jill/txt

If you haven’t seen the Vote Different! viral YouTube video portraying Hillary Clinton as Big Brother out of 1984 (in a mashup of Apple’s 1984 ad) you should go see it - and then watch this video where ParkRidge47 a.k.a. Phil de Vellis, who created the ad, explains how he did it and what his ideas about viral, citizen-created political videos. A major concern about the video was that it was anonymous, which caused people to worry about a lack of accountability. De Vellis points out that there is a long tradition of anonymous and pseudonymous political speech in the United States, and also that “the system worked”, in that when his video became so vastly popular, people figured out who he was. He has some great things to say about the changing media landscape and its effects on politics.

Via the Norwegian YouTubeBlogg (which seems a good way to track Norway-related YouTube content) I found this video, posted by Datatilsynet as part of a campaign where they’re trying to make teens more aware of their privacy rights and of surveillance in everyday situations.

There’s a website for the campaign too: dubestemmer.no, which means “you decide”. Lots of comparisons - “you have the right to shut the door to your room” encouraging more awareness of privacy issues. I wonder whether it works? I find it striking that this is something we have to teach teens. Will they reject privacy as an odd historical concept? Privacy wasn’t a common right a few hundred years ago, or even a few decades ago, when the idea of a teenager having a room of her or his own would have been extraordinary. Or will there be a revolution against the extreme panopticon of surveillance today?

Here’s a nice list of some favourite pieces of digital literature over at PART.

A journalist from Aftenposten’s jobs and education supplement is about to call me to interview me about Facebook, so I’m checking up on some stats and such. And I had a geek at the interview about Facebook Bergen Student TV did with me and Morten a couple of weeks ago (see March 11, 2007) - they did a great job of editing it down, it came out excellent.

Students have been telling me that Facebook has exploded in Norway in the last month or so. Internationally, Facebook has also grown a lot recently - they had 6.5 million users in June 2006, before they opened the site up to everyone (even Norwegians and people not affiliated with a university or college) and they had 18 million users by February 2007. Alexa’s traffic ranking for Norway shows that Facebook is now the 18th most popular site in Norway, behind Gule Sider (10th) (the yellow pages, which also provides a good map search), YouTube (7th) and Myspace (15th) but well ahead of NRK (21st) or the University of Oslo (52nd) or University of Bergen (63rd). I can’t find a more recent percentage of college students in the US who are members than this one from 2005: at that point, 85% were on Facebook, which is an amazingly high penetration.

Facebook staff can even track people’s television habits and the commercial breaks based on activity levels on Facebook. Here’s a graph showing how Facebooks watch Grey’s Anatomy on Thursday nights.

I was lucky enough to attend a course on how to do a TV interview this morning, with a professional media advisor, hired by the University, who wants more of us to dare to say yes to doing television - I’m trying out some of her advice now on focussing what I want to say. I’ll tell you more about the TV course later, now I want to go out into the glorious sun!

[Update March 28: Facebook is now the 16th most popular site in Norway, by Alexa’s count.]
[Update April 18: And now Facebook is the 9th most popular site in Norway.]

Amazing how suddenly one can just not blog for a whole week, after blogging many times a day for a while. Most of the reason I didn’t blog was that we just spent three and a half days up at Hilde and Atle’s place in Sogn, where Hilde and I drafted the introduction for our anthology on World of Warcraft, and Scott finished his chapter and read our introduction for us. I really don’t spend enough time just exploring this beautiful country. I mean, I’ve lived here most of my life and still I hadn’t really grasped not only how close Sognefjorden is but how stunningly beautiful it is. Oh, of course I’ve seen it before, but after this trip I really want to spend more time there. So Scott and I extended our initial plan to take visiting family on Norway on a Nutshell before our wedding and have started thinking about a three day trip the week after the wedding, for those family members who are still around. It should be wonderful.

I was planning to blog the table of contents for the WoW anthology, but I’m going to wait until the final final drafts are in in a few days time so we have the final chapter titles.

Yesterday I got to be one of the parents to accompany my daughter’s class on their annual skidag or ski day. It was amazing. Norway is so beautiful, and skiing is so calmly pleasant, and kids are so happy and nice to one another outdoors in the snow. We skied for about an hour or so, then settled down and built a camp on an embankment, complete with fire, snow cabin and ski jump. Sausages were grilled and playing and chatting was enjoyed by all before we headed back to the car park and then to town. The photo shows the teacher gathering most of the class around her to give them some final instructions before we left our camp.

To my surprise, a google for skidag revealed that the University of Bergen has a ski day too, and they even lay on free skiing instruction - but only for students. Perhaps I should pretend to be one!

A tentative agenda is finally up for MiT5, and it has more parallel sessions than any conference I’ve ever been to. I mean, I know that the MLA and SIGGRAPH and such have 20,000 attendees, but I’ve always avoided them. I wonder what it’ll be like? Back in 1999 I was at a conference with two hundred or so attendees and nine parallel sessions (everyone attending presented), and quite a few of the sessions only had two or three people in the audience. Oh well, at least there’ll be lots of interesting people and some entertainment in trying to figure out which of ten interesting panels to attend.

That means my unofficial blogosphere version of the program only covers about a tenth of what’s going on. Yikes.

This blog post includes a link to the PDF report of a UK survey on what web 2.0 software and sites people really use - from Myspace, Flickr and blogging to World of Warcraft. A lot more people blog than play World of Warcraft. (via Magnus Enger)

Students have been telling me that Facebook seems to have taken off in Norway over the last few weeks. Alexa shows that it’s currently the 32nd most visited site in Norway. That means students use it more than they use the University of Oslo’s site (56th most visited) or the University of Bergen’s site (61st most visited), though hits to both those sites (and other university sites in Norway) combined might compare to hits to Facebook. I’m going to try to remember to keep checking the list to see how Facebook works out - will Norwegian students use it more than they use the official university sites?

Instead of waiting for the schedule to come up for the MiT5 conference (at MIT, April 27-29), I googled the blogosphere, and found the following participants:

• Scott Rettberg, Nick Montfort and I are doing a panel on “Appropriation and Collaboration in Digital Writing”. My bit is mostly about blogs.
• Derek Kompare on authorship. His blog has other interesting authorship and literature things, looks interesting. Mike Newman left a comment on this post that he would also attend.
• Jean Burgess writes that she , Axel Bruns and John Banks are doing a panel on “user-led content creation”. Jean’s work on quotidian creativity is great, and Axel does very interesting things about gatewatching, blogging, produsage and citizen journalism, so this should be good. Oh, look, I think Jean’s paper will be on Flickr, social aesthetics, and the reconfiguration of the relations between everyday life, ‘professional’ photography and artworlds.
• Luca Rossi is co-presenting a paper titled “Creativity, Ownership and collaboration in the digital age” (thanks Luca for adding this in the comments!)
• Kim Christen is doing a panel with on Technological Translations and Digital Dilemmas: Leveraging Culture for Heritage, Language and Policy Projects, with
  Kate Hennessey, Nariyo Kono, Patrick Moore, Jason Shultz and Katerina Martina Teaiwa.
• Paul Benson is giving a paper on Image, Network, Narrative: Creative Dispersion in the Novel of Digital Culture
• Casey O’Donnell is giving a talk on Mixed Messages: Independent and Collaborative Console Video Game Development
• Alec Austin is giving a paper on “Authorship in Interactive Media: Collaboration, Interaction, and User-Generated Content in the Games Industry”
• K. is doing something on remix culture.
• Mary Madden (Pew Internet & American life project), D. Travers Scott (communication, university of southern california), Chuck Tryon (film and media studies, Fayetteville state university), and David Silver (media studies, San Francisco, also founder of the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, which has the best collection of reviews of books in the field I know of as well as things like lists of course syllabi in cyberculture and so on) - here’s their panel abstract.
• Alice Marwick’s sidebar says she’s presenting at MiT5. Doesn’t say what on, but she’s “studying social technology from a feminist perspective” - sounds interesting.
• Jessica, whose blog is called “Replayable - stories : games : community” is presenting at MiT5 instead of going to the Ladies Rock Camp. I kind of hope she’ll rock the conference, too.
• Geoffrey Long is presenting a paper called “Radial Narrative Maps and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy”
• Mike Newman’s doing a paper called “The Community as Artist: The Show with Ze Frank” about the way web video exploits the architecture of participation (thanks Mike for adding this in your comment to this post!)

Ha, that was quite good fun. Do you know of any more people and presentations at MiT5?

My students generally have no idea what I’m talking about when I ask them to analyse a website or blog or work of digital art or literature. A close reading, I say, textual analysis, and I try to explain it but I clearly haven’t worked out how to get it across because most are just as baffled at the end of the semester (or in the next class they take with me) as they were to begin with. So I found Dr. Crazy’s very specific explanation of how she teaches close reading very useful, and I’m definitely going to try to adapt it for the kinds of texts I teach. Not just yet though - I’m actually done with classroom teaching until after my sabbatical - don’t worry, I have plenty of advising and grading left this semester, so won’t get bored or anything, but I organised the semester so that all the regular teaching was in the first half of the semester. The plan is that this will leave me time for all the writing I have to do in the next months. And the admin, of course, let’s not forget the admin.

I also tried Dr. Crazy’s grading sheets for giving feedback on student essay this week, and the students loved them! It made it really clear to them what they need to work on to improve their essays for the final portfolio. I liked the sheets because it helped me remember the main points I wanted to communicate to the student (hard to remember when you have 20 papers mostly on the same assignment, they all blur a bit) and it also helped me think about what is important in the paper - and as Dr. Crazy wrote, I think it actually saved a little time on grading. Made it clearer to me what I was doing, somehow.

Social network sites now have 6.5% of all traffic on the web, and is still growing rapidly, Hitwise reports. Here’s the distribution between sites:

(via Micropersuasion)

I like my university. Not only do they have Studblogg, they’re running a competition for the best student-produced 20 second YouTube-ready video promoting the University. I think this is my favourite so far, although there are others that would probably, well, work better, or that at least are closer to standard advertising techniques. Um. Well. Who knows, maybe this’d work? Makes me sort of inspired thinking of my next class, anyway ;)

The slogan read at the end means “The University of Bergen. We’ll beat knowledge into your brain.” Which doesn’t quite translate, it’s an idiom, funnier in Norwegian.

Inspired by Scott’s list, here’s where I’m planning on travelling this year.

• MiT5, April 27-29, at MIT (Cambridge, MA). I’m on a panel with Scott and Nick.
• ELO2007: The Future of Electronic Literature, May 3, MITH in Maryland. Personal Democracy Forum 2007 in New York. I’m on a panel about international electronic literature.
• Personal Democracy Forum 2007, May 18, New York. Here I’ll just be learning - I think all the things about political blogs and other online pursuits will be useful for my book on blogging.
• Digital Arts and Culture 2007, September 15-18, Perth, Australia. I’m presenting a full paper (I hope, I got through the first round of abstracts and I think the full paper I sumitted for the second round’s quite good), and I’m also spending the whole month of September in Perth, at Communication Studies at the University of Western Australia.

I think that’ll be plenty - am I missing anything important? I must say, though, I get conferenced out if I do too many conferences, and this looks like plenty, unless there’s something pretty close to home.

Oh, there’s also some recreational travelling I’m really looking forward to - a wedding (not ours) in Chicago, and a honeymoon (ours!) in Barcelona and that area of Spain. And yes, I’m carbon-neutralising all this…

I think I was born fifteen years too late to have an FTIC (Full-Time Intimate Community):

FTICs are the close group of friends (usually around 8-10 people) with whom you share presence. Most mobile youths know whether members of their FTIC are awake, at school, happy, sick, finished with their homework, etc. They use their mobile phones to keep in touch with their FTIC usually sending state changes by text message.

Joi Ito posted this, discussing something called Radar, which is supposed to let young people easily share photos as well as text with their FTIC. I guess these are the people Twitter is for.

I wonder whether my students have FTICs, or whether they’re too old as well? My ten-year-old doesn’t - well, not yet. She has MSN messenger (the pervasive IM in Norway) but it’s infrequently used. Her mobile phone is only dragged along when I insist. For now.