jill/txt

Look at this! I think that the symbols on the blue banner, to the left of the word “Blogging”, may spell out my name. Or part of my name.

Does anyone read Korean? I can’t even figure out how to google to find out whether there’s a Korean webpage about the book. Silly illiterate Westerner.

We recently had great news: we’ve received nearly a million euros to fund a large, European project exploring creativity in the field of electronic literature. The project is led by Scott Rettberg and involves researchers from a total of seven universities in Norway, the UK, Sweden, Slovenia, Finland and the Netherlands. I’ll be participating as a researcher here in Bergen, working with Scott, a soon-to-be-hired post.doc. and a technician. There was an article about the project in the UiB newsletter yesterday, and our research assistant Elisabeth Nesheim has made a wonderfully clear presentation of the project:

Privacy of the Self
Originally uploaded by snappybex

Quite often I receive emails from high school students writing papers about blogging who have long lists of questions they’d like me to answer. Unfortunately I don’t often have time to answer ten questions in detail, but I do try to send some general suggestions and references. This morning’s questions were about guidelines for blogging and how some of Norway’s most popular bloggers follow them. The student plans to look specifically at the blogs of Regine Stokke (she’s the 18-year-old who recently died of cancer and wrote about her illness, bringing me to tears) and Voe (the fourteen-year-old I wrote about last week).

I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly listed guidelines for bloggers - I think that’s very dependent on context and on what kind of blog you’re writing. I’ve certainly discussed various guidelines, for instance in presentations like this one.

When it comes to personal blogs, I think there are three main kinds of guideline or ethical issues you need to consider:

1. Privacy - both your own and your friends’. How much information do you want to share? How much do you think its OK to write about your friends and family? Think about your audience, and your potential audience. Will your friends and family read this? Will they be able to recognise you or themselves? Will your teacher or employer read it? Would it bother you if your (perhaps still unborn) children read this in ten or twenty or thirty years? What about photos of your friends and family? (Thanks to lskwew for reminding me of this.)
   • Dooce was the first prominent blogger to be fired for her blog. I’ve written a fair bit about this in my book Blogging, but you can also find lots about it online, including her first post about it. In a recent article from Forbes, you can read about the continuation of Dooce’s blog - and about how she among other things decided to delete anything she’d written about her family that she wouldn’t have felt comfortable saying in front of a bunch of strangers. That’s not a bad guideline for blogging and privacy: don’t publish things you wouldn’t say to a bunch of strangers.
   • Justin Hall is another famous and long-term personal blogger. In 2005 he posted an emotional video explaining that he was quitting blogging because it drove his friends away from him. Since then he has begun blogging again, but in a much less intimate manner.
2. Advertising and disclosure The FTC (Federal Trade Commission, the US equivalent, more or less, to the Norwegian forbrukerombudet) recently issued guidelines for bloggers requiring them to say so if the products they’re writing about were sent to them for free by the company, or if they have been paid to write about something. This is still not required in most countries. In fact, popular Norwegian bloggers like Voe don’t necessarily disclose that they have received products for free. For instance, it’s not entirely clear from Voe’s enthusiastic endorsement of her OnePiece suit that it was sent to her for free, as this article in Aftenposten clearly states. She does clearly feel a need to defend her integrity in writing product reviews, however, as you can see in this post, “My opinions are not for sale“. In Blogging I argue that bloggers who aren’t honest about when they’re being paid will lose their credibility, meaning fewer readers and less advertising money. Anyway, if you’re a personal blogger and receiving freebies (and most personal bloggers don’t, to be honest you need a lot of readers to get to that point) you need to think about if and how you want to write about those products.
3. Honesty - how truthful do you want to be in your blog? There are plenty of examples of fictional blogs that have presented themselves as real. When readers discovered they were fictional, they felt cheated and became very angry (I’ve blogged about why readers get angry at this. On a smaller scale, most bloggers leave out the ugly bits and maybe play up the good stuff, as in the quote from Lars Tangen in this blog post. I’m not saying you need to be utterly honest (in fact, the more literary blogs get, the less factual truth matters, in my opinion, but you do need to think about this.

Do you think there are other ethical issues that personal bloggers should consider?

We have two PhD fellowships advertised right now, with a deadline of January 31. We’re particularly interested in candidates interested in researching electronic literature (perhaps in connection with our freshly-funded project on creativity in electronic literature), digital art, social media, gender and technology, the history of technology, computer games, blogging and related topics. While the positions are open to applicants within our whole department (including literature, art history, linguistics, classics and theatre studies in addition to digital culture), we should have a good chance of getting a PhD candidate accepted within the field of digital culture.

Here is the official advertisement, with a link to the online application system.

Norwegian PhD fellowships are renowned for paying as well as a normal job rather than exploiting graduate students: The fellowships are 100% positions with standard Norwegian health, social security and pension benefits (including, say, parental leave, a topic near to my heart these days) and they pay 355,400 kroner (US $55,000/€40,000) a year. You’re an employee, not a student, which gives you far better rights than a student has. You’ll have some travel/research funding assigned to you automatically - I think about 20,000 kroner ($3000/€2200) a year - and the opportunity to apply for more. These are three-year fellowships, where you do about one semester’s worth of coursework (attending conferences and seminars and writing a paper or two) and the rest of the time is reserved for dissertation research and writing. They’re open to applicants from anywhere in the world. You are required to have an MA in a relevant discipline, with a final grade of A (preferred) or B (acceptable if your dissertation proposal is excellent), or equivalent.

You’ll need to supply the following material with your application:

• Dissertation proposal, maximum 5 pages
• Bibliography for the dissertation proposal
• Time schedule for the completion of your project
• Maximum 3 page summary of your master thesis
• All diplomas achieved in higher education from university/college (scanned version)
• List of academic publications (if any)
• a cover letter

The dissertation proposal is the most important part of your application, and the main criteria for ranking applicants will be the excellence of the proposal. The committee has a list of items they’re supposed to rank from 1-4 (4 being best):

• Basic qualifications (i.e. your grade on your MA, and whether or not it was finished on time - make sure your cover letter either states clearly that it was or provides a good reason why it wasn’t)
• Project quality (originality, research question, hypotheses, is it solid, what’s the status of your knowledge at this point, etc)
• Feasibility (is there a balance between empirical material and theoretical ambitions? Are you likely to actually finish the PhD within the three years?)
• Research environment (is there support for this research topic among researchers already in the department?)
• Academic qualifications (published or accepted scholarly papers - this is not expected if you just finished your MA (though if you have anything that’s awesome), but if it’s been a while, the committee will be looking for evidence that you’re actually motivated to be a researcher and have been working at achieving this by participating in academic discourse.)
• Dissemination of research results (you’re supposed to say something about this; in practice it’s very hard to differentiate candidates based on this - but do try to say something)

It’s important to remember that the committee will have just one person from digital culture - the other members of the committee will be general humanities people, especially from literature (comparative and/or Nordic) and linguistics (comparative/Nordic/computational). That means you need to write very clearly, and work hard not to use jargon or assume that everyone already knows the field.

You’ll also need to name your supervisor at the department. This means you must contact one of us before you apply. Within digital culture, your choices are me (social media, blogging, narratives online, digital art, games), Scott Rettberg (electronic literature, digital art), Hilde Corneliussen (gender and technology, gender and computer games, history of technology) and Daniel Apollon (knowledge society, sociological approaches to digital culture, semantic web).

Internationally, it seems that the most popular blogs are about gadgets, technology, politics and weird web finds, at least if we can trust Technorati’s ranking list. In Norway, the most popular blogs are written by teenaged girls, like 14-year-old “Voe“, who’s the subject of a long and interesting article about the phenomenon in Aftenposten (if you can’t read Norwegian, you can get an idea of the content using Google Translate) Another extremely popular teenaged blogger is Lars Tangen, a sixteen year old who writes about makeup and the lifestyle of a gay, teenaged blogger.

I’m not sure why these blogs are so extremely popular in Norway. Voe apparently has 60,000 readers a day, which in a country of about 4.5 million people is astounding. There must be some kind of critical mass that builds and suddenly, hey presto, that’s what people in this culture think blogging is about. There has been a lot of media hype about the phenomenon too, and especially about how much money teens can (occasionally) make from product placement, ads and sponsorship agreements. I’m sure many teens are attracted by that possibility, no matter that most bloggers make nothing.

I love this quote from Lars Tangen in the Aftenposten article:

Det meste av det jeg skriver, er sant, men jeg forbedrer og raffinerer litt. En gang tok jeg på meg en bukse fra H&M og skrev at den var fra Gucci. Folk elsker å lese om noen som er bedre enn dem. Det er jo ikke jeg, men jeg later som. (”Most of what I write is true, but I improve and refine it a little. Once I put on a pair of trousers from H&M and wrote that they were from Gucci. People love to read about someone who’s better than them. I’m not, but I pretend to be.”)

In 2008, the Norwegian Bureau of Statistics found that 18% of 16-24 year olds had published their own blog in the last three months. That’s pretty amazing.

My belly has grown a LOT since October. Only a month left now and my little boy will be born! While he’s been growing, videos have been processed, and video of the talk I gave at the Wikipedia Academy in October is now online, nicely put together so you can see the slides and me talking. I posted a summary of the talk the day I gave it - my main argument is that the current community norms in the Wikipedia discourage experts from contributing their knowledge.