jill/txt

Hello. I'm Jill Walker, a researcher at humanistic informatics at the University of Bergen. This blog is bits of my thoughts about my research on electronic texts:
hypertext, net art,
games, stories.

Right now the blog is hovering between two languages, so some bits are in English and some are in Norwegian. I reckon you'll manage just fine.

[jill.walker@uib.no]

ISSN: 1502-8003

friday, september 28

Thank goodness the age of irony isn't dead! Read The Onion | America's Finest News Source, for gems like

Bush Sr. Apologizes To Son For Funding Bin Laden In '80s MIDLAND, TX— Former president George Bush issued an apology to his son Monday for advocating the CIA's mid-'80s funding of Osama bin Laden, who at the time was resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. "I'm sorry, son," Bush told President George W. Bush. "We thought it was a good idea at the time because he was part of a group fighting communism in Central Asia. We called them 'freedom fighters' back then. I know it sounds weird. You sort of had to be there." Bush is still deliberating over whether to tell his son about the whole supporting-Saddam Hussein-against-Iran thing.

My local paper today has a collection of forwarded email jokes and photos and SMS messages about the attacks and even (just to be sure) an academic telling us that it's healthy to make jokes. Yesterday "Lovely Linda" had a wonderful "dream interview" with Bush - the interview you've all been waiting to read for two weeks. Yes indeed, had he really said all that I'd be very happy :) Not so utopian (though not very realistic either I guess) is this AIM chat between Bush and bin Laden.

posted 15:16

wednesday, september 26

Her er linkene til foredraget på Deichmanske i dag: nettlitteratur: linker

posted 17:52

tuesday, september 25

To check out later (too sleepy to do it now): Laura Trippi's blog net.narrative - "The stream of postings reflects the rhythms of my research, divided between course development (at the moment, electronic culture, game design, and networked narrative); designing for online learning; and developing more effective networked platforms for research (hence the emphasis at times on such things as CSS and XML)." ("about"). Stuff here about "disentangling play from story" and "when watched blogs blink back". Oh the promise of good titles.

posted 23:15

not.so.soft [under.construction]: "a collaborative weblog exploring and chronicling culture and community on the internet"

posted 12:26

FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) have some good resources on the Media Bias on Terrorism.

posted 12:22

Found an email poem about the attacks, by Alan Sondheim - you'll need to set your browser to show this in a monospaced font, like courier, or cut and paste it somewhere where you can see it that way: the defile. It's tall, like the towers, falling letters, endlessly, almost, until they crash into meaninglessness. Take a look, too, at the images for Towers of Light, a suggested installation to "at once echo the World Trade Center Towers and serve as a votive candle in memory of lives lost while giving presence to the ongoing and heroic relief efforts downtown." They're rather beautiful. via the e-kunst mailing list)

posted 11:39

Jeg skal snakke om "Nettlitteratur: poesi og fortelling på skjermen" på Deichmanske bibliotek i morgen ettermiddag, i anledning forskningsdagene. Jeg gleder meg. Har aldri vært på Deichmanske (!), bare gått forbi og sett det staselige huset, og hørt navnet rulle seg på tungen min som et eventyr.I'm giving a talk on netliterature (I keep wanting to type net.lit, has noone done that yet? Well, it's among a long list of possible names for the work Alt-X and trAce awarded last year, and there's one of those web sites for publishing ordinary poems called net-lit. Nothing much else. Perhaps for good reason - the term net.art is pretty fraught, as another discussion on e-kunst is showing.) Um. Yes. I'm talking in Oslo tomorrow. What a non-translation that was.

posted 11:14

monday, september 24

Found another collegue weblogging this evening - Oliver Wrede is a German who right now is notable for intelligent thoughts about the attacks and aftermath (he was in NY when it happened and has some interesting comments about American media coverage) but he seems to be an information architect/net pedagogy sort of person - not quite sure, but he's got some stuff about blogs and teaching among other things.

posted 21:17

saturday, september 22

Wow. Google is indexing blogs daily! Yesterday I posted about that clichéd "Wanted dead or alive" thing that Bush said about bin Laden, and mentioned the "Wanted" poster New York Times printed and how it's all over NY and the Internet now, and Zizek's comments about the terrorist attacks being so shocking in part because they are fantasy come true (all those films and computer games of the WTC crashing, being bombed, etc) and that is the ultimate American (probably European and Australian too, we watch and play the same games and television after all) paranoiac fantasy. Oh and I complained about the simplistic rhetoric right out of a Hollywood classic that Bush used the other night: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." I'm so sick of all this black and white unnuanced rhetoric - and of course, it is largely from the movies. We can't see the world other than as Hollywood and its copycats have represented it for so long. Anyway. I deleted the post because I'd made it all about how that's America, which is nonsense, it's all of us, all of us media-addicted Western rich nations. We try to live in our advertisments in Norway just as much as they do in America. Norway always tags along in the same wars. And I bet if you ask starving families maimed in bombings by Western nations, they're angry with all of us undeservedly rich countries and not just with America. The world is a disaster. Utterly unfair and I've no idea how it could be made good for everyone.

But no matter all that: since posting that, about 200 people have visited this site because they searched for "bin laden wanted dead or alive poster" (My referral logs show me what links people follow to get here and if they come from a search engine, I can see which words they searched for.) Probably they were disappointed since I'd deleted those words by then (if you're looking for the poster, it's here, as a pdf) but it sure shows that google is a brilliant search engine! I'm impressed!

posted 16:44

friday, september 21

Gonzalo Frasca: How come simulation is a bad thing now but representation is not? Excellent post about Microsoft Flight Simulator being pulled from the shelves, media representation and fear.

posted 13:45

Here's an interview with Tamim Ansary, you know, the Afghan-American whose email about what life is really like in Afghanistan now has been forwarded to everyone. I've seen it on at least three mailing lists and received it from about four friends. The interview has some interesting points on how an email like this can become more important and more farreaching than reports in traditional media.

posted 11:09

thursday, september 20

"The fewer dogmas, the fewer disputes; the fewer disputes, the fewer miseries: if this is not true, then I'm wrong." Voltaire: A Treatise on Toleration (via Caterina)

posted 14:19

I got another one of those questions at lunch today: "Wouldn't you say that anyone who reads or writes blogs needs to get a life?" Jesus, I'm tired of that nonsense. So I'm supposed to defend the breed or admit I don't have a life. I asked him why on earth he'd ask me the question in that way, knowing that I write a blog, and he sort of tittered and said it was a neutral question. Yeah, sure it was. If he'd asked "what's so fascinating about blogs, anyway?" instead of making his "question" a moral judgement I might have answered.

posted 14:02

Palette Man is a very nifty tool for trying out colours that will look good together, and actually getting those #996633 kind of codes for them too. (via Elin)

posted 13:54

wednesday, september 19

Eirik Newth writes at Kulturnett about open source, copyright and of course, the unbelievable lethargy of mainstream publishers and authors . Thank goodness we have people like Eirik in this country. Not only does he write and say a lot of sensible things, he's also one of those heros with the stamina to keep at it in usenet groups like no.kultur.litteratur.diverse. These days, not many people have even heard of usenet, or "news", which used to be the backbone of discussion and communication on the Internet. His guide to e-books (in Norwegian) is excellent too.

posted 20:38

Torill on the development of a canon and about Gamestudies.

posted 13:19

tuesday, september 18

Det er håpløst
og vi gir oss ikke

(it's hopeless
and we won't give up)

(Jan Erik Vold)

posted 12:04

monday, september 17

Help build the Sep11 Attack Archive. The Library of Congress, webArchivist.org and The Internet Archive want to build a "solid historical record of this time" and are particularly interested in personal accounts of experiences, feelings or opinions. They're asking you to put a little link on your browser toolbar and click it when you see a site related to the attacks, and then their robots will archive it - with your comments if you want to comment on the site. That's a really smart way of putting together an archive.

posted 19:48

Yesterday Anne Britt Gran noted in a "kronikk" (not online) in Bergens Tidende, my local newspaper, that the arts and culture section of the newspaper was the only section with no mention of the tragedies in America last Tuesday. "Ikke en kunstner som uttaler seg om terrorangrepene i USA. Ikke en kommentar fra redaksjonelt hold. Ingenting. (..) Så marginalisert har kunsten blitt." She's right. It's appalling. Artists, writers and academics should speak out about this.

posted 11:13

Let's see.

The Gulf war was about massive forces attacking a clear, single enemy, all broadcast live on one main channel, CNN.
This war's medium is the Internet. I'm more likely to look here or here or to check my email from friends around the globe than to watch CNN. When I do look at CNN it's more often CNN.com than the television.
This war will be "unconventional", they want assassinations, the CIA is heavily involved, "human intelligence" (i.e. infiltrators and spies) and terrorist tactics will probably be employed. (Great: turn to terrorism to combat terrorism.)
The enemy is unclear and distributed.
Hubert Dreyfus: "The West has a penchant for turning its philosophical assumptions into technologies." (1992, qtd by Ken Hillis)

The world is changing. Does media change war or the world change media? Is this the Napster approach to war? When will the first Internet attacks come? (Or have they already?)

posted 11:04

A Danish email story, @skepost has been running in the newspaper Politiken for months. It's primarily intended for print, but there's an online version too. I'll start up a separate page with all these email narratives, in print and online - as soon as I get Ceres running. I get to start beta-testing it today! I'm going to try to get this blog running using it but I've no idea how that'll work out. (Via Lisbeth, who writes a bit more about @skepost.)

posted 10:40

sunday, september 16

Slavoj Zizek writes about the terrorist attacks and the American responses with a quote from the Matrix: Welcome to the Desert of the Real!. Zizek is coming to Oslo on the 8th of October, to discuss the attacks and war with Thomas Hylland Eriksen at SANS (Nedre Vollgt. 19) at 7 pm. (Thanks to Frode Molven for that info, and Adrian for forwarding the essay. It was posted on Nettime, a mailing list I'm rejoining.)

posted 21:49

I quite often disagree with Dave Winer - I hated that thing he did a few weeks back about why there aren't many women in high tech, for instance. However, he's had a lot of good thoughts and links the last days, and he has an interesting point here:

OK, now we're going to war, or according to some (like the US president) we're already at war. Now, most of the voices we're hearing are male. That's not a big surprise. (..) Wired says this is the first Internet war, and I think they're right. So this could be the first war where women have a voice. Imho, civilization and infrastructure need to speak up, before we flush it all down the toilet. I fear that's exactly what's happening. I'm not kidding about that. (Dave Winer, 15/9)

I've already unsubscribed and resubscribed to a mailing list of mothers that I've been a member of for nearly six years, since we'd all just discovered we were pregnant. I was horrified at all the hatred and bloodlust I saw in these mostly American women, women I've grown to know as a loving, supportive, openminded and tolerant group. A lot of the anger seemed to be directed at anyone not American, who said anything other than "kill, kill, kill!". I'm not really convinced that women are more peaceful than men, though I suppose statistics show it. Thank goodness I'm starting to see that the ruthless desire for revenge at any cost was in part a reaction to a huge shock. There is more thoughtfulness today. People are almost back to where they were before Tuesday, politically speaking. Yes, the Internet lets me hear more individual Americans' views and they hear mine, but I'm not feeling very confident it will make much of a difference.

posted 21:41

saturday, september 15

Fray is a site that has good stories told by individuals, complemented by often beautiful design that belongs with the stories, like the story of an illicit lover where you had to pull apart frames to find the hidden place of the story. The stories are linear, nothing hypertexty or particularly multimediaish - no, they belong to another kind of digital narrative: the personal account, frail, often small (why do I want to say small rather than short?) usually deeply felt stories that invite and always give space to answers from their readers. They've just opened a new group of stories from the last week in New York: {fray} hope - missing pieces. Some of the best stories here are ones in the "what's your stories" section.

Rebecca Blood has good stuff, lots of links and opinions I mostly agree with about this war that so many want to see happen. After seeing too much thirst for revenge and blood (and dreaming too much of screaming children and bombs) I was relieved to see a "what you can do" message I can believe in:

What you can do: Renew friendships with people who are considered enemies, but actually are not. Use the Internet to meet people with strange last names, and ask questions and listen to what they say. If they express anger, try to validate it, not negate it. Have the courage to go through your beliefs. (via Rebecca Blood who got it from Dave Winer)

posted 23:10

friday, september 14

Blogger has a bug so I can't save adjustments to my template. If I had been able to, I would have added blogs by these people: Elin Sjursen, my friend and collegue who's now at MIT. Mark Bernstein, whose home page has kind of snuck up on me as a blog. Mark doesn't use date or time stamps and so you have to watch for a while to realise that it's actually quite frequently updated. Almost daily, I think. Mark runs Eastgate and is a nexus of hypertext and electronic narratives. And he's my personal hero when it comes to presentations. Also Hilde Corneliussen who's working on gender and computing here in Bergen. There would be a link to September's archives too, some of the early posts from this month are already gone from the front page.

posted 13:29

Noah Chomsky writes about the attacks, quoting Robert Fisk: "this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia - paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally - hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." Which reminds me of Jernalderdrøm, a book of war and rape through millennia, a book that shows the horror for ordinary people, men, women and children, no matter who is fighting for what.

Auschwitz og Chelmno og Treblinka og Sobibor og Majadanek og Belzec (..) og Babylon og Havlandet og Ebla og Ai og Jeriko og Lagash og Umma og Urkesh og Ur og Uruk og Uruk og Uruk og Uruk - altså: den som har lest om krigere og har sett krigere, som selv har vært kriger, eller som ikke har vært det, eller som har vært beordret til å bli kriger men som har sagt nei, som har sagt nei! har sagt nei! sagt nei! nei! nei! nei!, den vet, eller kanskje ikke vet, men aner fornemmer at en kriger er en kriger er en kriger er en kriger er en kriger, men det er antagelig også alt han eller hun fornemmer aner eller kanskje vet, faen i innerste i svarteste i jævligste! (Steinar Løding: Jernalderdrøm, side 101-6)

For a modern list of wars, you might be interested in looking at The Herald's list of recent Western acts of terrorism.

posted 12:09

The 404 Research Lab has been greatly refurbished since the last time I was there. Fancy design, a randomiser and lots more silly "404 - page not found" messages!

posted 11:47

thursday, september 13

Love, life & email is another email drama - not actually "the first ever interactive email drama", as they claim. Unfortunately it was one of those ones that ran for a fixed period of time, and it's over, so now you can only access the archives instead of getting the emails sent to you in "real time". There are more and more of these email narratives, and none of them seem aware of the other ones that exist. Amazing. Here's my list: Inbox Outbox, Blue Company, Emailshows, Online Caroline, Two Minutes, Two Solitudes and Blue Company. Or see two of my previous posts about email narratives here and here.

posted 14:05

Torill has a link to Aftenpostens collection of American front pages - they didn't include this one.

posted 12:20

People are starting to point out the symbolism of the attacks. The terrorists targeted what can certainly be seen as the three pillars (or powers) of America: Capitalism (the World Trade Center), the Military (the Pentagon) and the third target which was never hit was probably either the White House or perhaps the Capitol, which could have killed congress - so that's Government. It was done on the day of the year that Americans date 9.11, 911, emergency (I've seen this pointed out in blogs and discussions but can't find them now, sorry). The method was almost a tribute to the land of freedom and opportunity where anyone can learn to fly a plane. This has been planned on many levels.

I'm frightened by the hatred and the desire for revenge we're seeing. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind", said Gandhi, and Jish reminded me of it, along with a personal story of harassment and anti-Arabic sentiment. People are buying guns en masse (like that will help) and otherwise sensible people are screaming for revenge and slaughter. There have been bomb threats against American mosques, Islamic schools and Arab businesses. Robert White has a sane article about the problem with retaliation. He writes about the last US attack on Bin Laden's base: "Does anyone doubt that the incident gave Osama Bin Laden five eager recruits for every one of his soldiers who died?" This is the problem of course. There's nothing like losing your loved ones and fearing for your life to make a nation (or any group of people) rally together and demand revenge.

posted 11:32

wednesday, september 12

Amazing photos from Manhattan at this blog: lightningfield.com. Also take a look at this email with photos. Other blogs with a lot of first-hand stories: east/west, scripting.com, saranwarp.com, worldnewyork, Mookie and likeanorb. This personal journalism is in many ways much more compelling than CNN and the papers. I've been needing to talk about this and read about other people's experiences (yeah I know I'm a long way away from America but nowhere feels far away these days), making sure that the few people I know in Manhattan were OK. The image that sticks with me most is yesterday wasn't on TV at all, it was sitting outside in the sun with some neighbours, our kids playing oblivious to our concerns, we were joking as one does in times of crisis and then a Bosnian neighbour said, very quietly, "We sat just like this after hearing the Serbs had attacked. Joking about it, having a barbeque in the sun. Nobody believed there would be a war."

posted 10:27

tuesday, september 11

A custom search page at blogger.com: Blogs that mention "world trade" or "terrorist" in the last 24 hours Update: now split into times so you can only see posts 9 am-9.30 am yesterday for instance. 22% more posts through blogger yesterday than usual. I sure used the net a lot to find out about this.

posted 20:24

Discovered a few blogs I'll be keeping an eye onbluishorange - ! and the sentimental education of eliot wilder and prolific.org. Also another "couple" blog, notable not particularly for its content (which is probably more interesting for the couple than outsiders) but for its style - it's like reading a chat session between this couple only in a blog. She writes in pink, he writes in blue. Their posts have no time stamps or other separations and sometimes seem to merge. I'm not sure of their story but I assume they're unhappily apart, like Lane and Stu.

posted 13:42

sunday, september 9

I'm always surprised at how gullible people are on the Internet. So many people believe that Online Caroline or Kaycee Nicole are real. They're furious when they discover they've been tricked. Perhaps we've all fallen for a logical short-circuit. You know those syllogisms old comedians would play with - Ludvig Holberg (a Bergen boy) wrote of Mother Nille's distress when her half-studied (and rather obnoxious) son proved to her that she was a stone:

1. A stone can't fly.
2. You, Mother Nille, can't fly either.
3. Therefore, you are a stone.

So lets translate this rather faulty logic into the era cyberspace and computers:

1. I'm real.
2. I'm participating in this. I'm interacting. Maybe I even link to it.
3. Therefore: this is real.

I think this is the false logic we succumb to when we believe in Caroline or Kaycee or Sven Hope or Eliza - or Caterina and Meg and Lane and Stu for that matter. The latter four probably are real, but my reading their blogs doesn't prove a thing about it. Neither do webcams or references to them from other blogs and media or photos on the web.

And of course, the concept of "real" is suspect in itself. How do I know I'm not a figment of your imagination?

posted 10:33

friday, september 7

Dansk studentoppgave om weblogs - grundig sak, ser det ut til (men jeg har ikke lest den). Dessverre kun tilgjengelig som word dokument. Bloggen til en av forfatterne heter peterwrites.

posted 16:10

In his reply to Nick Montfort's review, among other probably more important things, Jim Rosenberg describes Postism, which I hereby adopt as my academic trope no. 2. I described trope no. 1 last week (and Adrian commented on it, calling it analogical argument and arguing that the existence of bad analogy doesn't mean analogy's always bad. I concede, but I do think analogy is a particularly corruptible, clichéd trope that's dangerously easy to do badly.) Here's academic trope no. 2:

Finally, concerning Markku Eskelinen's pronouncement that "Hypertext is Dead": this is a particular manifestation of a widespread phenomenon I call Postism. Postism is the compulsive desire to measure where you are by what you are leaving behind. It is a view of life through the rear view mirror. Speaking personally, the only form of postism I find useful is post-postism. (Jim Rosenberg, in "Ripostes", EBR no 11 2001)

posted 14:46

I read Nick Montfort's review of Espen Aarseth's Cybertext a while ago, but had forgotten some of the juicier bits - like this:

"Ergodics" and "cybertext" provoke curiosity. Aarseth attracts the reading eye by using one neologism each for title and subtitle. He has also selected terms that sound somewhat similar to the words "erotics" and "cybersex."

Goodness, I hadn't even thought of that. Of course, that's why it's such an influential book! Such an innocent I am, eh?

Oh, and btw, the discussion about Montfort's review (where he declares hypertext dead) is interesting - I'm blushing for not having seen this earlier. Marjorie Luesebrink argues that hypertext isn't dead, Jim Rosenberg points out that hypertext is not always defined by links, and Kate Hayles insists that electronic literature in fact has two parents: literature and computer games. Reading this, do you think this is (mostly?) a political move:

Let us not make the same mistake with electronic literature. This new-born hybrid, still so young many do not know it exists, desperately needs all the parents it can get.Kate Hayles, EBR 11)

posted 14:32

Here's Meg Pickard's (of the blog not.so.soft) MA thesis on cyberculture Under Construction: (re)defining Culture and Community in Cyberspace - an ethnographical study from 1998.

posted 11:20

thursday, september 6

ASAP! A Stand Against Pop-under ads! I absolutely agree (now I know what pop-under ads are - they're those really annoying extra browser windows with ads that some sites bombard you with) - but I'm not sure how just linking to a site is supposed to help get rid of them. Oh well. There are a few links with ways of getting ridding of the bastards, anyway.

posted 22:32

The mother tongue, spoken or written, expects an answer. it is conversation, a word the root of which means 'turning together'. The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange, a network. Its power is not in dividing but in binding, not in distancing but in uniting. It is written, but not by scribes and secretaries for posterity; it flies from the mouth on the breath that is our life and is gone, like the outbreath, utterly gone and yet returning, repeated, the breath the same again always, everywhere, and we all know it by heart. (..) It's a language always on the verge of silence and often on the verge of song. It is the language stories are told in. (..)

People crave objectivity because to be subjective is to be embodied, to be a body, vulnerable, violable.

Ursula Le Guin, "Bryn Mawr Commencement Address, Dancing at the Edge of the World, 1989. p 149-51)

posted 15:56

"True love" or "to lie"? Torill tells a true story about damnthepacific.com. There's something fascinating about seeing that an internet tale is true (true?) and yet, oh, I think I like the allure of not-quite-knowing, where everything on the net might be true or might be fiction.

posted 14:00

Hehe. Gonzalo thinks someone should "analyze the dangerous effects of" studies discussing whether or not playing video games makes you violent.

posted 13:37

Here's info on Free Online Scholarship (FOS), which that radio talk I linked to last week discussed. And at eprints.org there's a system for self-archiving peer-reviewed papers, open archiving and so on. Lots of links, also. (via Adrian)

posted 13:31

tuesday, september 4

I watched her hand softly cupping the mobile phone. She held it to her ear and the phone was a secret inside her palm. It was so small that her hand caressed her cheek when she whispered into it, her lips tinged green with the electronic glow of the hidden machine. She listened for distant sounds as I have listened for the sound of the sea in a shell. "That must have cost a lot", I said, translating my envy into moral disapproval. She nodded, slightly embarrassed. "But it's small enough to keep in my bra if I want to."

We caress ourselves as we use our technology. We desire unity with our machines.

posted 17:36

monday, september 3

How about a blogging tool installed on public computers (libraries, net cafes, universities, malls) which lures chance passers-by to post to a worldblog? People find it by mistake and post before they know what it is. Now where can I install it? (via metafilter)

posted 18:05

Mark Bernstein notes the "interesting and active cluster of media-theory Scandinavian-flavored weblogs" (that's us, guys) and brings up the point of clustering and elitism:

The Web design community has recently been sharply critical of co-citation practices, which some regard as merely a way for elites to reinforce their influence and which has led to the suspension of dreamless.org and K10K pending the arrival of cooler heads. I suspect, though, that these clusters are more interesting, and less strictly political, than they may seem at first -- perhaps a visible manifestation of discipline-formation in proceess.

I see the clustering of blogs as a very open process - as long as I'm involved. Ha. I guess it could easily be construed as elitistic and exclusionistic (no - it's not, is it? Is it? Are we?) Blogs certainly aren't the voices of the nestors of a profession huddling together to keep the others out - no professors among this cluster. One thing I like about blogs is that clusters become, they're not preset. I'm sure I'll never be linked to from any of the "A-list" (see point 2 in the article that link goes to) of blogs, but I'm free to link to them, and I'm free to link to anyone else too. I guess if/when we all become nestors, it could look rather different. Hm.

posted 16:52

Ooh. Lars writes: "However there is a pattern in both socialism and feminism. Both end up not dealing with egalitarianism but instead pursuing the goal of getting the real power." I suspect the problem doesn't lie with socialism or feminism (and I agree with Hilde, feminism is many things, there are many versions, and the same goes for socialism). The problem is that some people will try to twist any philosophy or religion (especially religion) or movement into being a dogma, which also gives them power. That doesn't mean that socialism or feminism or for that matter, Christianity, necessarily are evil totalising regimes. It just means that one variety of each of these has been abused and made into a power game. Perhaps our society forces this sort of power play? Feminism(s) is/are about a lot more than that.

posted 16:24

Lovely :) Another explanation of why people blog: here's Hilde's reason

My decision to blog was in part based on a feeling of being muted - maybe I didn't even 'exist?? 'I blog therefore I am' But it was also a wish to dare to have opinions in public: 'I wrote it therefore I mean it'?

That's certainly a lot of the reason I blog - I love a medium where I can be opinionated - and rather than interrupt me, people who disagree can just ignore it (without me having to see that) or they can reply. My blog is my castle ;)

posted 16:16

ISSNs and copyright and people getting ripped off - Torill and Lisbeth and Elin are thinking about this stuff these days. My understanding is that getting an ISSN (as I've done) doesn't really have anything to do with copyright, and that I have the copyright to anything I write whether I use the copyright symbol, mark it "copyright Jill Walker 2001" or not. And I went to a day seminar called "Digital copyright" two years ago so I should know all about it! ;) I have an ISSN because I can have one, and to test (and push) the limits of what is thought of as "real" publishing, and because it might look a teeny bit more impressive when I put the blog in those reports you have to fill out as an academic. Copyright? Well, I want to be credited if anyone uses stuff from here, but people do generally credit each other. I trust people. If someone does plagiarise me in a way that bothers me, the log files of this blog are evidence that I published it before they did. As I understand it that's as good protection as you can get in any medium. I'd probably copyleft this blog before demonstratively copyrighting it, anyway.

posted 16:07

saturday, september 1

Well, it doesn't quite offer a simple way to analyse your correspondents based on their email (perhaps Eudora should extend their chili function to do this), but the Psychology of Cyberspace - Email Relationships does have some amusing bits:

Compulsive people may construct highly organized, intellectualized messages with little emotional revelation. Histrionic people may show less concern about organization and much more for the emotions they express. Narcissists may write extremely long, rambling blocks of paragraphs. Schizoids may produce very short but penetrating messages.

Makes me worry about what kind of emails I write. Not to mention my subject lines:

Creating a new subject line calls into play the "observing ego" - that ability to step back and reflect on what is happening. It shows a sense of responsibility and ownership for the dialogue - in some cases maybe even an attempt to control the dialogue. In this fashion, some e-mail partners "duel" with each other via the subject line. Simply clicking on reply without creating a new message title may indicate less of an observing ego and more of a spontaneous reaction. It suggests a "I want to reply to what you said" mode of operation. Some people chronically fail to create a new subject line and persistently use "re:" They may be a bit passive in the relationship, or lazy. They may not feel that sense of responsibility, ownership, or control.

There's bits here about the greeting (meanings of Hi! vs Hi Pat! vs Hi!!! etc), empathy, etc. And a make-over of a shabby email, and oh, heaps.

posted 22:40

essays:

Do you think you're part of this? Digital texts and the second person address
(or pdf) Cybertext Yearbook, Jyv?yla University. You can order the whole anthology from roisko@dodo.jyu.fi.

A Child's Game Confused
a hypertextual riff against (or with?) some netpoems. JoDI 1.7, 2000. Speilet lokalt.

Men er det litteratur?
en introduksjon til skjermtekster. Bob nr. 7-8, 2000.

Men hvorfor virker ikke musen?
en anmeldelse av nettkunsten på høstutstillingen. Kunstnett Norge,okt 2000.

Jeg taster, derfor er jeg
en kronikk om websåpeoperaer. Studvest, 18/1999.

Piecing together and tearing apart: reading afternoon, a story.
about Michael Joyce's classic hypertext fiction. Won Ted Nelsons Newcomer Award, Hypertext '99.

Tripp trapp tresko i cyberspace
en hypertekstuell anmeldelse av Juliet Ann Martins elektroniske diktsyklus xxxoooxxx. vinduet.no,1998.

Hypertextual Criticism. Comparative Readings of Three Web Hypertexts about Literature and Film
my MA thesis on non-fiction web hypertexts. Dept of Comparative Literature, University of Bergen, 1998.

Jernaldervev: lesefragmenter
en hypertekst om min lesning av Steinar Lødings papirroman Jernalderdrøm. 1998. (Dette er ikke en hypertekstuell versjon av romanen men en anmeldelse av den.)