In Raine Koskimaa’s new Dichtung Digital article I found this lovely description of a Finnish hypercard work from the late 80s/early 90s: One of these (HyperApocalypsis) employed the premise that if the reader is not interested enough in the story and quits […]

From a Rhizome thread: Why is the loss of email and TV reception met with frustration and near-hysteria, but cell phone signal loss is met with, at best, mild aggravation and more often than not, if you think about it, mild relief […]

Solveig pointed to the stop smoking game at tobakkdreper.no, and after a quick play I have to say it’s pretty cool, as political or argumentative web games go. It’s a strategy game, done in Flash, where you play a tobacco baron and […]

The radio interview this morning was fun, and living as we do in convergent times, they remediated it into a web article three hours later: Doktor i internettfiksjon [update: with a link to the audio]. Very efficient way of interviewing people, that. […]

I shut my computer to put it to sleep and the phone next to it blinks in surprise. The display lights up, blue in distress at losing its link to the computer. It gasps for air. Then goes dark again, quietly and […]

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 […]