I’m going to be audiochatting for a while with Scott Rettberg‘s students in half an hour or so, a fortnight before I actually go visit them – I’ve never audiochat-taught/lectured before, so it’ll be interesting. Scott’s New Media Studies class are starting […]

I’m going to be on the local radio news (NRK Hordaland) tomorrow morning at 6:50 am. Cool! I haven’t been in a radio studio since I worked as a journalist in Studentradioen, and I quit that in 1992, in the dark ages, […]

The Oxford English Dictionary is brilliant for finding examples of how words have been used in literature, but it’s not so hot for science fiction and network terms. The digital meaning of “avatar” isn’t in there at all, for instance. To remedy […]

I’ve been hunting to see when the word avatar was first used about user puppets in digitally represented or simulated worlds – I’m not sure I’m quite there yet, but this is a start. Neal Stephenson (1992), Habitat (1984-88, paper on it […]

I’d never heard of The Encyclopedia of New Media, edited by Steve Jones and published by Sage Publications in 2002, but hey, it has definitions of both avatar (by Lori Kendall) and blog (by Mark Andrejevic) and I pretty much approve of […]

I don’t know, I really can’t see that much difference between the “before” and “after” photos at awfulplasticsurgery, another single-topic blog. Don’t most people look radically different from photo from photo anyway?

Half a year back I thought about Edison’s proliferative notebooks in relation to blogging: Did you know Thomas Edison’s notebooks ran to three and a half million pages? He wrote down ideas, plans, possibilities, drew sketches, visualised his thoughts and wrote about […]

I push aside my books and pull my new scarf across my arm, feeling the thin but slightly rough cloth drawing strings of bead in its wake. Lisbeth is coming from Copenhagen, and Jesper, and Espen, my beloved supervisor, and Torill‘s coming […]

Ooh. The official press release they made me write is on the university website now. That’s the photo the university photographer took, right there. I look slightly insane. And here’s the internal announcement. Adgang for interesserte, admission open to those who are […]

See, this is why it’s important to carefully plan one’s blogging oeuvre: Hoping to positively influence the evaluation of his artistic creation, an autobiographer can manage, manipulate, or even correct his own public image through autobiographical writing. How many previously unknown but […]