We repeat: games are not dangerous
Some articles in Norwegian newspapers, June 1st: Espen Aarseth about the new reality created by technology, an article from may 6th comes up with some interesting statistics on media use among Norwegian children, and me, June 1st, saying that the modern society has no secret rooms for children, yes, very Henry Jenkins inspired.

A summary for non-Norwegians: Espen puts an emphasis on the connection between culture, virtual representations, technology and economy, and shows how technology is interweaved with modern culture. The article with the statistics shows that children who use computers a lot are as active in other games and activities as children who don't. It shows that children still use television a lot more than they do computers. See also Jill's blog for statistics on Norwegian media use. I am repeating the "don't blame the technology, it is a product of our culture (or at least, someone's culture)" mantra I have been pushing for years.

Warning: violent and gooey
This example of linux bashing should really speak to the media watchers out there. Look what games get us to do: equip uncorrupted polar bears and take it all out on innocent cuddly creatures!

(PS: highscore so far: 619,74)

Seduction
Sometimes you find that there is an other mind so close to your own that it is as if the thoughts could have been yours. It is a feeling of thrill and terror - a sensation of seeing boundaries slip and the self become diffuse, blurred. Today I received a book in the mail that gave me exactly this experience.

Ragnhild Tronstad, who defends her thesis Friday 11th of June, in Oslo, has a chapter that makes me feel that intellectual boundaries are dissolving. Chapter six: "Questing as a Deductive Discourse" uses Baudrillard, and discusses seduction and seductive quest objects. I don't know whether to get jealous, or all gooey. I started to plan a chapter/an article on Baudrillard, seduction and games in 2000/2001. There's an old draft on my computer, waiting for me to immerse myself in it - and here Ragnhild writes it. Well, not exactly - I never connected it to quests. Interesting, very interesting connection.

So, as you understand, I am eagerly leafing through her dissertation, but most of all I am just looking forwards to my trip to Oslo, for her defense.

Procrastination
I have a slight sunburn around my eyes, from taking off my glasses and turning my face to the sun yesterday afternoon. It was pure procrastination: I have to finish grading, and I don't like doing it! But that's the life of a college teacher, it has to get done! Anyway: today and tomorrow, oral assessment and student parting party, Saturday will be spent in the car driving to Trøgstad, a flat spot close to the Swedish border. Sunday; confirmation for one married-in niece, Monday; driving all the way back. Good thing the family likes to spend time together and rarely argue, or twenty hours in a small car in three days might get just a liittle tense.

Australian voices
I noticed another gaming blog the other day, Gamely Manner by Stewart Woods and exploring it led me to Helen Merric's blog on net studies. She uses the word "networksing" as one of her categories, and points out that it is not a gollumification of language, but something more than that.

Both blogs look clean, crisp and informed, but not all that frequently updated. Still, worth a peek!

Career change
Or just an expansion? Here is how to become a webcam whore!

Weblog design
Makiko Itho, who is not a nameless cat, posts on weblog design. She has a very pretty design herself, which in my eyes gives her much credibility in this topic. She also has an interesting post about blogger template designs and gender.

Interpretation, Performance, Play, & Seduction: Textual Adventures in Tubmud
Ragnhild Tronstad, brilliant, exiting researcher that she is, now defends her dissertation in Oslo, June 11th. Opponents are Cynthia Haynes, Niels Overgaard Lehmann and as third opponent Espen Aarseth.

People watching
Years ago, I spent a week in the company of a spanish film-maker in an office at the University of Bergen, the media department. We had a few interesting experiences; one night we let ourselves be hijacked for a cosmetic demonstration party in a suite at one of the best hotels in Bergen, an other night we skipped dinner and went on a cake-tasting spree in every cafe in Bergen. But the night we spent people watching at a bar was the most fun.

She played this little game everywhere. She made up stories about the people she saw. Fantastic stories about lost love, dark family secrets, fortunes won and lost... When a nice gay male couple joined us the game changed, simplified, into guessing peoples' occupation. This too was fun, although different.

A couple of years later, travelling with a colleague, two teachers and 30 students. We visited Brussels and Amsterdam, a frozen winter week of walking through two large, lovely cities. This colleague also makes films, and when I told him of the people game, he caught on immediately. We spent the student-free evenings creating long, involved narratives, weaving tales across borders.

Since these two experiences, I have been an avid watcher of people. And with Desmond Morris' book, now I am looking for details:

4. The Intention Power-grip. The speaker who is seeking control and is striving in his speech to master the situation, but has not yet done so, performs his batons with his hand held in the frozen intention of the power-grip. This is the Air Grasp posture, with the digits stiffly spread and slightly bent. The hand grabs at the air but does not follow through.

I can hardly wait to find a busy cafe, settle with my book and a cup of coffee, and just look!

Journalist factory
Volda college has been called "the journalist factory", due to the way we process students and send them out to attack the unsuspecting Norwegian public. That's not true, it's not journalists that are our largest output, it's media theory students! Today I am about to walk the "comforting route", and visit students writing exams in media theory. There are more than a hundred students, positioned in 7 different locations. Just finding the rooms they are in is a challenge, I have no chance to actually recognize the students. I just hope they recognize me.

I don't know if this routine is common outside of Norway, but for exams like this - school exams - we always visit the students in the morning, in order to help them understand the questions, give them a hint if they have misunderstood completely and nudge in the right direction if they feel insecure. I have also spent time as an ad-hoc therapist calming exams nerves, I have called for an ambulance for a student who went into diabetic shock from stress, and I have been strict and told lazy students to get back in there and make an effort - suffer through the exam and take a chance at a weak grade rather than leave and be guaranteed to fail. It is one of those things that marks the seasons.

Spam and threats
Jarle Dahl Bergersen (in Norwegians) has used his blog to critizise a spammer, been threatened and considered getting a lawyer, before they finally came to a compromise.

It's an interesting case, so I want to point to it, even if it is all solved now.

Typical May week
Norwegians like May. It's the month with the most holidays all year. Yesterday was 17th of May, and Thursday it's ascencion day - the day Jesus went up to heaven, you know. That means most Norwegians work two days this week, because we all have a little extra time to take out Friday. Those two workdays I am spending with the department, in a cabin on an island, talking about more or less serious things concerning teaching and administration - but also fishing, chatting, having fun.

The weather conspires against us though: there is a gale blowing, 8 on the Beaufort scale (sterk kuling), and it's been raining steadily for the last three days. Wish me luck - I'll be stuck in a cabin with the men I argue with the most frequently! The rest of the week will be spent with family, in various locations at Sunnmøre, all of them without an internet connection.

Vindstyrke
Beaufortscala, Deutsch
Beaufort wind scale

Are weblogs journalism?
Online Journalism Review organised a roundtable with a group of "blogologists" (don't just dislike the term, I am biting my tongue hard not to use the kind of language I would like about it, while I remind myself "it's supposed to be funny, it's supposed to be funny"). One of the questions asked is:

OJR: Do you consider Weblogs to be a form of journalism? How do they differ from other forms of journalism and media?

The interviewees made good attempts at replies to this question by saying blogging is more than journalism, blogging may be journalism, blogging can challenge journalism, all of it correct. My question is however: where was the editor when the journalist made that question? Is a question like that journalism? It is asked by a reporter working in a review of online journalism published at a college of journalism, but it is clumsy, unprofessional and pretty impossible to answer in a way that does not make the interviewee seem pedantic or trying to avoid the question.

As a public service for all who have considered asking that or a similar question, I am going to do some pigeonholing. I am even going to talk about the size of pigeon holes: which small holes fit into which big ones. Sometimes it just has to be done.

The problem with OJR's question is that we could just as well ask: is writing journalism? Is printing journalism? Is videotaping journalism? Is filming journalism? Is soundtaping journalism? All of these manners of recording and communicating can be journalism, given certain criteria met. The same goes for blogging. We can adjust this question so OJR doesn't need to ask it again in the future, when some other online medium becomes popular, by rephrasing it to: "Is communicating journalism?"

Now, pay attention to the pigeonholes: Communication is the big box. Journalism is a little one that fits inside the big box. Blogging is a box that is smaller than communication, but bigger than journalism. Concept-wise it is comparable to television(ing) and radio(ing), and a lot of different genres of recording and reporting from the world of facts and fantasy fit within each of these boxes.

So: is blogging journalism? No. But a blog can be a medium for good reporting, good newscoverage, good investigative journalism. It is also a lot more.

Syttende mai
The significance of syttende mai. What lacks in this description is how pretty Norway is in spring, and how suitable a celebration is in May, when the light, warmth and life has returned after a bleak, dark, cold winter.

Webcams from some Norwegian cities:
Oslo, Karl Johan's gate
Bergen, Torgalmenningen
Ålesund, Brosundet should give the most interesting view today.

The parades start at different times, the first one in Volda at 10 am Norwegian time. So I have to go prepare breakfast. I have already ironed two shirts, and have to make up my mind what to wear on a cool, rainy day since I have had my national costume refitted for my daughter.

Students don't do what you want?
Colleagues unruly and ignoring you? Your partner refusing to do his part of the chores, or treat you the way you wish for? Perhaps what you need is a new tool in your bag of persuation tricks...

Spelt flour
Spelt is old-fashioned wheat, with a higher content of protein and a somewhat lower content of carbohydrate than normal wheat. Hildegard von Bingen mentions spelt as a particularly good type of grain, for all purposes, and particularly for healing and strengthening the body.

I have been using spelt rather than wheat in baking for about a year. After a year of testing, I find that I am not as sensitive to bread, cookies and cakes made from spelt as common wheat. I can even have occasional waffles! Particularly with my own specially made strawberry jam. But I am still looking for recipes, and today I had the brilliant idea to make a search for it online:

Steep Hill food recipes
Spelt flour organic recipes
Spelt noodles
Blueberry muffins

And a bonus recipe, Angel Food Cake with fructose, rather than saccharine.

A Doctor of blogs!
Kaye Trammell defends her thesis today - a few hours ago, according to her post. Kaye Trammell's research is on celebrity blogs, contents and user surveys. Congratulations, Kaye!

Planning the autumn
It's the season of planning ahead, and I have spent a delicious little hour finishing the pland for a tiny little course in New Media. I started these plans last year, delirious with happiness that I had received The New Media Reader. Due to a mix-up, that tiny little course never ended up as part of the department curriculum. However, when the media group leader frowned at the plans for next year and muttered "We need one or two more topics here", I volunteered (!) my little plan. For those lovers of lists and plans out there, here it is, Torill's little pleasure project this autumn:

Old news on new media
Dr. Torill Mortensen
The development of the hypertext and the non-linear text from Vannevar Bush and the Memex Machine to the World Wide Web. The ideas behind our understanding of the web.

Three lectures, each 2 x 45 minutes:
The Computer and the thought
Society, technology and structures
Breaking with linearity

Bush, Vannevar (1945): ”As We May Think”, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, på http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm

Douglas C. Engelbart. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Summary Report AFOSR-3223 under Contract AF 49(638)-1024, SRI Project 3578 for Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Ca., October 1962. på http://www.bootstrap.org/augdocs/friedewald030402/augmentinghumanintellect/ahi62index.html, disse delene: I: Introduction, A og B, III Examples and discussion, A2 og A3 og B4 og B5.

Baudrillard, Jean (1981): “Requiem for the Media”, in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 164 – 184, Telos Press, og trykt på nytt i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 278 – 288) Også tilgjengelig på: http://www.calarts.edu/~bookchin/mediatheory/essays/19-baudrillard-03.pdf

Williams, Raymond (1972): ”The Technology and the Society”, I Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 291-300)

Nelson, Theodor H. (1981): “Proposal for a Universal Electronic Publishing System and Archive”, i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 443-461)

Turkle, Sherry (1984): “Video Games and Computer Holding Power”, i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 500-513)

Moulthrop, Stuart (1991): “You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of the Media”, i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 692 – 704)

McLoud, Scott (1993): “Time Frames”, i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 712 – 735)

Aarseth, Espen (1994): “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory”, i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 762 – 780)

Berners-Lee, Tim, Robert Cailliau, Ari Luotonen, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and Arthur Secret: “The World-Wide Web”, i Wardrip-Fruin, Noah og Nick Montfort (2003): The New Media Reader, the MIT Press, Boston. (s 792 – 797)

Images of pain
The images from Iraq are powerful statements that may change the path of the war. They have made Tony Blair apologize for the behaviour of the British soldiers involved in the abuse of the prisoners. George Bush calls the abuse a stain to the nation's honour. I think Mike might feel it is somewhat more than a slight discolouration, and that it takes more than a quick trip to the laundromat to clean this up.

I am as stunned as everybody else, and the news resonate through every western society like a shockwave of sadness, horror and fear - fear that the values of the society we try to live in are crumbling, falling apart and giving way to - what?

To me, the true horror is that I feel I have seen these images before - and not from prison camps in dictatorships in Africa or South America, but from the "civilised" west. One of the topics I have studied was images of sexuality. Among those are images of deviations: humiliation, sexual torture, sadism, masochism. Consensual games between consenting adults - but still, a rich source for images of pain, degradation and dominance. And I watch the pictures with the gleeful smiles on the faces of the American soldiers, and I find myself asking: is that what they think they are part of? Is that the frame of the prison and the torture? Is torture and degradation so far from the soldiers who find themselves in that situation that the only frame for understanding their reality is by interpreting it as part of sex games?

Growing up with parents who actually experienced war, and reading Mike's deeply felt essay, I would never claim that war or the military turns humans into automatons, unfeeling machines with no empathy, or shallow shells who only act. But at the same time: military discipline is supposed to install frames for particular situations: given A, you do B. That's what you train on, that's what you do in a tight spot, if the training is right.

Running a prison in wartime is a very tight spot. Was deviant porn the only possible frame for the soldiers' actions in that position? It might work the other way around as well - sexual sadism takes its imagery from the darkest basements of human imagination and emotion. Perhaps is what we see here the very source of all images of pain: the human with too much power and no control. It is not like our culture does not recognize and know about the capability of cruelty inherent in humanity. Read the Lord of the Flies.

Indiana in September?
If you are, you can catch the WWW@10 at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

Changes
And Eeeek! Blogger has changed looks! Feels strange. They refer to the main log-in screen as dashboard. Inspired by the drivers of Grand Text Auto?

Different options
Next time around, I will make different choices when the turn comes for me to return to the worldly pursuits. With the increase of population over the last few hundred years, I can't imagine souls are allowed to stay in storage long, so some of my plans may still be valid. At the moment, the plan for the next life is to learn languages. I want to be the child (daughter is fine) of a couple with one spanish and one russian speaking parent. They should live in Japan. They put me in an international school where I have to learn French and Arabic. Then they move to Italy, and I study classical languages in Rome; Latin, Greek.

Then, when I meet interesting looking online publications like neural.it, I don't need to feel stupid and frustrated. Luckily, a link can be recognized in most languages, and it links to a varied collection of online resources. Enjoy!

So much for burning out
Four things happened since yesterday:
Most important - following a link from Dennis' blog I read the NYC times article about Mary Ann Buckles. She dropped everything and quit academia after her PhD on the game Adventure. That dissertation was the first work I read on text-based games, and I sat down and plunged into the MUDs myself afterwards. I was sure she had to be a highly paid tenured professor at some fancy, progressive University by now. Why does it make me feel better that she isn't? Because it legitimises my own occasional academic overload. The only role models visible to me from this vantage point are the ones who finished their PhDs and went on to become powerwielding professors way above me in the hierarchy. Mary Ann Buckles shows me that it is possible to turn the back on all of it and do something else. Perhaps my secret shameful dream of being a nail designer isn't a sign of failure after all, just a sign that this is a rough field and if you feel battered it is because you ARE battered, not a trick of your (failing) mind. The article lines up neatly next to the goodbye of the Invisible Adjunct and confirms that yes, this really IS a rat race.

Did the last of the how-did-I-ever-get-into-doing-this lectures on organisational theory. I guess I am the most competent person the department has on organisation theory. That doesn't say much about my level of competency, really. Lucky it is at a very basic level, or the students would have been better off just reading the book. Why did I do it? I didn't find anybody who both spoke Norwegian, knew the field and were willing to do the lecture, not for money or for threats or promises of payment of other kinds. Or actually I did, but the email never reached me, and I didn't know until four days ago. The irony, the irony.

Booked the flight for my vacation. Guess where? New York in July. Sounds horrible, really, but I am not familiar with the combination heat/metropol, so it will be a different experience. And so nice to get back to the cool clean quiet fjords afterwards. So if you know of interesting events around NYC between 9th and 28th of July, I'd love to know! Nick and Noah have both already pointed me towards the Ars Electronica exhibition.

I read my own blogposts. Not as much gloom and doom as I feared. Looks like I have managed to keep most of it out of the blogspace. Good. Internal super-editor still working.

Minor burnout blogwise
I feel like I do nothing but post about how exhausted and overworked I am. Not fun for you, not fun for me. I will probably (very likely) be back when I have managed to clean my desk again.

drawing machines
12 machines draws pictures 2 months each, online.

Paying my dues
An organisation like Volda College is small enough that each individual has a lot of freedom to create our own job and control our own day. This is the great advantage of working here - in this tiny little pond it's easy to become a big fish among other reasonably large fish who all are pretty autonomous within our territories.

This does, however, in the best spirit of social democracy, entail a duty towards the collective. In other words: I have to pay my dues to the organisation for the trust and freedom it gives me. Now that I have finished the PhD it's payback time. This happens through taking on the tasks vital to the running of the Collage: be on minor or major boards, taking on leadership and responsibility, working for the union. So far I am, apart from being back to leading my by now preteen baby the information education; on the boards of the department, the local researcher's union and the board of employment (for all of the college). I have done my duty time in the arrangement comittee for the Christmas party, and entertained the masses with my eloquence in social contexts. But I haven't even started paying yet. The next big project is the organisational comittee. Due to the changes in the Norwegian educational system over the last 10 years, Volda College is in dire need of restructuring. I have said yes to be part of that. With three other faculty members and a secretary, our job will be to make a suggestion as to how to re-organise a 200 strong organisation with tasks ranging from building maintainance to large-scale socio-political research, with all the quirks of a 130-year-old organisation forcefully joined with another organisation 100 years younger thrown into the pot.

I have to learn a new word soon. I have to practice using it fluently and politely, but with conviction. I desperately need to learn when to say "no".

Disappearing in plain sight
What magicians do with mirrors, Baudrillard claims we do through other media:

In fact, all this corresponds to the inalienable right or desire to be nothing and to be regarded as such. There are two ways to disappear. Either you demand not to be seen (the current issue with image rights); or you turn to the maddening exhibitionist display of your insignificance. You make yourself insignificant in order to be seen as such. This is the ultimate protection against the need to exist and the duty to be oneself.

Manycoloured wigs
After weeks of feeling that nothing makes sense, it is interesting to find that a site with a picture of wigs in many different colours and a list of links to summaries of books by Baudrillard, Barthes and Marcuse gives me a feeling og nostalgic recognition, reminiscent of coming home. Parry and First seems to be a place for storing lecture notes and summaries by some anonymous graduate student, a little online pocket in a fold of the net, found by google and my command, while looking for links on Seduction by Baudrillard.

Somehow the wigs in the window touched me, as I feel like that at the moment: Like I am only surfaces, that what others think is a head is a plaster lump carrying a wig, a seductress who does not love, only scheme for the effects of learning, not the spell of it.

Back to grey
And that was it, spring in Volda is over: it's darker and cold, even the fresh green of the new leaves is dull as the light changes and the fjord turns lead grey. Business as usual!

Spring
Today is a green and blue day: green buds bursting into young leaves, blue sky framed by dark green mountains, green lawns stretching towards blue waters - I couldn't keep the strict red-and-black today, while the colours of grass and sky press themselves so eagerly into my vision.

Grace was her nature
I never really knew her. She knew me though, in several different aspects. I was “that girl” her son went out with. I was the strange guest she needed to treat politely. I was the mother who performed the tasks to keep a household running. I was a source of sweets and treats, an excuse for yet another cup of coffee. At one time I was “the nice lady with the hat and the flowers”. Another time I was “she who brought the white hair.” But most of all I was the maid.

Everybody told me what a wonderful woman she was. Daughter of a doctor, from the times when being a doctor was really something, she was well spoken, educated, intelligent, interested and very, very considerate. Since I loved these traits in her son I was looking for what they told me about her. And once in a while I would see a glimpse of this woman, the competent social worker, the warm friend, the concerned citizen of the world. Those were the moments when she saw me as a stranger, without some lingering sense that she should know me. But long before we met her past had started unravelling like a knitting from her most recent memories and backwards.

At first they all protected her and refused to see that she was sick. She was herself, only more so, more fuzzy, more endearingly impractical, she asked her polite questions a few times more than normal. When I said that something was wrong I was told to shut up, stop being so critical, be happy I had such a darling mother-in-law.

The first years I was unhappy, and felt that I was the one who couldn’t make enough of an impression on her. Then, one visit, she started ranting about how I didn’t do enough work. She had decided who I was. You see, I speak the way their maids had always done – a west-coast dialect. So much more reliable workers, the girls from the west-coast; strong, thrifty and efficient. Her mother always had a maid speaking somewhat like me.

Sociolects guided her understanding of the world as she lost more and more of her memory. By the time her softly west-Oslo speaking son became “that very nice young man”, I had resigned to my role of unskilled labour. I would clean, cook and look after the children. One Christmas I washed her hair, and she obeyed me like a child, the way she had obeyed the maids and nurses of her childhood. There was nothing else I could do for her, and she felt safe with me that way. It confused her when I sat down and had dinner with them, but as I acted as nurse for the children at those occasions, she translated me into some kind of nanny.

I could not help her family into an equally clearly defined space in her world. Her loving, doting husband became “that nice old man”. She thought her son was my son, my “boy”, and cried when in a clear moment she realised that he was hers. My children mainly remember that she stole their candy. At least they were too small to realise their grandmother forgot them.

I never knew the woman her family grieved. But having lost everything, she was still magnificent, dignified. In the end she had no real language, only fragments: “Oh, really? No! What is…? MmmHmm? Yes? Is that so?” This was her entire vocabulary, and she was still able to charm strangers, acting the perfect lady. I can’t even do that with my brain at full speed and my well-mannered husband as a coach. When everything else was lost, grace was her true nature.

In Vienna
July 5th, and desperately seeking Torill? Well, try Blogtalk 2.0, between 14.45 and 15.15. I'll be the woman standing up, talking.

Broken system
or not, this description of the popularity of The Invisible Adjunct indicates that blogs are a way to critisise a system where formal channels are too restricted and closely monitored to open up for a real dialogue.

Moblogging
From a colleague with his own photoblog fed from his mobile phone, some interesting moblogging links.

A pdf collection of pictures of people with cellphones, all over the world, by Dr. Sadie Plant.

Buzznet, with a link to a BBC article on Moblogs. I wanted to read the article on how moblogs drive the adaption of camera phones, but the link to Daily Yomiuru didn't work.

And Bitflux, a photoblog with little tiny stories - like "lecker" and "happy end".

No derivative work
One of the things that us Norwegian scholars always worry about when publishing in the US is the rules for re-use of the work, ours and others. This worry is normally not because we sorry about people quoting too much of our own work. Hey, use us, quote us, criticize or adore us, it is what academic writing is for! No, what we worry about is whether we have overstepped boundaries about quoting and citing, rules and regulations foreign to the Norwegian traditions.

The Creative Commons license is in a way very close to how most Norwegian Scholars think about their work, so when Into the blogosphere uses the creative commons to restrict the use of my article, that's perfectly fine with me. It is also fine because then I can go in and check what it really means, and see that people can use, cite, quote and in general have fun with my work, as long as they don't sell it for money. What I don't quite understand though is the meaning of "derivative works". Where is the limit for derivative? If I inspire an other scholar to write a scathing criticism of what I wrote, is that a derivative work? After all, refuting everything I say means staying very close to my text, and letting my text control the other writer's every response. Or if the other writer decides to see if I am really right in my assumptions, and wants to develop a research project to test a theory from my work, is that derivative work?

No, I don't want to use this to ensure that I will not be criticised or stop others from developing research testing my hypothesis. I want to understand whether the editors could use the "no derivative" clause of a Creative Commons license to stop others using my work that way. And I suspect it is a technicality. Just one that made me wonder.

update:
From Mark Bernstein, a definition:
The Copyright Act, at 17 U.S.C. §101,....

A ``derivative work'' is a work based upon one or more pre-existing works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a ``derivative work''.

and a link

And from one of the editors of Into the Blogosphere a message that if I want to open up for derivative work, I can. What I can't do is restrict the use of my article more than the editors intend with the license.

Thanks, that was useful information!

At the beginning was chaos
That is a more acceptable theory, and also more in line with the norse myth of creation, than having a conscious mind out there creating everything. A cow licking a frosted, salty rock causing life sounds a little like butterflies causing storms, and chaos is definitely a powerful actor in all of the norse myths, represented by Loke, the advocate of all things unpredictable.

Chaos connected to creativity thus has a mythic or religious connection. The strong mathematical nature of Chaos theory makes it rather inaccessible to us of a more humanistic bent. Even the Chaos Hypertextbook is beyond true understanding. Knowing the theories of hypertexts does not help, and reader-response theory only tells me that no, I am not the model reader of this! I could of course see if it helps with a Master's degree from Western Sydney in Complexity, Chaos and Creativity. One of the courses is called Use of Narratology in Dealing with Social Complexity, and sounds like part of an argument raging in groups I know fairly well.

What I am looking at chaos and creativity for right now, is that I think that a lot of the patterns and structures we see emerge in multi-user computer games might be better explained through chaos: emergence of logic and results from the random acts of multitudes. I just don't understand the theory properly yet. Not at all, really. But that's pretty chaotic and in the spirit of random acts from which meaning emerges - me thinking about using chaos theory to study games is as effective as a cow licking a frosted stone to create life. But Audhumla did it.

Dark thoughts
A heavy, rainy day with no rest, a complicated series of lectures waiting for me, starting tomorrow, and no way out of my obligations. Not even a Dr. of games can play ALL the time. So when this poem drifted by, I snagged it:

HINSIDES

Jeg er uten håp.
Men regnet faller for å
fylle opp fjorden.

Glo

Stone mason
Ålesund, the closest city, burned down in January 1904. Today the city centre is heavily modernised, but luckily some of the city that rose from the ashes has been preserved: some of the most beautiful stone architecture in Norway, thanks to the German Kaiser Wilhelm.

Among the stone masons drifting north was a young man from a family og stone masons. His father had come out of Sweeden, nobody knows from where exactly. The name he used was Karlson - son of Karl, which means man in both Swedish and Norwegian. The son of Karl followed the work on the railroads, and the first time the history of this particular stone mason touches on my past, is when he meets the daughter of a farmer close to Bergen. At the time the son of Karl was a labour party agitator, a skilled mason and, according to the picture hanging on the wall in my mother's summer house, a man with strong features and intense eyes, looking in his old age dreamily into some future just beyond our point of view. The woman he met was his match. Her picture is at the other side of the window, at the same wall, and she looks directly into your eyes, her hair pulled back to reveal the shape of a face I find alarmingly familiar: strong jaw, clear brow, long neck, she haunts the family with glimpses of her features generations down the line.

The son of Karl and the daughter of the farmer not only loved each other, but they made love. More than one of my great-uncles had been born by the time they married. She was cast out of the family not for her love but for that marriage, with the words of her father still ringing in the memory of this family with their bitter venom, poisoning the past but also setting us all free to choose for ourselves. "It would be better if she had a mill-stone about her neck and was drowned and resting at the bottom of the ocean than marrying that Swede!"

She never backed down. She married her stone-mason, her wandering Swede, took his name, gave birth to this children and lived a long life in Oslo, apart and estranged from her family until her brother took over the farm and invited his nephews back to visit. From these two came several stone-masons, and when Ålesund burned, the work pulled them north. This one stayed behind while his brothers drifted further north, following the work. They went north to work on rebuilding and maintaining Nidarosdomen, the gothic cathedral in Trondheim, started in 1070 and kind of fully built around 1300. According to family history, there are still stone masons of the line of the son of Karl working on the cathedral.

But this particular one stayed in the vicinity of Ålesund. He liked to go to town in the week-end, and would blow some of his salary on staying at the best hotel in town, Grand, today named Hotel Scandinavie. In this hotel there was a particular young maid, from the north of Norway, who had caught his fancy.

Although he was a mature man, already married and divorced once, the feisty little girl from an island far north caught his attention, and he never went north to his brothers or back south to his children and former wife. Instead he bought a piece of rock, built a house on it, and paid for permission to work the stone along the shore close to that house. The stone in this area is clean and even, a warm, fine-grained light grey. Out of the rock he cut a living for himself and his six younger children. He worked to give his children education, and managed to pay for two of them, one boy and one girl, an engineer and a school-teacher, as well as some additional schooling for his two younger daughters. Not quite as much as they dreamed of, but more than some. He cut headstones, stones for memorials, stones for any use, but to know him in his old age, think of him when you walk the streets of Ålesund.

The characteristic warm grey of the mountains around my mother's childhood home occasionally breaks the cooler grey of the Italian stone in the intricate patterns of the cobbled streets of Ålesund, and I know that he or one of my uncles, or even my father, have handled this piece of rock. They have split a huge block out of the side of the mountain, then split that again into smaller pieces, until at the end one man could shape each single stone individually, with quick and light snaps of the hammer, and yet an other square can be added to the load waiting to be shipped out the fjord and back in one fjord further south, to be used to cover the streets we walk on today. When I put my hand on one of the memorial stones he cut, I know that I touch where his hand touched, and I know my children and my children's children can do the same. I know very little of him, and touching his stones is the closest I will ever be to my grandfather, but from his stones I learn that he was a man who cherished balance, he chose the pure grey granite over the flashy marble, and he never chose to polish a surface if he could leave it raw, living with the texture of the rock. The only polished stones I know of his are those of the cobbled roads: polished by feet and wheels, paws and hooves.

the-phone-book and break battle
One of my favourite projects, the-phone-book.com, is ending. I have enjoyed the ultra-short stories immensely, and used them in my lectures, teaching narratology, rhetoric and writing. Now the project is closed, but the stories live on, this time as texts for scratch DJ's! I am not much of a club-goer, but that's something I'd have liked to see and hear!

Tobacco tycoon
Are you secretly in love with the thought of killing off millions all over the world, but without ever needing to see the goo, splatter and mess that comes with first person shooter games? Try your hand as a Tobacco Tycoon! (in Norwegian).

This is an example of a game used for educational and public information purposes. It is developed as part of an anti-smoking campaign, and it is structured as a simple board-game with traditional little tasks for you to do, cards that let you know if you are harassed by journalists or can afford a vacation at the Seychelles, and a dice to roll. Every time you pass "start" you're told how much money you have made or lost, and how many people you have killed. In this game being good doesn't pay, so I guess it is social realism.

Meming
By way of Dennis Jerz, a meme:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

The theoretician and indefatigable agitator for this policy was schoolmaster and grammarian Knud Knudsen (1812-1895), who in the early 1840's began advocating that Danish spelling, grammar and vocabulary should be gradually Norwegianized.

From Einar Haugen: Norsk-engelsk ordbok / Norwegian-english Dictionary, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo 1994.

It's a theory, you know
One of the things I do in my job, is talk to a lot of communication planners, directors, consultants and other highly-paid communication specialists. I meet them in conferences and seminars, as supervisors of my students in interbships or as fellow members in advisory boards. They are a multi-hued group, with a wide range of backgrounds. One thing most of them have in common though: They think Communication Planning is so much more "real life" than anything I can do as a teacher or researcher. I have to admit that this is wearying, even if I don't think I live in a virtual world.

These are the things on my mind when I read articles like "Evaluating Communication Campaigns" by Thomas W. Valente, in Rice and Atkin's Public Communication Campaigns. Valente has a really good point: a communication program depends on a theory!

... three different scenarios in which the program or the theory or both might succeed or fail. In the first scenario, a successful program sets in motion a causal process specified by a theory that results in the desired outcome. In the second scenario, there is a failure of theory in which there is a successfully implemented program (as measured by process evalutation) that sets in motion a causal process that did not result in the desired outcome. In the third scenario, because of a program failure, the intervention did not start an expected causal sequence, so the theory could not be tested.

What this means is that a communication plan is just a theory about how the audience will react to certain input and certain changes in the infrastructure. It is not a recipe for communicative success, it is an idea about how it may be possible to succeed. So, next time you're about to spend a significant part of your budget on public relations, advertising or public information, and you are about to shuffle that money into the already bloated bank account of some firm that boasts their "hands-on" experience rather than buying the services of that boring old research institute, consider who you want to develop the theories you pay for. People who think academic discipline is boring and analysis a waste, or people who knows a good theory when they see one, but also knows how to test, criticize and question it?

After all, work doesn't become more real by being executed by people who have never wanted to understand the why of their job.

Bbbzzzzz
There is a fly crawling around in my screen right now. It is black, with blue wings. A moment ago, I had a visit from one with white wings. I wonder (and worry) whether I will have a swarm soon, of little baby flies with pale blue wings?

Do you want your own fly? Try Z, an online project from P. S. 1 at MoMa, Museum of Modern Art in New York.

To do - done
Last night I stayed late at the office, organising all the tasks that need to be addressed the coming weeks. My days are varied, comprising a multitude of different types of jobs: teaching, writing, reading, supervising, administration, representation, advising and attendance of several different types of boards, comittees and working groups. I keep falling behind on organising this: just keeping my calendar updated took a couple of hours.

So, I made two boxes: "to do" and "done". I put all the papers on my desk into different files and filed them in one of those boxes. I made a to-do-list, to keep at the desk, no longer on those index cards I normally use, but in a journal, one picked to live on my desk only. I updated the calendar on the cellphone, on the computer, and the black book I carry when I remember it.

My desk was so pretty and clean when I got to work this morning. It felt like I had accomplished a major task. Part of that feeling had obviously been with me last night. When I checked I had put all the urgent stuff on my desk in the "done" box.

Free Wi-Fi in Wien
Useful information for us who will be at blogtalk 2.0!

Do you tooth?
When my colleague asked me this, I thought he was worried about my teeth, and not about my sex life. Turns out there's a whole new way of getting casual sex that I have no chance to be even offended and much less tantalised by, as my new cellphone is without bluetooth. Hmm, the phone was a gift from my husband. Does he know something I did not?

Daedalus Project
An interesting link for academic gamers: The Daedalus Project, ran by Nicholas Yee. And for those who wonder what "Daedalus" means: the myth of Daedalus and Ikaros.

Dreams and desires
I have wild dreams of technology, and I enjoy living comfortably in a large house, but there is something I would really like to own, something that makes me pause and stare when I see one, something that makes me ache for time, blue blonde nights and smooth water. I think this is perhaps the most materialistic dream I have ever had. It is something I want just for pleasure, just for owning it and have access to it when ever I like. This runs deeper than the way I tend to pick up red shoes and boots when I have a chance, or the lust for a new gadget. I really want a wooden rowing boat, and even if I have to be an old lady before I can afford it, I will have one. And then I will pretend to go fishing, and just row, quietly, on the fjords. There is little more restful than the sound of oares and water against a wooden hull and the smell of salt and seaweed.

Male moron law §1 and 2
I have spent a couple of days considering how to make all people, and particularly women, choose the natural sciences, mathematics and computing for education and research. After that it was with great interest I read Jill's post at Misbehaving.net about Katla's anger at The Gathering, and her wow never to return. If this is the way men in male-dominated fields treat women, they not only manage to discredit the entire field for females, they also discredit themselves for all normally intelligent people, gender-independently! Who, with the slightest touch of social intelligence, wants to be identified with insensitive idiots who do something like that to their female peers? The geek-image definitely needs a LOT of adjustment.

The debate around this is interesting, at both Katla's site and at misbehaving.net. What really fascinates me is that people consider general stupidity to be a defence. There's a long, sad tradition for that in gendered debates and conflicts. When I studied in Bergen in the eighties the local newspaper covered a particularly nasty rape. A man had picked up a girl in his car, and with the help of friends taken her to his cabin, kept her prisoner several days and raped her repeatedly. She finally managed to escape and get help. Rapes are rarely this obvious. One thing is having sex with a girl who has agreed to let you drive her home, that often leaves ample room for defense. This moron had kept her prisoner for a long time and shared her with friends. When asked how he could do something like this, he replied with the male moron law of sexual encounters: "Everybody knows that when a girl says no, she really means yes."

The debate on Katla's site indicates that the geek girls should be happy they had all that interest from the geek boys. Geek girls don't get many other chances to be what all girls dream of: a sexy bimbo. I think that should be male moron law § 2: "What all women really want is to be a sex-object all the time and to all men."

And beebop, I am really sorry about what you must have felt that made you write this:
I sympathise with you, it's not a pleasant situation to be in. However these guys are not really doing you any harm, admittedly they are objectifying your body but, heck, i'd love for someone to objectify my body and most women love the flattery.

I know girls pretend that they don't like it but most girls I know love being hit on or wolf whistled at by guys - it just lets them know they're looking good. For these "geek girls" it's a rare opportunity, they're not going to get appreciated that often!

I am sorry there are nobody who appreciates your body and mind, nobody to express desire for you and nobody to let you feel respected and treasured. Because those things are so much, much better than having casual strangers drool over your tits, and experiencing respect and admiration just might teach you what geek girls really want.

Demonstration and veils
Crossing Karl-Johan at noon, there was a colourful demonstration. Girls in blue suits and white veils, and men in elegant turbans, a colourful gazebo on the back of a car, and families in turbans and veils in yellow and orange. Turned out they demonstrated against the proposed French law prohibiting hijab in schools.

I have problems with the rules demanding that girls wear hijab, covering their heads and necks (and just about everything else) at all times. I particularly have problems with the argument that women showing their hair ask to be violated by men, and if men take advantage of them the blame is on the women. It is an argument that makes me feel sick. At the same time I feel that it's equally wrong to make women's heads a battleground between culture and nation through legislation, the way women's bodies have been battlegrounds in so many other causes. This is complicated. I want it to just stop being a problem, all muslim men and women to see sense and let their children choose for themselves, and muslim girls to put their veils on and take them off according to function and pleasure, not at the demands of religious and political leaders. And then I want world peace and universal cooperation to solve the problems with pollution, disease and the skewed disperson of wealth and priviledge.