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. […]
Jess`
I think you’d probably be interested in this post, which I remember mentioning to you in Chicago.
Jill
Thanks Jess, that’s a great post – what a lot of great examples! Hm. Must save for thinking about later.
Francois Lachance
You might be interested in knowing that Laura Mulvey
revisits her “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” essay
in the 1989 collection _Visual and Other Pleasures_.
Curious: in which version of the myth is the fate of Narcissus the result of Echo’s revenge? In most versions I have encountered the vengeance is meted out by Aprhodite.
I was wondering if the ending could be reconfigured less as a contrast between the makeover shows of mass media and the self presentation practices of blogging. In in serial unrolling of varieties of personna do they not operate similarly — I’m thinking of the idological and the imaginary as categories invoked by the Lacanian-Marxist criticism of film theorists such as Mulvey — to produce a certain type of self, one is emmeshed in consumption of consumer goods or in struggle against such consumption. Few grind their own lens or silver their own mirrors or gaze into puddles. Your paper makes me think that seeing oneself is a matter of looking and looking again. Between the looking there is the talking about the self which is eluding the seeing. I wonder if Kaja Silverman’s work on the subject (See _The Subject of Semiotics_) could not be brought to bear on the act of picturing: the picture making subject, the subject pictured and the subject of the picture [Silverman references the speaking subject, the subject spoken about and the subject of speech — if I recall correctly].
Between mirror as surface and shadow as element projected onto a surface there is the projection.
Francois Lachance
The mirror stage and its relation to ideology alluded to in your paper on shadows and mirrors and modes of self fashioning got me to thinking about the quality of listening in the psycholanalytic situation. There is the listening _to_, the listening _with_, and the listening _for_. To the person (analysand), with the experience and history of training and fo the salient moment. In some ways such a tripartite division can be explored in the context of blogging and image projection. There is the “to”, the “with” and the “for” of presenting. Audience, means and purpose.
Jill
Blogging to and blogging with, I get, but what’s blogging _for_?
Francois Lachance
As the method actor said, “What’s my motivation?” The preposition “to” would cover considerations of audience, the “with” the mode of delivery from hand-rolled HTML through to snazzy content management with stylesheets galore. What for?
One possible reason: “Blogging is like writing past oneself to one self: there’s in that spacing, a moment for imagination to
reach reason.” from Thanks for Not Being a Zombie http://ghw.wordherders.net/archives/005185.html#47472
In the analytic situation, the psychoanalyst is listening for the moment where speech reveals that which is usually hidden. That is a convoluted way of suggesting that the analyst is on the look out for manifestations of the uncanny. Blogging too could be a practice meant to expose the uncanny by listening to the rustle of significations in the day to day. Doesn’t one blog to be surprised?
Knut
I enjoyed the paper but find its concluding paragraph troubling. Transforming ourselves into empowered subjects is presumably a good thing; but the other essential feature of digital self-representation is self-objectivication. When we have countless self-representations available we begin consulting these images/texts to find out ìwho we areî ñ rather like constructing after-the-fact childhood memories by flipping through an old photo album. By constantly viewing/reading ourselves in such a mediated form we set off a self-modifying feedback loop; what comes first, the self or the portrait? We even risk becoming ìothersî to ourselves.
And what happens to those aspects of self that never get representation?
Eirik
Is this paper removed permanently? I printed and read this.. well in 2005. Now I’d like to check up some things, but it seems to be removed? There’s no link from jilltxt.net/txt/ either..