Eirik Newth’s latest column over at Kulturnett uses jill/txt as an example to explain the social aspects of blogging – comments, trackbacks and so on. He writes:

[B]logger som jill/txt fungerer mer som knutepunkter i et nettverk av medskapende lesere enn som enkeltstÂende vevsider. (Blogs like jill/txt function more as nodes in a network of co-creating readers than as singular webpages.

In this morning’s New Media Theory lecture I amazed myself by happily talking for 45 minutes about the (at least) three prehistories of new media (that of the artists, the literary one and the cinematic one) and the difference between emphasising the work and the network. And I explained how using a course blog not only is a useful learning tool but helps us understand the network: it’s serial, social and about process.

I gave my first paid lecture two years ago or so, and Eirik Newth was the first presenter of the day. I watched in awe, nervously clutching my anxiously powerpoint-filled laptop, as he talked about e-books for two hours without notes or projectors. I’m so surprised that now I find yabbing on about something I’m interested in so much easier than setting up useful problems for the students to actually work on themselves. I had expected it to be the other way around.


Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

2 thoughts on “serial, social, process”

  1. Robert

    Eek! You forgot to close a tag somewhere…

  2. Eiriks forfatterblogg

    Sammen skal vi leve
    er tittelen p mitt nyeste bidrag til Magasinet til Kulturnett. Temaet er det nye motebegrepet “social software”, som jeg (oppfinnsomt

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

screenshot of blogpost from sept 11, 2001, about blogger.com showing blog posts about the attacks
Networked Politics social media

25 years since September 11

I’ve been reading through my blog posts on September 11, 2001 and the days that followed. The things that stand out to me – in addition to the horror of the attack itself – are how massively we (or at least I) used the web to understand what was happening, […]

AI STORIES

AI-generated stories have longer endings than human stories

My colleague Jessica Witte has just shared a preprint where she compared the emotional arcs of the stories we generated using gpt-4o-mini to those of human-authored (pre-2022) stories from the subreddit r/WritingPrompts, conveniently gathered in this dataset. She found a distinct difference in the endings of the LLM-generated stories: both […]

How to peer review a paper in 2026

Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist, wrote a useful list of what reviewers need to look out now that so many papers are bad science that looks good thanks to LLMs. Read her whole blog post, she explains it well, but here’s a brief version because I’m pretty sure we’ll be needing […]

“So what if it was ChatGPT? It *could* have been true!”

I recently read a good article on the different kinds of truth a language model operates with by Luke Mann, Liam Magee and Vanicka Arora, Truth Machines: Synthesizing Veracity in AI Language Models, but despite its lovely typology of truths (consensus, correspondence, coherence and pragmatic) it doesn’t help me with […]

AI STORIES

AI shimmer and sparkle

I have this hunch that sparkles and glow and shimmer are somehow a point in the latent spaces of LLMs that have more connections than you would expect. Perhaps their connotation to magic and to the unknown matches some of the mystique of genAI? Or perhaps these words are used […]