jill/txt:
december 2001
home: jill/txt
version 1.1d4
pompous twits
Sometimes people are so pompous. Intellectual and critical and embarrassed about any enthusiasm or emotion. From today's paper:
-The Lord of the Rings is a fairy tale inflated to absurdity! If we Norwegians had a stronger foundation in our own fairy tales, we might have had a stronger critical sense in relation to these excesses. (Truls Gjefsen, BT, p 23)
Yes, it's really shocking how all these people actually think they like Tolkien! A critical, ungenerous view of the world is so important to Norwegians, or at least to "intellectuals" I suppose, and I guess after all these years at a univeristy most of the people I know think of themselves as intellectuals. Here's a media studies man, Alex Iversen, (Torill probably knows him, he's at her college) who's embarrassed at his own emotions when the crown prince and princess were married some months ago:
-I sat and watched TV the whole of that day. I felt how I was pulled into it [revet med], how touched I was. Afterwards I've been extremely annoyed [kraftig irritert] at my reactions. [..] We all took part in a national event where healthy criticism of the monarchy state was laid dead, where we were ideologically flattened [overkjrt] by TV-romanticism. (Alex Iversen, BT 30/12/01, p 24)
I'm so sick of all this moralising. And really, fancy being embarrassed at having been swept up by emotions about two people loving each other, or saying that it's appalling that people like Tolkien! What wankers.
define international
Heard on the radio, about Christian Skau's weeklong sit-in in a shop window on Karl Johan: If this had been international, done in America that is, it would be seen as great art.
digital poetics
On my to-buy list: Loss Pequeno Glazier's new book: Digital Poetics. (via Hypertext Kitchen)
'objectivity' in online communities
The main problem with applications that map relations between and relative popularity of websites and users is that they claim to be objective. Google, for instance, argues that their search results are automatically generated and therefore better: "Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult." Blogdex's social network explorer is based on the same idea: use link information to map relations between blogs and to recommend other blogs the reader may like if she likes this site.
Blogdex and Google may create community among individually published sites. They interpret data intended for other purposes (links) to map connections and evaluate popularity and relevance. Websites that market themselves as online communities, on the other hand, request this kind of data specifically. Amazon asks you to rate books and reviews so that it can generate recommendations and build up links between customers. Sites like Slashdot and Plastic and Epinions and many others ask you to rank posts from other users and uses this information to filter posts both for you individually and globally for other users.
Cameron Barrett, of CamWorld, has written a short essay packed with ideas and links to things like these that actually exist in online communities - this is the field of online community management, btw. Reputation management is an interesting example - at sites like Advogato they use a trust metric where users certify each other as Apprentice, Journeyer or Master. Other sites let users give each other Karma points or call them friends etc. Cam writes about a lot of other systems too, the essay's worth a read.
Although these systems are fascinating, and often work well, there's lots of the slightly unpleasant feel of playground popularity contests here. With the infallability of the majority vote combined with Big Brother the computer. Every community, offline or online, has informal reputation management going on, but it's not absolute. And it looks different depending on where you're standing. Many of these automatic systems do enable that. But of course, they're never fully automatic: someone programmed them and chose the variables to be used.
Algorithms are always ideological! Machines are never objective!
ancestors
Teacher said today's homework was to find out where our families came from. I was eight and had already moved back and forwards between Norway and Australia four times. Desk after desk, row after row, my classmates told their histories: My grandparents are farmers in Sogn. Dad's from Asky and Mum's from sane. Mum says she thinks our family has always lived in Bergen. It was my turn and everyone's eyes were on me. My eight year old voice must have seemed too small for my words: Well we're from Australia but before that we were from Ireland and England and Mum says that a thousand years ago our village was probably invaded by Vikings so really my family's from here too just like you are.
I can't remember how it felt. I only remember that the teacher very quickly moved on to the next eight year old and that the rest of the lesson was about Sogn and Asky and not at all about Australia or Vikings. I remember feeling different.
Last night I watched the last episode of the BBC version of David Copperfield, where half the cast emigrates (or in Uriah Heep's case, is sent) to Australia. Feeling rootless and drawn between two continents myself the thought of my unknown ancestors sailing from Europe to Australia has a peculiar fascination for me. If I knew all about my ancestors, would the world seem whole? (ha) If I knew that there was nothing to know about my ancestors (they were farmers in Sogn for a thousand years) would the world seem whole? There'd be something else, then, wouldn't there.
imposed upon
Torill feels imposed upon by tools like the social network explorer. I think I agree. I prefer to choose what I read based on whether I like it on not rather than because it's on a top ten chart, and to write what I want without considering machine-readable popularity scores. Also it just plain doesn't work and ignores lots of actual links. Which may be because it's not finished.
review of the cybertext yearbook
Today the postie brought a copy of The American Book Review. They've got a cybertext theme of which Mark Amerika is the editor, and I've got a subscription to the periodical as payment for a review. Anyway, there's a rather nice review of The Cybertext Yearbook in here:
[T]he volume [..] seems virtually indispensible for both new entrants into cybertext (most essays are written in a very lucid, nonspecialist language even where they touch upon fairly technical matter) and hypertextual stalwarts.
So go and buy it. The Yearbook that is.
blurred concepts
One might say that the concept 'game' is a concept with blurred edges. --'But is a blurred concept a concept at all?'--Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?
Frege compares a concept to an area and says that an area with vague boundaries cannot be called an area at all. This presumably means that we cannot do anything with it. --But is it senseless to say 'stand roughly there'? (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §71)
cohesion
Cameron Marlow, who does blogdex writes that
thanks to tools like blogdex and daypop, i think that there is now LOTS of cohesion in the weblog community. for instance, when i first started crawling, the greatest number of an individual link i would find would be on the order of 5 per day. now it is not uncommon to find 30 or 50. this means that the blogdex index now is more like a billboard chart, posting popular links for the longevity of their tenure at the top.
Hm. I've noticed this. And while I'm not enough of a traditionalist to say that the old days were better I'm not convinced that "cohesion" is necessarily a good thing. Blogs are special because of their individuality and for the unexpected links you'd find there but not anywhere else. I suppose services like blogdex have a similar effect to news bureaus (Associated Press and their ilk serve the same news to hundreds of newspapers). Cameron the blogdex man (can't find his full name) is aware of this I think, writing in a comment to that last bit I quoted:
my hope is really that blogdex will eventually turn into a routing tool, connecting people with the weblogs that they are interested in. right now, it's a bit more like a funnel, but hopefully with the addition of some social network analysis we'll soon be in the business of connecting people.
social network explorer
The latest from blogdex is the social network explorer, which lays out the links between any registered blog and other blogs - links to the current blog, "friends" which are both linked to and have links from them to the current blog, and blogs that are linked, as well as recommended blogs based on these links. This reminds me of the web of trust and all that adjustive path stuff that happens on big sites like amazon and epinions and no doubt plenty of others (I haven't been paying attention to those sites lately) but it gives you that functionality with the freedom of individually published blogs rather than the very limited format of megasites and I love that!
The downside, potentially, I suppose, could be that it makes one aspect of popularity (links are only a machine-readable version of quality/popularity (which needn't be the same thing) though and certainly not an objective measure) very visible and that could make it harder to enter into blogging? Um, it could make blogs seem very cliquish.
Also it doesn't seem to pick up all links. I guess it's not quite finished yet - no official announcements about it on blogdex's main page.(via owrede)
cough
Sneeze. Cloggy eyes. Sleepy though I slept till noon. And I've got a lovely red nose from not being up to going to the shop (4 minutes walk away) to buy another box of kleenex. I've watched tv for hours (thank goodness for christmas and oodles of daytime movies) but my head spins when I open a book. Strangely reading blogs isn't too taxing.
SMS art projects
Lots of SMS art projects are described in this article in the Guardian Online.
what videogame character am i?
 I am an Asteroid.I am a drifter. I go where life leads, which makes me usually a very calm and content sort of person. That or thoroughly apathetic. Usually I keep on doing whatever I'm doing, and it takes something special to make me change my mind. What Video Game Character Are You? |
norwegian book on computer games
Eva Liestl has just published a book called Dataspill: innfring og analyse (Computer games, introduction and analysis), mostly intended as a textbook for undergraduates. Game studies is clearly the current cool thing for academics, as Susana's pointed out. And for teachers. There's stuff about problem-based learning in relation to computer games in the book too, according to the press release. I think this is probably the first Norwegian book specifically about computer games, though of course, Espen's Cybertext both discussed computer games and has given plenty of fodder to the game studies field. I wonder if this means there are actually a lot of students studying computer games now? Are there? I know we teach computer games here in Bergen, but elsewhere in Norway?
can machines roleplay?
It's interesting that the question with which Turing replaces "Can machines think" is (in my words) "Can machines roleplay?"
Perhaps that really is the most human of all our qualities (what a preposterous idea, most human?): our finely-tuned ability to roleplay, to pretend, to feign, to see the role we are expected to play (that of a woman or a man or a student or an academic or a lawyer or a tinker or a subordinate or a boss or whatever) and to play it convincingly.
See how neatly I've brought Turing back to my own research? I'm working on the roles our computers make us play. That is a lovely inversion of Turing's idea of having a computer play the role of a human.
poor turing
I vaguely remembered Turing was gay, but I'd forgotten he was sentenced to taking female hormones to "cure" his "disease". This is from time.com:
Turing remains a hero to proponents of artificial intelligence in part because of his blithe assumption of a rosy future: "One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, 'My little computer said such a funny thing this morning!'"
Unfortunately, reality caught up with Turing well before his vision would, if ever, be realized. In Manchester, he told police investigating a robbery at his house that he was having "an affair" with a man who was probably known to the burglar. Always frank about his sexual orientation, Turing this time got himself into real trouble. Homosexual relations were still a felony in Britain, and Turing was tried and convicted of "gross indecency" in 1952. He was spared prison but subjected to injections of female hormones intended to dampen his lust. "I'm growing breasts!" Turing told a friend. On June 7, 1954, he committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide. He was 41.
Reading his article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", I'm so enjoying his dry humour that seeps through the very formal structure of the article.
A is liable to believe 'A thinks but B does not' whilst B believes 'B thinks but A does not'. Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.
or,
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do, or rather because, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, slipshod fashion, taking risks. Perhaps I say to myself, 'I suppose the voltage here ought to be the same as there: anyway let's assume it is'. {p.451} Naturally I am often wrong, and the result is a surprise for me for by the time the experiment is done these assumptions have been forgotten. These admissions lay me open to lectures on the subject of my vicious ways, but do not throw any doubt on my credibility when I testify to the surprises I experience.
In an email, Jesper also pointed out that the "women are X, men are Y" perceptions in our culture are, to say the least, ambiguous. For instance:
Kvinder er mest kosmiske, cykliske, mest naturlige.
-Kvinder er cyborgs og dermed mest konstruerede.
-Kvinder er mest kulturelle (tj, teater) og dermed mest konstruerede.
-Mnd er mest teknologiske etc.. og dermed mest konstruerede.
[Women are more cosmical, cyclical, and so more natural.
Women are cyborgs are thereby more constructed.
Women are more cultural (fashion, theatre) and thereby more constructed.
Men are more technological etc and thereby more constructed.]
And of course gender is constructed and not biologically determined. It's important to be aware of how it's constructed.
fighting fire with marshmellows
"Fighting fire with marshmallows, sand or rain might be the better solution." An original way of fighting terrorism, cited by Caterina. As long as the girls had a say in all this, it sounds rather ingenious.
god jul!
It's not quite Christmas yet, but here are two cute greetings for you: a snowball fight for gamers (thanks Jeremy!) and an angel for people who might prefer interactive narrative (thanks Elin!)
I like these little shockwave snippets. With both these there's a moment of puzzle until you figure out what to do - obviously you have to click something. In the snowball fight your team's pants are knocked off until you get the hang of it and in the dreaming angel there's a horrible bug that crawls over eats something I didn't even realise was a halo at first - and I made that happen to such a sweet little girl in a beautiful card just by clicking! My mouse controls a small winged creature - good or evil? a moth or a stinging wasp that my mouse controls? Everything ends well if you keep at it for a minute or so (hint: you're not done till the card fades away) but an edge of unease remains from the mixture of beauty and the grotesque, of evil and innocence.
gender in the turing game
Apropos my response to the response I told you about yesterday, I've been reading Turing's classic article "Computer Machinery and Intelligence" (Mind, October 1950 and of course it's on the web too.) Yesterday I wrote that Turing's imitation game sounds sexist, at first glance. I don't think I'd call it sexist, but the use of gender here is worth more attention. Here's the passage (and it's quoted almost in full in Sack's response to my essay about Online Caroline)
The new form of the problem can be described' in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game'. It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either 'X is A and Y is B' or 'X is B and Y is A'. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:
C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?
Now suppose X is actually A [the man], then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C [the interrogator] to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be
'My hair is shingled, and the longest strands, are about nine inches long.'
In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B [the woman]) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as 'I am the woman, don't listen to him!' to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks.
We now ask the question, 'What will happen when a machine takes the part of A [the man] in this game?' Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, 'Can machines think?' (Turing, 1950, pp. 433-434)
Sack rather cleverly constructs himself as interrogant (C), me as the woman (B) and Online Caroline as the machine pretending to be human (genders are reversed there). He uses this to make some good points about real/not real/constructed etc. More on that later.
Today: gender. I'd never realised that the Turing game isn't really about seeing whether a computer can pretend to be a human. Yes, he starts by asking "Can machines think?" but quickly replaces this question with the problem posed above, basically, whether a computer can convince a human that it (the computer) is a woman.
Why bring gender into it?
The woman's goal, in the Imitation Game, is to help the interrogator identify her as the true woman. The game forces her to act out the role of woman, a role society would have us believe is natural for women. So we could view the game as radical and subversive by questioning the naturalness of "woman" as a category. The machine's goal is to be so artifical that it convinces the interrogator that it is not only human, but a woman. A woman because it is easier to feign the role of a woman than that of a man? A woman because "woman", in our culture, is more "natural" than "man"?
Note to self: think more about this.
blogging journey
Mark Bernstein's a visiting fellow in Singapore for the next month and I'm really enjoying following it in his blog. I like blogs :)
enforced breaks
And in celebration of Back To Work week, I've introduced MacBreakZ, and set it to "enforce breaks" mode, ten minutes break for every ten minutes typing. (stop that sniggering! sure I can do that!)
2 good women, 13 good men?
Only two women among the fifteen nominees for best blogger of the year? Hm. (via Torill)
left hand right hand
Computer keyboards are discriminatory towards right handed people, according to the extraordinarily dystopic RSI Recovery Book. The number pad, the control key, enter, all that. That's on windows machines though. On my Mac I use my left hand constantly. The apple and option keys (like control and alt on PCs) are left of the space bar (and there aren't any duplicates on the right hand side because it's a laptop) Apple-W to close a window, apple-Q to quit, apple-C, -V and -X to copy, paste and cut, apple-F to find, apple-G to find again, apple-A to mark all, apple-Z to undo. There aren't any keyboard shortcuts on the right hand side, are there? Oh, some finder commands, but they're the sort you use rarely. All the advice on RSI says to save your mouse arm and use keyboard shortcuts - well, I do, and no wonder I got tendonitis in my left arm rather than my mouse arm.
I need a new keyboard.
useful mailing list
Just about every announcement in existence about new media related conferences, job openings, funding opportunities, events, publications and talks finds its way to the newmedia-ann list.
the risk of the personal
Last summer I wrote an essay on Online Caroline for an anthology Noah Wardruip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan are editing. The anthology looks really good. Noah and Pat have got all the contributors to respond to each others essays, and then the original authors are supposed to respond to the responses in a capstone piece. I've only just been sent my responses - one is fairly straight forward, but the other, by Warren Sack, is outrageous, and almost as long as my essay was. It's a rather brilliant reading of my reading as an example of the Turing game, you know, where a human interrogant (the responder) tries to tell the difference between a machine pretending to be a woman and a real woman. I'm the real woman (possibly) and Online Caroline is the machine pretending to be a real woman.
It's amazing reading such a creative and thorough (no, um, it's gjennomført, what's that in English?) response to what I wrote. At first skim I was horrified and went all defensive - my god, he's questioning whether I'm really a woman or even a mammal and he says I'm displaced as a woman and he's even dug out, quoted and discussed something I wrote in a completely different context on the net in Norwegian which I always assume is as good as jibberish outside of Scandinavia and Safe From International Attention. Now I've actually read it a few times and I'm fascinated by it. I have a thousand things to say about it. A lot of things about this whole "as a woman" thing and about the Turing game and so on.
I wrote the essay very much in the first person, using myself and my own reading of Online Caroline as my material. I wanted to clearly contexualise where I was writing from, to highlight the subjective nature of any writing however academic and I wanted an accessible tone, similar to the tone I use here on the blog.
Of course doing that is risky. I've obviously given Warren Sack plenty of fodder by doing so - and he does interesting things with it. Sack himself always stays "objective" and hidden and presumably safe - I don't think he uses "I" once. He does have a website (of course I googled him, he googled me after all), interestingly with a photo (he's offering evidence that he is a mammal, a human and a male) but nothing personal - only already published papers and such. My website has no photo but lots of informal writing that could no doubt be construed as rather personal. Are these just different ways of constituting some form of credibility? Which kind of website makes you believe more in the "real person" behind it? Do I, as a woman (ugh), put more effort into playing the role of a woman than a man need put into playing the role of a man? Do I, as a woman, put more effort into playing the role of a female academic (inventing the role of a female academic instead of playing that of a woman pretending to be a male academic) than Sack, as a man, need put into the role of a male academic?
I'm going to the library to read more about the Turing Game. Which I suspect is ruthlessly sexist in that deep taken for granted structural way. Has anyone written about that?
advertising america
Are they showing those post-attack TV ads for America where you live? I've never seen the USA advertising for tourists before, so I take it as a sign of desparation. There are lots of smiling service workers (waiters, bell boys, airline workers; the "authentic tourism" idea of seeing "real" America hasn't made it into this ad) and amazingly, there are presidential quotes, subtitled for easy accessibility for Europeans (or did some advisor recommend not showing Bush's face?) Take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed. (oh yes, that's my emphasis) Well, well, well.
hands
Did it ever occur to you that if you type lots every day your hands and forearms are actually quite strong and well-trained? And if you don't type for weeks you need to slowly strengthen them - by typing, but not too much at a time? Talking to my manual therapist made me feel like a professional athlete. And what a relief to have professional permission to type again.
personalities and generosity
Mark writes about disdain and arrogance and such:
The important thing, in my opinion, is to focus on ideas that matter without worrying about personalities and "ancestral worship". Scholarship -- helping readers understand sources and trace the genesis of ideas -- isn't worship. Nor is civility. Academic discussion has acquired an encrustation of formal courtesy not merely because scholars are pompous, but because formality helps keep personalities from contaminating our theories.
I think I want personalities to contaminate our theories. I think they always do, and I think that's part of the glory of blogs - blogs are after all, almost wholly character-based rather than plot-based, to speak in narratological terms (thought properly through, that idea might not hold water but lets leave it there anyway). In blogs personality and individuality (exhibitionism?) always seeps through. And in an interesting blog, there is a lot more than "just" personality. There are ideas and concepts that could not have been thought or written without that particular personality to write them.
I'm also all for academic (and general) civility and perhaps even more, academic generosity. There are many things about American culture that I don't understand, but one aspect that I love is the generosity and openness I've often experienced from American academics. I remember at Digital Arts and Culture in Atlanta I was amazed at the (apparently) honest and very personal praise with which the presenters were introduced. I've never seen that in Europe. We'll be all formal and polite but certainly in Scandinavia teeth are often gritted and we all have the basic tenet of the Jante law in our blood: don't think you're as good as us. Believing that makes you rather defensive. And usually not very generous. So we tend to assume that American generosity must be fake, brownnosing, self-serving. It might be much more fruitful to assume it's genuine.
That's another reason I like blogging. Blogs are generous.
on my screen
Been reading some new blogs this morning. Diane Greco's just started up. She writes great hypertexty stories and other things and, well, nice to see her "live" on the web ;) I've been enjoying reading Jenny Sinclair's blog Bloggetyblog since I came across it, too - how did I come across it? Was it the URL? Platypuses are such nice animals. Or should I say weird. Whatever. Jenny's a friendly Melbourne journalist I met once when she interviewed me - about blogs, mostly :) I wish my local Bergen paper would add a weekly column on blogs, like Jenny now writes for The Age... Anja Rau's blog Flickwerk is happy and alive and opinionated too. And then there are all the regular ones, there's a list down in the left column.
chatting with a body part
My arm's a bit better. I've been talking with it, you see. Arm, dear, what do you need me to do for you? My forearm is a violin with the strings too tight and wood that needs polishing and the scroll is a woman's head. She stuttered at first, not used to being addressed so directly: P-P-P-P-P.... I assured her it would be alright, she was safe to speak and she blurted out PANDEMONIUM in an endless stream of silent pressure waves in the air. Since then she won't speak to me, she just mutters that she needs to sleep. I've loosened her strings and polished the wood but she won't let me tune her. Still, my arm feels a bit better. I can type a little.
Sarna is a doctor who believes that just about all pain and disease, possibly including cancer but rarely broken bones, is caused by denying emotions. He's written a book about it that has unbelievable rave reviews at amazon. Not having read the book yet, I gleaned a lot from the reviews and from a transcript of a talk show he did. Apparently he reckons you get so hung up on not dealing with emotions that your brain actually shuts off blood to part of the body - an arm, for instance, producing symptoms and physical reactions that are equivalent to tendonitis. You *have* tendonitis, as I understand it, but the cause isn't your typing, it's your brain preferring to have a tangible thing to worry about (hurting arm) rather than an intangible emotion to deal with. Keeps your mind off what's bugging you, so to speak.
Hm. I do believe that the mind and the body are closely connected. It's obvious. Look at the increase in people with colds and low-level influensa after September 11, for instance (can only find a half-good link, sorry). But it goes both ways, I reckon. Sure stress can make your back hurt. But surely bad posture or lack of exercise or repetitive motions without enough breaks can make you more stressed, too - just as exercise can make you feel happier. The bits of criticism against Sarna I found before my allotted 20 minutes on the net was up pointed out that though he has a 95% success rate he screens his patients, refusing to see anyone who's not "susceptible" to his methods. Also that his approach amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater since it completely neglects ergonomics, exercise etc. Another thing that worries me is that if we assume that "it's all in the mind", illness becomes something to be guilty about. You're dying of cancer? That's your own fault for being in denial about your emotions!
I've ordered Sarna's book anyway. Some of his ideas appeal to me. Hm, I wonder what kind of pandemonium my arm has in mind?
the computer users plague
The Age: The Hidden Plague. I've changed doctors (I should have reported my old one) and discovered something called manual therapy which might be good. Acupuncture, ultrasound, alexander technique and healing have been recommended to me. My brother-in-law tells me that repetetive strain injury and chronic tendonitis are the reasons he's now studying music administration instead of being a guitarist. Imagine retraining to a profession without computers. I definitely need to find a different way of dealing with this.
I'll be offline for another week or so at least I expect.