from a dream. It is because you have changed. Something has died in you–perhaps a virtual addressee, of whom you were not even aware, but whose disappearance has made the edifice crumble. Or, on the contrary, the diary dies a violent death because it has met an unwanted reader. The adolescent trauma of having your diary read by someone close to you can ruin any possibility of personal writing for years, sometimes forever. Or, in a different manner, here is the closure of a diary used as a constraint on writing: I need to wrap up this diary, which depicts a particular slice of my life, before next Sunday, or exactly a month from now. The anticipation of an ending involves the diarist in what might seem the very opposite of the ordinary practice of keeping a diary: the work of composition. I have done this work more than once, both when I have kept diaries destined for public consumption, for example as part of Le Moi des demoiselles (about nineteenth-century young girls’ diaries) or of Cher Écran (about online diaries on the web), but also in private, in my personal diaries. You sail freely through the surprises of everyday life while maintaining a course for the punchline up ahead. It’s very stimulating. And anyway, doesn’t this taste for wrapping up appear at the most elementary level when the diarist carefully polishes the last line of an entry?
As for me, I’m enjoying blogging again as I haven’t in a long time, so I’ll be balancing that line of ending and continuing for a good while yet.
I spent a while this morning hunting for the full text of Brecht’s article about radio from 1932 - the one where he points out that’s there’s no technological reason why radio should be a mass medium rather than a peer-to-peer form of communication. While are most radios crippled so they can only receive and not also send? Not because of technological necessity, anyway. Brecht wrote:
[R]adio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction.
I’m a little disappointed, really, upon looking this up, that the original article isn’t longer than the measly two pages I found - why didn’t Brecht mention ham radio? Why couldn’t he have, oh, I don’t know, done some awesome brechtian theatrical intervention involving epic theatre and Verfremdungseffekt and peer-to-peer radio.
Imagine Lonelygirl15 with Verfremdungseffekt. What would Brecht, alive today, have done?
(Read below the fold if you want to follow my hunt in the library for the original source for Brecht’s essay. No more lonelygirl musings, unfortunately) (more…)
Ever wondered whether you’re breaking DRM legislation or now? Even the experts don’t quite know what’s legal, as this recent Norwegian survey shows. I translated the results into English for your reading pleasure; for the Norwegian original follow that link.
As Jon points out, it’s a wonder even half of teenagers know what “illegal downloads” is supposed to mean. Oh, and Norwegian law differs somewhat from other countries’ laws, just to complicate things.
| Cultural dept | Jon Bing (IT law professor) | Kripos (Police) | IFPI (film and music industry) | EFN (EFF Norway) | |
| Arne’s three year old daughter doesn’t exactly treat the children’s DVDs Arne has bought with respect, and has rendered many of them unplayable. So Arne has started making backup copies of his DVDs right after he buys them, before giving them to his daughter. Because Arne’s not very good with computers, a friend does this for him. |
Permitted with limitations. | Unclear | Illegal | Illegal | Illegal |
| Arne has a lot of DVDs. When he travels, he transfers some of them to his iPod so he can watch them on the plane. |
Unclear | Unclear | Unclear | Illegal | Unclear |
| Arne has downloaded thousands of songs from various online shops. This has cost him several thousand kroner. Arne can’t make backups of all this on his own, but knows that it’s important to have a backup, so he archives his music on an external storage service (like mp3tunes.com) so he won’t lose his music if his computer breaks. |
Permitted | Unclear | Permitted with limitations. | Illegal | Illegal |
| Arne uses some of the songs he’s bought online as ringtones for his phone. |
Permitted with limitations. | Unclear | Unclear | Illegal | Permitted with limitations. |
| Arne’s mother got a new Creative player for Christmas. Arne hasbought a lot of music on iTunes that his mother wants to listen to. So Arne converts the music he’s bought on iTunes so it can be played on his mother’s Creative player. |
Unclear | Unclear | Unclear | Permitted with limitations. | Unclear |
| In the USA Arne bought a perfect children’s game. When he got home, he discovered the game couldn’t be played because it was for the wrong zone. So he wants to modify his Playstation so his daughter can play the game. |
Permitted | Permitted | Illegal | Permitted | Permitted |
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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