
A soft word, “indecent”, and it brushes my lips as they touch a petal pale as the sky and soft as the silk of a white white nightgown still warm from bed. The rain has stopped.
I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, and Professor of Digital Culture. Blogging here since October 2000.
A soft word, “indecent”, and it brushes my lips as they touch a petal pale as the sky and soft as the silk of a white white nightgown still warm from bed. The rain has stopped.
Having your own words processed and restated can help you improve your thinking and your writing. That’s one reason why talking with someone about your ideas can help you clarify your thoughts. ChatGPT is certainly no replacement for a knowledgable friend or colleague, […]
Like the rest of the internet, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT, the new AI chatbot released by OpenAI, and I’ve been fascinated by how much it does well and how it still gets a lot wrong. ChatGPT is a foundation model, that […]
A few weeks ago Meta released Galactica, a language model that generates scientific papers based on a prompt you type in. They put it online and invited people to try it out, but had to remove it after just three days after […]
This spring when I was learning R, I came across a paper by Anders Kristian Munk, Asger Gehrt Olesen and Mathieu Jacomy about using machine learning in anthropology – not to classify big data, as machine learning is often used, but to […]
I’m co-organising a preconfernece workshop for AoIR2022 in Dublin today with Annette Markham and MaryElizabeth Luka today, and I’m going to show a few of the ways I’ve engaged with new digital platforms and genres over the years. This is a key […]
I’m (virtually) attending Elisa Serifinalli’s conference Drones in Society: New Visual Aesthetics today, and will be presenting work-in-progress exploring how drones are presented in the 500 novels, movies, artworks, games and other stories that we have analysed in the Database of Machine […]
mae
Jill – This is not a direct response to pale as the sky, although I might do that next! I’m not sure if this is the best way to contact you – it’s my first writing (posting)to a blog. I’m doing a project on blogging in a course on Cyberculture that I’m doing at art school – and you are one of my main sources, being so prolific, knowledgeable and passionate! One or two weeks ago I read something, which I’m sure you said, in your blog, about people being able to maintain a false persona in ‘real’ life, but through regular online journalling one cannot hide one’s ‘real’ self, one’s self inevitably comes through. This interests me, partly because it contrasts with how people see the internet – as a place where role playing and deception are the norm. Do you remember writing about that? Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find it, but will keep looking. I’m really interested in how liberated people feel on the internet, seeming to reveal so much of their personal lives to a huge public, through blogs and even webcam girls, and then the connections that are built up through those journals and blogs. I don’t have a blog, but am hoping to set one up soon.
Jill
Mae, sure, you can contact me like this – ah, I forgot to put my email address in my new design didn’t I?
I’m pretty sure someone else must have said that bit about its being easier to maintain a false persona offline than online. Perhaps it’s your own thought, that you compiled from other things you read?
But you do raise an interesting point, and what I *might* have written, though I don’t remember it, but I’m happy to write it now, is that it doesn’t really matter whether a blog is “real” or “fictional”, because the emotions and experiences and thoughts expressed and the connections made and the ideas written out can be real and moving whether they happened to a particular individual on that day or whether they were simply imagined.
Novels and movies move me and are important to me whether they were “based on a true story” or not.
And it’s interesting how people think they’re finding out everything about a blogger’s life. So much is not written. Even a more personal blogger than I leaves out vast swathes of what he or she does and feels. Yet as a reader I know I piece together the little bits of infomration that I do have and shape myself a lovely picture of each blogger I read. Just as Wolfgang Iser says we do with fiction.
Good luck with your blogging and on your project!
Constance
Nothing comes out of the sack but what was in it...
Jill
Well, you know, sacks don’t really have a great deal in common with literature or art, anyway.