I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. , If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics). This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]
Sindre
As I can remember, LCD displays keep their state, the pixels have physical
addresses that the GPU uses to change the state of individual pixels. So a pixel keeps its state as long as the GPU sends the same signal, no refreshing. However the confusion might occur
because LCD displays have response times. It refers to how long it takes a pixel
to change it’s state, this has sometimes been referred to as refresh lag or simiar.
Liz Lawley
Yep.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refresh_rate
Liz Lawley
(Um, that is, “yep” in response to the comment, not “yep” that LCDs refresh the same way CRTs did.)
Jill
Oh great, thanks guys! From that wikipedia article:
So Michael Joyce’s statement about electronic text doesn’t hold any more. Sort of a pity…
Matt K.
Of course Michael was also trying to capture something more general about electronic text and electronic culture, what he called elsewhere (I forget where, exactly) “the anticipatory state of constant nextness.” The beauty of the “replaces itself” formulation is that it was based in technical ground truth. On the other hand, I’ve argued that this is ultimately a false dichotomy: textual scholars have long understood that print is perfectly capable of “replacing itself,” and our fixiation on the fluidity and ephemerality of electronic text speaks to what I’ve called a Romantic ideology, more lately a *medial* ideology.
Jill
It was such a beautiful statement, yes – Matt, where have you argued this? I expect I may have read it but just forgotten where…
Matt K.
Check here for the short version:
http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/LeavesATrace.pdf
And my forthcoming Mechanisms (MIT) for the (much) longer version. 😉
Jill
Thanks Matt – I think I have read that (or maybe part of it was in a blog post, it’s familiar, anyway) but I hadn’t connected it to the Joyce quote – excellent 🙂 Looking forward to your book!
Mark Bernstein
Joyce’s argument is essentially unchanged.
The significant way in which text replaces itself is through the link. CRT phosphor refreshing doesn’t really matter; indeed, persistence of vision means that most people seldom or never perceived it.
But hypertext — both navigational and stretchtext — does promise that the text we now see will be replaced by whatever we see next. In the codex, we turn the page — and we know that page is still sitting there, unchanged, beneath our fingers. But, on the screen, where are the flowers of yesteryear?
In print, we are absolutely certain that we can turn back to the previous page, and that it will be the same artifact we saw moments before. (This certainty has limits: we might die before we can turn the page, or our two-year-old be about to tip a pot of India ink onto the book.) In hypertext, the back button may work but it might not; we might be taken to a different page. Perhaps the page has been updated on the server. Perhaps it was computed for our benefit, and now a new and different page will be computed for us. Perhaps it’s a video stream into which you cannot step twice. So, I disagree with Matt: Joyce is identifying a real difference, it’s not merely romantic ideology.
But this difference is a minor gloss — just as Joyce’s adjacent observation of the recto/verso rhythms of the codex book is a gloss. Yes, books have left-hand (verso) pages and right-hand (recto) pages, and yes, that does contribute in some way to the experience of reading. But nobody really cares very much about page breaks, and a sonnet, whether printed on the recto or the verso or written on the wall, is still pretty much the same.
Espen
For a textual medium that truly replaces itself, how about TV?