jill/txt

[Trondheim talk]

Here are the links for my talk today in Trondheim, with a very brief summary.

In the days of mass media (newspapers, radio, television) you could get away with sending a message to your audience and stopping there. With the internet you need to think conversation, not mass distribution. We “don’t read online", but the average Norwegian reads online for 30 minutes a day - between 60 and 80 minutes a day if you only count Norwegians who regularly use the internet. Usually we don’t just read, we want to write as well. A lot of our time online is spent seeking out other people who share our interests. Maybe you’re pregnant - you’ll search for other expectant parents because your friends close to home will be sick to death of your single-mindedness. Maybe you miscarried - find blogs written by women in your situation with blogrolls consisting of dozens of other women fighting the battle you’re fighting yourself. Join mailing lists, add your voice to the scores of comments, write your own blog and add your friends to your own blogroll. Blogs are interconnected and search engines read links as peer endorsement. Blogs are written in a human voice (Cluetrain Manifesto). Whether you choose to take part in a conversation on your website, or you choose to create a space that allows a conversation to grow forth (Amazon, dikt.no, Newgrounds, Dagbladet) remember that the age of mass broadcast is past. Sometimes just being able to see that other people are here too (Rhizome) really makes a difference. Derek Powazek’s Design for Community is a book that has a lot of ideas about and case studies of online communities.

[electronic literature at Holmsbu]

I had fun talking about electronic literature today. I even slipped in a few laps in the pool after my talk. It’s a beautiful place.

Here’s a brief summary of the talk, which I intended to be an intro to electronic literature and net fiction that would inspire the audience to explore more on their own. I started by showing some of Anne Bang Steinsland’s I mellom tiden followed by a couple of minutes of Young-Hae Chang’s Dakota, which rose some laughs. I pointed out some similarities to other genres (concrete poetry, animation, music video etc) and then moved on to Rob Bevan and Tim Wright’s Online Caroline, which does completely different stuff. I briefly explained the idea of Magic-tree.com, to show yet another way of doing things, followed by a brief introduction to David Still. Then I stepped back to talk a bit about Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart, continuing with a little bit of Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story, mentioning how the hypertextual form mirrors the protagonist’s inability to reach a centre. I showed the section on loss at The Uninvited, noting that it also uses the medium in sync with the content. Finally I talked about how readers write, using examples like Metafilter, The Fray, Other People’s Stories and Dikt.no. Some of these are edited, some not, and of course they have different purposes. Weblogs are another place readers writer, and my quick run down of blogs included the Norwegian portal to web diaries, Nettdagbok.no, Nyrup.dk, Oblivio.com, Belle de Jour and I slipped in a story about She’s a Flight Risk that I didn’t have slides for.

If you’re looking for more electronic literature, The Electronic Literature Organisation’s Directory is a good place to start. Rhizome.org, among other sites, has links to net.art. And you can always keep reading this blog :)

[talk at brown]

My talk at Brown today is titled “Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network” and is going to be mostly about using blogs with students. I’m going to stress network literacy and how blogging is not simply keeping an electronic journal, it’s distributed and collaborative; it’s learning to think and write with the network. I’ll also talk a bit about the ethics of insisting students blog in public.
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[stockton talk]

I’m speaking at Stockton today about weblogs, the real talk that the audio conference a few weeks ago was leading up to. Here are the links I’ll be using.
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[blog talks]

Previous talks I’ve given on blogs where I’ve blogged the links and talked from the blog post: HUMlab in Umeå, November 2002; IFI here in Bergen in February 2003 for about blogs and learing; with Torill in Oslo, April 2002. And I ended up basing my talk on youth literature and the web in Narvik this March on links I blogged here though I think I’d stored the webpages I wanted to show in Explorer’s scrapbook rather than use live links, I was uncertain of the net connection there.

[norwegian net lit]

I’m giving a talk in Narvik on Monday at the literature festival. The general theme of the festival this year is youth literature, and I’ve been invited to talk about net literature since young people surf. My title is “Nettlitteratur - nye stemmer og ny teknologi". So I’m going to talk about web diaries and blogs as literary endeavours, and show how teenagers often combine design and writing, and how the writing is often very good. I’m poking around for examples now. I’m not sure whether to show “regular” net lit or not. Mm.

I like papirepler by Karina Junker. Nice design (visually, it’s kind of cryptic to navigate and I don’t like that it’s all hidden in frames and you can’t link to bits of it, but it does look good), lovely sketches, and she writes well about choice little topics. In this long fairly mundane listed post (sorry, no design on the direct links) item 2 on the list is “hendene mine er laget av snø", my hands are made of snow. There are tiny bursts of joy like that throughout the site. Look at the way she presents herself if you click her name under each post. Beautiful. And she’s born in 1985 (a test tube baby!), nettdagbok.no says, so she counts as “young” ;) Among Karina’s friends I found Mia Frogner, whose site is a poem in several screenfuls with images of her (?) face evocatively set against dark golden text. The poem is in English with no explainations or anything to explain it, not even the name of the author, but the guestbook at the end of the poem is in Norwegian. [update: actually Mia’s used bits of song lyrics by Tool, with some of her own words set against them and very evocative design and images. I love it.]

Wandering on (starting as always from nettdagbok.no) I find Thale, whose an exchange student at highschool in Melbourne (marvellous Melbourne). Today her web sports little but a photo of a wombat and of course, the archives, but a link to “diktene mine” (my poems) leads to dikt.no, a community poetry site, where I find that Thale has some rather good poems, like this one, and that at dikt.no readers comment each others works and recommendations.

I’ve not frequented sites like dikt.no because I’ve been more interested in interactive, networked literature, whereas dikt.no is all about conventional poems only on the web. Perhaps I’ve been too locked into the conventional categories of works and genres. Browsing from site to site like this, finding connections and links to “my poems", and seeing the way in which web diaries nest alongside dikt.no and each other, I’m thinking a little differently. Perhaps net literature is not simply about works that individually respond to the network or use interactivity. Perhaps I should forget about discrete works. Perhaps network literature is in between the works and throughout the works and in web diaries, community sites and links?

Karina is a member of dikt.no, too. Some of her poems are in English, perfect English for that matter: I don’t remember my friends being perfectly comfortable writing in English when we were eighteen. Except me, but English is my mother-tounge. Perhaps it’s Karina’s too - or perhaps eighteen-year-olds are more international today. I like her Norwegian poems better than the English one I read: she piles words onto each other in a way English can’t emulate. Papirengel (it matches the title of her web ) reminds me of Gro Dahle’s poems.

Clicking through to the front page of dikt.no I remember why I’ve never explored it before. It’s incredibly ugly and deeply uninviting. Perhaps my looping reading through diaries and links is the best way to enjoy a site like this?