jill/txt

On Thursday at 1:15 pm we’re gathering masters and PhD students (and other researchers) who are writing about social media at the coffee bar at the University Library here in Bergen - look for a gang of social media types sitting round a table with a little sign saying “Social Media!” This first time we’ll mainly just try to get to know each other and talk about what we’re all working on - and of course figure out what the best way to proceed would be. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I think a lot of people are working on social media in very different departments without really knowing that there are other people out there. If you’re in Bergen and interested, do come. And if you know someone who should come, please let them know about it!

So the latest fuss in the Norwegian social mediasphere is about Even Sandvold Roland, an 18-year-old in his final year of high school who wrote a tweet yesterday evening complaining that he couldn’t buy a song legally in Norway that was available in the US. A representative for Norwegian Warner Brothers tweeted back somewhat too hastily: “I think you should steal it, then, and brag about it afterwards in your brat* blog. I don’t want you to be angry.” (He deleted the tweet this afternoon, but Jon Hoem (and many others) have screenshots.) Even Sandvold Roland wrote an excellent blog post about this, piles of Twitter users joined in the fray, someone wrote a post about it in English which landed on Digg, the Warner Brothers executive wrote an apology (published on Even Sandvold Roland’s blog), it was in the mainstream media by morning and by noon today, Even was being interviewed on the stage of the Norwegian Editor’s Association’s annual meeting. An aside: the program for their meeting is only available as a word file - how old media. Yet obviously they also have people who get new media and were able to twitter their way into getting the key player in this latest affair on stage so quickly - and look, the interview with Even Sandvold Roland and the debate following it is already online:

This is a fabulous example of how different the public sphere is today - and how out of control it can get. PR people often talk about how social media give them direct access to their audiences, allowing them to bypass the journalists who have their own agendas and of course the journalistic desire to emphasise conflicts and problems. This is an example of the opposite: if the record company exec had been talking to a journalist rather than firing off 140 characters from his sofa he would almost certainly not have called a would-be customer a brat. He would have moderated his tone and choice of words according to his awareness that he would be quoted.

I don’t really know that the record company exec was sitting in his sofa when he wrote those words, but I sort of assume so. It was 7:30 in the evening, after all, and the tone he uses is very informal. He shows no awareness of speaking in the public sphere - he’s writing directly to Even Sandvold Roland but the irony, one assumes, must be largely for the benefit of his friends.

He quickly saw his mistake. His next tweets attempt to modify what he said, and within three hours he’s written a lengthy apology for using such derogatory language, with explanations for why the music isn’t available in Norway - rights are complicated and Warner Brothers isn’t trying to aggravate people, he says.

And yet the damage is done. His apology is unlikely to receive as many Diggs as the intitial blunder. Perhaps we’ll simply all have to get used to a world where our mistakes are public. More and more young people simply say they don’t care that their future employers will see photos of them at parties or making fools of themselves. Everyone will have such embarrassments in the future; not having them would make you more suspect. Even in old media this may be the way to go. While previous US presidents pretended they hadn’t smoked marihuana (or claimed not to have inhaled), Obama published an autobiography admitting to his experimentation with drugs. And so nobody bother’s to kick up a fuss about it.

I’m not sure that will make the record company exec feel any better though.

* The original is drittunge, which is untranslatable, literally meaning “shit-kid” but in practice a word most often used scathingly by kids or teenagers to refer to annoying, grubby, younger kids.

Update: I like how Dagbladet has inserted a live Twitter feed of Norwegian tweets mentioning the word “Warner” in their article about the topic. Cool.

Update 2: I’m reading The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet and I’m feeling pretty bad for the record company guy - the internet can be so harsh. Not that it’ll make much difference, but I took his name out of the post. It’s available plenty of other places but at least I’m not adding to it quite so badly.

Queen was my first musical love - well, after ABBA, of course. I must have listened to Bohemian Rhapsody hundreds of times. Although the theme of the repentent murderer may seem odd for a fourteen year old to appreciate so greatly, the passionate cries of “I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all” were perfect for my teenaged angst. I must try to remember how normal those intense feelings are at that age as my eldest daughter rapidly approaches her teens…

Anyway, this wonderful cover version of Bohemian Rhapsody has been flying around the intertubes. It’s played entirely on vintage computers and oscillators and such - and “what you see is what you hear”. Amazing.

I spent two days last week at the European Journal of Communication Symposium 2009 - a fabulous little workshop that was held in beautiful Padua, half an hour away from Venice. Every couple of years the journal’s editors invite a group of scholars to a symposium on a specific topic. Everyone contributes a paper, much discussion and debate follows, and later that year, a special issue of the journal is published based on the papers given at the symposium. This year’s questions circle around the changes in communication as the audience become creators. Half of the participants were well-established nestors in the field of communications studies, discussing how old paradigms hold up or must adapt to new media, and the other half of us were something closer to digital natives discussing the specifics of new media communication.

The surroundings were splendid - Padua is one of the world’s oldest universities, and the seminar room was glorious, as you can see from Mark Deuze’s photo above (thanks Mark for documenting us!) Three hours in Venice en route to the seminar was also a fabulous experience - all the better for meeting there my Norwegian colleague Gunn Enli from Oslo (whose paper is about audience voting in shows like the Eurovision Song Contest and Dance with the Stars) and the intriguing and energetic EJC editor wrote about some examples here on my blog a while ago. I need to finish the paper by May 20, before I go to the E-Poetry conference in Barcelona, so I’ll be working hard on it over the next few weeks - and intend to blog about it as I go.

Right now, I want to finish reading José van Dijck’s Mediated Memories in the Digital Age and skim through a paper I just found - On the Design of Digital Heirlooms by David Kirk and Richard Banks. And think about the ways in which I want to organise the paper and my examples.

It was really inspiring to be invited to this workshop - it got me thinking again after being on leave, and I’m relishing the excitement of researching and writing about new ideas. And it was an honour to be invited to such an exclusive gathering. And now to work!