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. […]
Thomas
I think the most important issue when discussing blogs would be trust and reliability. How do you determine if a
blog is trustworthy or real? Maybe you could use examples of how journalists have been fooled by blogs into reporting
non-news:-)
Gro
I think that the most interesting development in the blogging
business is that there seems to be less and less personal/private/ diary
blogs and more nisje (?) blogs popping up, treating spesific topics
only. Some kind of specialization is going on, I think.
Jill Walker Rettberg
I think you’re right, Gro, about the specialisation – I wonder whether there are simply more blogs and so we see more of the specialised blogs or whether there really are less diary-style blogs? Thomas, do you have any examples? I bet there have been some, I just can’t think of them right now…
Svenn
1)Making money on your blog. Problems or no problems for the readers?
2)How the traditional media like newspapers and television are blogging too.
William Patrick Wend
Jill, something I have been giving a lot of thought to recently is the use of social networking and other web2.0 tools by authors/bands/politicians/etc and whether their intent is in sincerely using Twitter/Facebook/etc or just an insincere marketing tool to advertise their content or product.
But then part of me wonders how would someone even gauge a sincere use on a web2.0 tool anyway?
Chuck
Like Gro, I’ve been noticing the increased professionalization of blogging. It could be that I’ve specialized a bit more in my blog reading, but that seems to be happening quite a bit. It’s not always about making money from ads, but the film blogging crowd definitely uses it as a networking/conversation tool.
Jill Walker Rettberg
Interestingly, Mark Bernstein also notes that Merlin Mann’s advice in “What Makes a Good Blog?” appears to assume that the bloggers reading it are professionals – or at least that they’re writing for a blog that has some kind of assumptions about a wordcount for posts. So this seems to confirm these ideas about a trend towards professionalisation.
The crafts blogs I’ve been reading lately seem to be professionalising, too – the other day I was reading a post from Gertrude at Sew at Home describing how she’d tried to mimic the most popular crafts blogs, down to trying to sell her wares in an etsy shop (“because all the popular crafts blogs have them”) and being disheartened to find that she sold nothing. She decided to stop trying to be a professional, super-popular crafts blogger and just enjoy her joy in making things for herself.
At the same time I’m pretty sure most blogs are still entirely amateurish and have hardly any readers. But with more and more blogs, the professionalised ones are getting more and more visible.
Gro
I follow some blogs about literature, written by professional and amateurs, in norway, sweden an denmark. And it’s interesting to see the difference in “style of conversation” in the different countries. To make some heavy generalization; Swedes are impressingly velarticulated and polite to each other compared to the more aggressive danes. The danes on the other hand, are using much more academic style and refrences to theory than the norwegians, who is somehow more “anarcistic” in their style/approach to the topic. Maybe the norwegian attitude mirrors that everybody are supposed to be able to engage in the discussion – or else it is “elitistic”:)
Albertine
I think blogging is a genuine tool for reflexion and lifelonglearning, because you are part of a network. People are polite, as well as close, even though they mostly don¥t ‘know’ each other. This is something I both like and find interesting. Its peaceful in a sense, you can hold your own pace. (At least when spam filters works as they should! 🙂
Norman Hanscombe
I’m not against wanting items to be interesting, Jill, but see the more important problem being the increase of readily available material of an intellectually dubious quality, combined with a decline in literacy levels essential for high level analysis. I’m confident we could build up students’ literacy levels again, but am equally confident no one in authority has the courage to tackle the problem.
On a different note, congrats re your family’s addition. At least I can still entertain positive thoughts about something? Best wishes.