jill/txt

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 this 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 my book, 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?

Today’s class will begin with a discussion of the worksheets I made up for this week. I’m interested in what the students think of them. We’ll also be looking at their blogs and we’ll talk about the assignments.

The main topic for today, however, is to introduce blogs as a cultural phenomenon, and to begin talking about what they are. I’ll use the following summary to spin off into the web and show the students examples on the projector. (more…)

People read my paper on feral hypertext! And (I think) misquoted me in just the way that I’ve been thinking, lately, was perhaps what I really meant. I wrote the paper about hypertext, sticking rather closely to the history of hypertext rather than trying to talk about, you know, everything. But Robert Leston at Neo Baroque mentions that “the distinction Jill Walker makes between feral and domestic writing”, see, that’s a broader distinction than I think I actually made in my paper but one I was musing over, vaguely, over the weekend, thinking that perhaps that’s too big a distinction. And I was thinking that I far prefer the word “feral” to “distributed” and that perhaps it would be more interesting to talk about feral narrative than distributed narrative, but then, where, exactly would that get me? Maybe not where I want to go, though where, exactly, do I want to go anyway?

Jill’s paper helps illustrate D&G’s thinking of the rhizome and how community and multiplicity can be made, but not from the perspective of the individual or the centralized location or the blog or from internet writing but by taking any of those notions and subtracting, dispersing.

I get that! It’s not exactly what I meant, quite, but it’s what I mean, kind of. I love how ideas change, just a little, but wonderfully, as they slip from mind to mind. And it’s exactly the sort of thing Justin Hall tried to write about, and I quoted him and Robert requotes him: “to write on the web itself, not on a web page. Disappear from any central location; intead, inhabit the web as a sort of spirt. My personality, commentary, reflections, stories, notions popping up on other web sites.” Is this how it works?

And what does it mean that I still bring it back again by writing about it here on my very author-centered, orderly blog?

Did you look at Justin Hall’s blog lately? Justin’s been publishing his life online for eleven years, with an honesty (well, an apparent honesty, I don’t know him apart from his website so can’t verify anything, but it’s certainly truthful in the way that literature is truthful) and sustainability that’s awesome.

Right now his usual site has been replaced by a ten minute video, where he cries into the camera asking how to combine his deep need to make media, write, publish, share with his need to have meaningful relationships and love. If the front page of his site is different when you go to look, here’s a direct link to the video.

Blogging, writing his life online, feeds some of the same needs as religion, Justin says:

What if a deeply connective personal activity you do that’s like religion that you practice with yourself, that’s a dialogue with the divine turns out to drive people away from you?

“There’s always someone there.” But it’s not working. “Because I can’t write about people because they don’t want to be there and I have nothing to write about (..) and I publish my life on the fucking internet and it doesn’t make people want to be with me, it makes people not trust me and I don’t know what the fuck to do about it.”

It is a form of art, this media-making so many of us have come to feel is part of life. I don’t want Justin the real person to be in pain, of course not, but a stop and a video like this is a strong narrative move and a cautionary note as well.

I’ve started reading Viviane Serfaty’s The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs, which is a literary rather than an ethnographical or quantitative approach to diaries online. She notes the twofold nature of the screen, which is both a veil and a mirror:

The literal function of a screen is precisely to conceal and as a result of this perception, all kinds of highly controversial discourses are freely displayed on the Net. The screen seemingly offers a protection against the gaze of others, enabling each diary writer to disclose intimate thoughts and deeds, thus attempting to achieve transparency and braking the taboo of opacity regulating social relationships. (13)

Serfaty quotes Jean Starobinski, whom in 1971, writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote what could as well be a description of bloggers and readers: “Making oneself invisible means one no longer is a mere transparency anyone can see thought, but that one has turned into a gaze no taboo can stop.” (Starobinski 1971: 302)

Look at Justin’s gaze, fixing the camera, fixing you, fixing himself. In the final moments, after the sobbing yet self-aware phonecall with a friend, right at the end of the video he’s wiped away the tears and whispers into the camera:

I’m alone because of what I did. And I’m going to be alone because of what I’m doing. Can you take that? How does that sound? [small smile] How does that sound? Hi? Hi, hi, hi…be alone. [smile] Do you like this? This is company. This is relating. This is relating. You’re crazy.

You’re crazy. Is he talking to himself, or to you? To the mirror, or through the veil?

“Without the prohibition of intimate disclosure, there would be no transgression. The prohibition therefore is constitutive of the meaning of self-revelation on the Internet.” (Serfaty 2004: 13-14)

Justin Hall’s been accused of over-fictionalising his life, but refuses to comment.

I’ve had a few requests for the text and grading scheme for the blog review assigment I’m currently grading, so I’ve translated it into English, all the better to share it and hopefully contribute to this kind of assignment evolving further so I can improve it next time I teach this course. Here’s an English version of the PDF I handed out to the students. For those who don’t like PDFs, I’ve included the text below.

The grade descriptions follow the Norwegian standard, and I’ve tried to write more specific descriptions of each grade for this particular assignment. It’s not a very easy task but I find it useful, and the students seem to like it too. Some of the terms I’ve used are from the SOLO taxonomy of learning outcomes, which I found at RMIT.

The general advice I’ve given as to what students should think about while writing is almost completely taken from Scott Rettberg’s version of this assignment. I’d love to hear any comments - and you’re more than welcome to take this and use it in any way you like.
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Justin Hall has blogged since before they called it blogging, since 1994. Rob Wittig’s review of Justin’s Links.net is a wonderful introduction to Justin’s site and to the stretched out over years experience of reading blogs as well. According to Justin’s entry on Blogtree.com, he was inspired by Moonmilk, started in November 1993, and is still going. Not quite like modern blogs, but definitely short dated posts in reverse chronlogical order. Since there was no web until 1993 there can’t be many older bloggish sites than Moonmilk.

Justin Hall describes Mogi, a fascinating sounding GPS-enabled mobile phone game running in Tokyo where you collect stuff by actually going to places near where you happen to be in the city. He also links to slides from a presentation by Amy Jo Kim on social trends in mobile entertainment

Ever thought of writing reviews of weblogs as a class assignment? Scott Rettberg’s New Media Studies class (which I visited a week or two ago, lovely bunch of students) have written a collection of reviews of weblogs as their final class project, all neatly put together and published with screenshots and room for reader comments. The selection is neatly categorised, so you can read about “Classic Bloggers”, “Digital Culture Blogs” like Steven Johnson, Laurence Lessig, Mamamusings, Frank Schaap and Jason Rhody’s, or you can browse the students’ reviews of writer’s blogs, persona blogs, group blogs, political blogs and so on.

I only know of one other project where people have tried to collect reviews of blogs: the Peer-to-Peer Review Project, which ran last year, coordinating bloggers reviewing each other’s weblogs.

Rob Wittig’s review of Justin Hall’s links.net is the best review I’ve ever read of a weblog. It was published in American Book Review, in a special issue on new media edited by, yes, again, Scott Rettberg, as well as electronically in EBR. Rob’s review is of course wonderfully written but it also demonstrates the reason why a good weblog review is hard to find: Rob has been following links.net since the mid-90s. He has experienced the weblog in time, the way it’s meant to be experienced, as a serial, persistent, constantly changing site you read now and then, sometimes daily, sometimes almost forgetting it completely. Someone who has a week or two to read and review a weblog is going to struggle to approach this deep reading. I suppose you could say, then, that Rob’s review goes beyond reviewing.

However that may be, my web design and web aesthetics students will be reviewing weblogs next semester.

Our new fagreferent buys every book I ask for. Good thing, too, cos the list of new books I want is far too long for my personal book budget. My latest list is below, and do you know, hardly any of these are owned by any library in Norway. I suppose they are mostly very new. Oh, being an academic has its joys! [update: Our friendly library has even got the world’s first (I think) institutional subscription to Rhizome.org! Isn’t that clever of us! It’s not quite linked up yet but the deal is made]
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