jill/txt

We’re busy wrapping up our research stay in Chicago, and time is brief. Thursday’s meetup was great, with lots of interesting people. We met Julian Dibbell, who has not only read the galley version of Hilde and my World of Warcraft reader, he’s even endorsed it, which was excellent news. Bryan Campen, the organiser, not only consults for businesses doing things in Second Life, he also has a fascinating job as an interfaith mediator in various online communities, stretching from Facebook to Second Life, I thnk. He and his wife are also expecting a baby just a week before we are, so we bonded on that, of course. Several people from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Learning program were there, including Craig Wacker, who has a wicked sense of humour and came highly recommended by Linn Sovig, who met him at State of Play in Singapore. Ericka Menchen Trevino and I had a nice chat - she did her MA thesis on del.icio.us and the collisions of private and public people experienced there, which I found really interesting - especially given I just had the “what do I do with my baby links in del.icio.us” question pop up myself. And of course Jeremy Hunsinger was there - Jeremy’s so familiar a figure online that I was quite surprised to realise that the only time I’ve possibly met him physically before was at DAC at Brown in 2001.

This weekend we attended a twelve hour Lamaze childbirth class that was really very good - we were a bit worried twelve hours, two days, would get boring, but it was really worthwhile. We both agreed that we learnt a lot, and thankfully I feel a lot calmer about labour now. Yeah, it’s my second time so you’d think I’d know it all, but I gave birth to my daughter nearly twelve years ago, and I’ve forgotten almost all the details except my utter panic and horror during transition and pushing. The class has given us many more strategies for dealing with pain and panic, and I just feel much more confident. And very knowledgeable! Did you know that pleasure reaches the brain faster than pain? So if your partner massages you while you’re having a contraction, for instance, the pain obviously won’t disappear, but the pleasure can to some extent override it. Also, it’s been shown again and again that fear and tension makes pain worse. Not feeling terrified has got to be a good thing :)

This evening Scott and I are both participating in Steve Jones‘ grad seminar at the Communications Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago, talking about the diffferences - or not - between old and new media. Scott will talk about electronic literature as new/old media, and I’ll be using things from my DAC presentation where I discussed blogs in relation to old media ranging from Plato on writing, the introduction of the printing press and the mass media of the twentieth century.

Then tomorrow will mostly be about packing things up and shipping books home. Wednesday we leave Chicago, and Thursday we land in Bergen, and presumably, collapse, exhausted.

It’s been a splendid month. I’ve been mostly busy revising a paper that I’m going to submit to a journal, and just networking with some of the new media people here in Chicago. It’s obvious that we’ve barely touched the surface of all the interesting things happening here, so I hope we’re able to repeat this research stay here in a year or two. Additionally we’ve had a great time just enjoying life in Chicago - eating out, hanging out with friends and family. Scott’s brother and his wife took us to TRU as a wedding present, which was a dining experience to remember forever - I think we had nine official courses plus so many amuse-bouches and extras, over the course of five and a half deliciously pleasant hours. Around Bucktown, where we’re staying, we’ve enjoyed Spring (rather upscale and very delicious seafood), Cy’s (yummy steaks), the Charleston (the Monday night bartender is an avid political blog reader and contributor, though she doesn’t write her own blog at the moment), Goddess and Grocer (I love the veggie wraps for lunch), Psycho Baby and all the other trendy baby stores on Damen and Division (no we didn’t buy anything but loved looking), Olivia’s Market (I love the Grown Up Soda), Vosges chocolates (didn’t like the Woolloomooloo, but loved the Barcelona, and want to try the bacon chocolate), Soulistic Spa (I went to a few prenatal yoga classes here, and they were great, but strangely empty, only one other participant), and I’m sure there are lots of other places I love that I’m missing out.

I’ve also discovered that virgin mojitos are really, really good.

I have a problem. If you read my RSS feed you’ll know that it includes both blog posts and the bookmarks I post to del.icio.us. That’s great - and actually it seems more people click through to read the sites I bookmark than click through to follow links in my longer posts. Presumably that means people like the bookmarks.

But recently lots of the sites I bookmark are baby-related sites (did I tell you I’m officially in the third trimester now? Less than twelve weeks left!) as I’m reading up on how to make sure this baby learns how to sleep at night, unlike her big sister, who woke more and more frequently the older she got. At seven months she was waking hourly demanding more milk, until we finally successfully “ferberized” her, after a month of supposedly kinder methods that didn’t work. (Ferberizing worked beautifully and rapidly and everyone was much happier after just two days - including the baby.) The main thing I’m determined to do differently in parenting this time round is avoid teaching the baby to wake every hour to eat.

Anyway, the point is, most of you probably don’t want lots of links about babies’ sleep patterns in your RSS reader. For now, I’ve been marking these links “do not share”, so they don’t go into the RSS feed. But that’s really not a satisfying solution for a web 2.0 geek like me - I love to share things!

I had imagined I could have Feedburner splice all my del.icio.us links except ones tagged “baby” into the RSS feed. That would be simple and elegant. Except I can’t see a way to do that.

So what do you think I should do?

Marketing research apparently shows that people are multi-tasking more and more while they use various media. We already knew that, really, I mean, when the television or newspaper doesn’t give you all the information you want, of course you’ll check it out online. Our main other activity while using media isn’t blogging or googling, though, it’s eating…

I was surprised at the finding (opinion? I’m not sure) that

media that can target, be timely, and deliver value to consumers - such as coupons/direct mail, radio, yellow pages, newspapers and newspaper inserts - increased in purchase influence

Really? I always simply throw out that junk mail, and the horrible inserts that come with newspapers, yuck, they go straight in the recycling. I imagined that was everyone else’s response too.

Are “Bigresearch.com” simply trying to sell direct mail and waste paper, or am I a total anomaly?

OK, time to go read the newspaper while I have some cereal… (hey, it’s still morning in Chicago!)

Scott and I are going to be at the Chicago Metaverse Meetup on Thursday, which I’m really looking forward to. Jeremy Hunsinger is one of the organisers, and the crowd sounds great: people interested in online worlds of various sorts. They’re interested in the World of Warcraft Reader, so I’ll have to print out some of the flyers MIT Press sent us.

If you’re in Chicago and interested, you should join us!

Via Espen Anderson, I found this report about a recent study that seems to confirm some of my arguments in the talk I gave a month or so ago at Fleksibel læring, where I argued that young university students are far less digitally literate than we assume:

A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.

There’s also a Slashdot discussion about the article.

Espen’s daughter’s homework apparently, at least on some days, consists largely of searching for answers on Google. We teachers certainly have a lot of challenges in figuring out how to help students not only learn to find information but learn those critical and analytical skills that do not come automatically.

Minnesota-based Viking Magazine is doing a short piece about Facebook’s popularity in Norway, and emailed to ask if I could answer some brief questions - of course I can. And so I had to go re-check how many Norwegians are currently on Facebook. Using the trusty old method of pretending I’m making an ad targeted to all Norwegians, I found that there are 1,042,240 Norwegians on Facebook. Or at least, there are 1,042,240 Facebook profiles claiming to be Norwegians - a few are probably fake. There are 4 721 600 people living in Norway, according to Statistics Norway. Some are temporary residents who might not brand themselves “Norwegian” on Facebook. Accepting these inaccuracies, that means that about 22% of the Norwegian population is on Facebook. Not a drastic rise since October, but still growing significantly.

Like Jess, I find watching this map where wikipedia edits rather fascinating. Look how these edits pop up almost as fast as they happen. This is the same principle as the World as a Blog map*, of course, both visualisations being splendid ways of letting us see how we’re collaborating, now, in a sense, across vast distances.

I actually imagined that Wikipedia edits were more frequent than this map suggests, just as I found the World as a Blog’s reporting of blog posts surprisingly sparse. Indeed, the Wikipedia’s Recent Changes page shows more than 50 changes made just in the last minute. Clearly the WikipediaVision map leaves out a fair bit of the world, but even considering that, they must be using some algorithm that leaves out most edits in their visualisation. I wonder why?

*Which seems no longer to work?

We’re going to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play Tchaikovsky’s fourth symphony tonight, and I’ve been having a splendid hour or so exploring the symphony through the San Francisco Symphony’s interactive guide to the work, part of their Keeping Score: MTT on Music series. I played violin and viola for many years (until my friends went pro and started practicing six hours a day - I was never that disciplined about it), and the works I played in the youth symphony orchestra are still the works I appreciate the most. No wonder: I’ve not only heard them many many times, I’ve been part of an orchestra practicing and performing them - surely the best way to get to know music.

We never played Tchaikovsky’s fourth, but the MTT on Music guide is a good second best to having performed the piece myself. You can follow themes from each movement while reading parts of letters Tchaikovsky wrote to his patron, describing the programme of the music. Or you can read the score while listening to the music and having helpful markings show where you’re up to, in case you lost track. You can click on notes by the composer and have him explain bits, or listen to the ways in which themes are repeated and varied throughout the work.

I can’t wait to hear the symphony performed - my computer speakers are way too tinny for classical music!

I just found an article by Anne Krogstad analysing the way the Norwegian politician Kristin Halvorsen used her blog and other web-based media, such as online discussions with citizens, in the election campaign in 2005. One of Krogstad’s conclusions is that the blog seemed to work very well over “the long campaign”, but that in the more intense final stages of the campaign traditional media were used more heavily and seemed more successful. She asks whether this might be generally the case in the success rate of online, participatory campaign strategies.

Krogstad, Anne. “En bok, en blogg og en blondine: Personlig politisk lederskap i nye medier.” Sosiologisk Tidsskrift. 15(3):195−225, 2007.

The New Hampshire primaries were held today, and of course, who would make the best president is a frequent topic of discussion here in Chicago. I like both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Probably just as well I don’t have the vote because I’d find it hard to choose.

We watched the debates on Saturday and I was surprised to find that when Clinton got just a bit annoyed, everyone took that as a Really Bad Mistake. But she remained well-spoken, polite and articulate - I really liked her controlled anger. On the other hand, people loved it when she responded all coyly and fake-charmingly to the obnoxious question about what she thought of the objection voters apparently make that she’s not “as likeable” as Obama. “That hurts my feelings,” she said, sweetly cocking her head just a little, flirtatiously playing to the stereotypes of femininity as little girls are taught to do. What a fine moment, the commentators said.

And so although I’m possibly an Obama supporter I found myself pleased that Clinton won in New Hampshire.

Gloria Steinem writes in the New York Times today that gender is still a more discriminatory force in politics than race is: “So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was.” She continues:

[W]hat worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

Yes, the argument that it’s time to get rid of the dynasties of US politics is a good one (Bush senior, Bush junior; Clinton the husband, Clinton the wife: it’s more than ridiculous) but the power of finally having a woman president, a role model as powerful as that for the rest of us - that would be an amazing thing for the United States and for the world.

Mark Bernstein links to Shadow Unit, a new, hypertextual (and predominately textual) online serial fiction about a group of FBI agents that attempt to deal with “anomalous crimes”. Although the video shown to Esther Falkner, one of our heroines, is sneakily not described to us readers, it sounds as though these are crimes involving supernatural powers. It sort of reminded me of that bad guy in Heroes, Sylar. So far there’s just one episode up, about Esther’s introduction to the Shadow Unit. The hypertextuality is very basic, consisting solely of links from the characters’ names to profile descriptions of them. But it was fun to read and more is promised:

Next briefing in one week
Case files will be declassified beginning in February.

It was ten or eleven degrees centigrade below zero (14°F) a few days ago, but today it’s +16°C (61°F) and feels like spring. Apparently this will change very soon. I’d been warned about Chicago’s brutally cold winters, but hadn’t realised the city was quite this mercurial.

We’re enjoying being visiting scholars in Chicago so far. We have an apartment in Bucktown for the month, which is splendid, and have been walking a lot and using the “L” (the electrical trains that run above the streets) and buses, which is great after a week or so of little walking beyond getting in and out of cars. The University of Illinois campus was quite devoid of students last week, but I expect that will change. I was also surprised to find that the English department is housed in a skyskraper. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a university with skyskrapers before. The cool thing is that the offices (on the 19th floor) have far more interesting views than most university offices. Scott and I are both giving talks with Joe Tabbi this Friday, and we’re also participating in Steve Jones’ grad seminar on Monday the 28th. We spent a bit of time at the MLA over the Christmas break, meeting up with electronic literature colleagues. And we’re writing. Me, I’m revising a paper on self-portraiture online in blogs and elsewhere, and I’m also, I think, starting a new paper, of which bits will no doubt crop up on the blog over the next days and weeks.

The true story is an apparently somewhat nasty revenge story by a woman scorned (and she happens to be a soap opera star and he happens to be a famous composer), but the semi-fictionalised blog she wrote about her revenge, in the hope of getting a book deal, is quite amusing. At any rate if you have a Facebook account:

I drafted a list of questions to him and fired them off via Facebook, along with a poke and a hatching egg. There were already several messages from him on there, slightly (actually VERY) jealous that I’d superpoked three of my friends and sent four pastries and a video.

You can read the rest of her tale at The Facebook Diaries.

Robert Scoble has about 5000 Facebook friends and was using a script to get a “map” of all his Facebook network and data so he could move it to a different platform. He writes in his blog: “I am working with a company to move my social graph to other places.” Facebook responded by disabling his account, because he was, as Scoble quotes their email, “viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script”, and because, “This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.”

Now I can actually see why you’d NOT want automated scripts sucking up info about us off Facebook. I intend the information on my profile to be read by my human friends, not collected by computers and repurposed for unknown projects. Scoble seems to have been scraping information off his social network on Facebook for a fair reason, though: so that he can re-implement his social network on a different service. The information is, after all, his. Or rather, it belongs to him and his friends - and I’m one of his Facebook friends. So it sounds as though his script was saving information off my profile, too, for instance. I wouldn’t be OK with someone taking that information, much of which is only viewable to my friends, and reposting it on another website.

I don’t really know what Scoble was intending to do with the data. Probably his intents are entirely benign. He clearly sees this as an issue of data portability and of owning your own data.
But whose data is it really? The individual user’s - in this case Scoble’s? Only a tiny fraction of the data on Scoble’s “social graph” was actually created by Scoble himself. Facebook’s? Well, legally, yes, because that’s how they’ve written their terms of use. The reasonable conclusion, in my opinion, is that it should belong to the people who shared their information. Scoble’s “social graph” on Facebook belongs not only to Scoble, but to all 5000 of Scoble’s friends. And how on earth can you really get permission to copy and reuse the data from all these people?

It’s certainly very convenient for Facebook that protecting their users’ privacy fits simultaneously allows them to stop anybody from moving their data to another service.

Update Jan 4: Scoble’s been readmitted to Facebook.

Update Jan 8: Thomas Otter has posted a very interesting blog post describing how Scoble’s actions were in violation of European privacy laws.