Cool design!

iMac G5 has arrived, and my oh my it's hot. I want it, now!

Blogbullies

Last Thursday, an article on cyber bullies by Amy Harmon was published in New York Times. As blogs are tools that "enable the harassment to be both less obvious to adults and more publicly humiliating, as gossip, put-downs and embarrassing pictures are circulated among a wide audience of peers with a few clicks.", they are discussed in the article. You must register though to read the article, thus here's an excerpt:

"Everyone hates you," read an anonymous comment directed toward a girl who had signed her name to a post about exams on a blog run by middle-school students at the Maret School in Washington, D.C., last term.

"They would talk about one girl in particular who had an acne problem, calling her pimpleface and things like that which was really mean," one Maret student said. "That stuck with me because I've had acne, too."

One of the girls who started the blog said she and her friends had deleted all the posts because so many people - including some parents - began to complain. "I didn't see why they cared so much," said the girl, who preferred not to be identified. "It's obviously not as serious as it seems if no one's coming up to you and saying it."

It seems to me like some kids don't see that even though it might feel unreal posting mean things on the Internet, almost like writing a diary, the consequences of the action are very real indeed.

End of season

I'm getting in my car again, driving the 350 km to my family and my summer cabin out in the arcipelago. This weekend is a festive one in the region where I come from (we name it villaavslutning or veneziaden, depending on the area). We "celebrate" or mourn for, depends on one's interests I guess, the end of the archipelago season. It's definitely getting darker quickly now, and it's quite chilly outside. There are bonfires on every small island, by every cottage, both by sea and by land. And there will be lots of fireworks! I for sure belong to those mourning that the cottage season is gone.

Unprofitable

My morning news paper Hufvudstadsbladet pays attention to a study (in Swedish) made in Sweden by the central organisation of Swedish academics a while ago. The substance of it is that, in some cases, it is economically not profitable to get a Master's degree in the Nordic countries. This is due to the Nordic way of pursuing a wage policy which shows solidarity with low-paid workers, therefore the wages for academics are low. And again, surprise surprise, the women are the losers as professions like librarians, physiotherapists and occupational therapists are low-paid. Economists and doctors score high on the other hand.

I've written about this before. Many Finns go to either university or polytechnics. But if this is the reality that faces them after graduation, the brain drain could increase. I should have gone for my dream of becoming a florist!

Postman prank

This is what the staircase in our house looked like last Sunday. The guy who delivers the pile of advertising brochures twice a week has apparently been out of control. There were more of them lying around the floor, but someone either threw them in the trash in the yard, or grabbed it along with them to read during dinner, before I got the chance to take a photo.

I like to think that the mailman was making a statement. It's not such an unlikely idea. I noticed that his post is vacant now. Perhaps he felt like he wanted to say what he really thought about his job, at his last round of work.

Perhaps he was tired of handing out enticements to buy a new identity every season, allurements to shop til you drop in the name of the national economy and temptations to make body, soul and mind (and the mobile phone, the home and the car as well) a project that can and should be ameliorated and updated infinitely.

Perhaps he's an example of what Sorbonne professor Michel Maffesoli talked about at the ISEA. He's noted some turning points in our society. Two of these are political and social. According to Maffesoli, we've reached a saturation of unifying the society. Maybe our mailman tried to favor consumption at the local market hall or market place in town, instead of consumption of global wares from global companies. Another new feature in our society, observed by Maffesoli, is the return of the emotional in social life. Perhaps this outburst of emotions, expressed by throwing papers around the staircase, was a way of rejecting the contemporary society, characterized by cold figures, rationality and productivity. Maybe he was taking up the cudgels for more amusement, spontaneity and joy in life.

Or maybe, just maybe, am I reading too much in to what probably was a prank by a bored young mailman. Although I hope I'm right regarding the enchantment part. I think emotions are coming back into fashion, because it's hip to be in touch with one's feelings, to explore one's inside and develop as a human being. But this is something that one should do and perform in the spare time, at weekends or so. Never at work, or in "public". I'm tired of the logic and rational, and I long for affections. If I were to chose between the Matrix and Shrek, I'd go for Shrek anytime!

Well, today's Wednesday, and my mail box is usually stuffed with advertising on Wednesdays and Sundays. I wonder where I'll find it today, if I get any at all!

The present tomorrow

Yesterday, Tuesday 24th, I accidently changed the time and date of a post, so that the date was one day ahead. This got me really confused, as my blog claimed that I had posted something on Wednesday 25th, a date that only a couple of islands in the Pacific Ocean had experienced at that point. Since I was quite positive that it was a Tuesday here in Åbo, I was quite lost there for a while. But then I realized that not only is it possible to change the time and date of a post backwards in time, but also ahead in time.

At ISEA, Jill Walker talked about timestamps and how essential time is in blog posts. She asked whether we are in charge of time in blogs, and the obvious answer is yes, we are. What a powerful thing to master!

Ecological footprints

This test clears my conscience, even though I'm far from a great, super-consumer. It measures your ecological footprint, with regards to what you eat, how you travel and live and the size of the waste you produce. This is expressed in biologically productive land and ocean areas necessary to maintain these services. My total footprint is 3.5 global hectares, where as the average for Finns is 8.4 hectares per person. Nonetheless, the test results reminds me: IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 1.9 PLANETS! Auch! I thought I was doing good at cutting down on waste production and using public transport and my bicycle instead of my car.

And while I'm at the topic of consumtion and population, I'll mention that according to the Population Reference Bureau, there will be an estimated 9.276 millions of us in the world, in 2050. Today, there's 6.3 millions. But who's to say? A lot can happen in 46 years. Epidemics might devastate entire regions, family planning may break through, and when women get a chance to educate themselves, the birthrate tends to go down.

Job therapy

Since I'm tired of eating macaroni, I applied for an extra job; a couple of hours of data storing at a tele company every night until September-November. Well, after a first sorting out of the record high number of applicants, the headhunter called me in for an interview today. But this wasn't enough. Now, she will analyse the interviewees, recommend a few to the tele company, which will do further interviewing next week. What circumstantial and difficult to get a part-time, evening job for two months, that was furthermore labeled "urgent"! What happened to those days when you called a company up, said "hey, I'm interested in your activities, and you can't do without me" and they'd take you on if you dressed decently and promised to show up on time? This is how I got most of my summer jobs, actually all of them when I think about it. All this bureaucracy surprised me and I wonder, is it necessary for part-time evening jobs like this one? But of course, this procedure employes people. But still.

I'm probably not gonna get the job if the headhunter reads this, but it's ok. My former boss at the local newspaper called me and begged me to come and work for them in September. I agreed, so shortly, I'll be blogging as a journalist.

After the interview today I figured I needed some light entertainment, thus voilà:

What kind of social software are you? [via Anti-mega]



And what are you addicted to? [via Schizoblog]


You're addicted to.....

Alcohol!
Mmmmmmm, Mmmmmm, Bitch! I like you, alcohol is one of the better things to be addicted to. The only bad part is it makes you feel like doing nothing and the next morning you get a terrible hangover.

Wireless experience in Helsinki

I’m not much for art exhibitions where all you do is walk around, lazily watching abstract paintings at the walls. But this one I like, ‘cause you get to participate and do things with the art. In this case, you create your own art by typing in messages on this all round keyboard. The messages you write circulate in what seems to be a digital crystal ball, for everyone to see. If you’re on your way to Helsinki, do check out the interactive “Wireless experience” exhibition, it’s open until October 24th.

Air Angus Young

Does this make you excited? If you want it, then I hope you've signed up for the Air guitar world championships in Oulu. In a couple of days, we'll know who wins the Flying Finn-guitar and the title Best Air Guitar Player of the year 2004.

Photo messaging

Sending pictures via the mobile phone isn't such a big hit as the mobile operators would have hoped, according to the Finnish paper Tekniikka & Talous. There's already been sent over a billion text messages this year in Finland, but only a couple of millions multi media messages. This is quite fascinating when considering that half more than of all the mobile phones sold today have a camera, and people tend to update their phones relatively often.

One of the possible reasons for this is the lack of synchronization. Since the screens and amount of pixels differ in many phones, the pictures sent don't always reach the receiver properly.

Professor Machiko Kusahara from Japan talked about the mobile phone culture (Ketai) in Japan at the ISEA conference. According to her, moblogging is very popular in Japan and the camera function in the phones is highly appreciated. It's not unusual to see someone reaching their hand up in the air, taking a picture of what is actually happening in the crowd in front of them. The mobile phone becomes an extension of your body (McLuhan's famous notion), in this case, the eyes that don't see what's going on due to the crowd.

While Kusahara claims that many women use the mobile phones and the camera function (many mobile phone ads are directly aimed at women) in Japan, English Nina Wakeford found that the four London lads she studied weren't interested at all in photo messaging. What they wanted was to sit down at the pub and show the picture to their friends and talk about it there. Someone in the audience commented that he had reached the same conclusion in his study, that kids don't seem to be interested in multi media messaging, and he asked Wakeford what she makes of this. She replied that people want to share the context and discuss the photo face to face with others, and not only share the picture as such.

According to the article I mentioned above, the average Sonera connection user sends one photo message per year, but more than one text message per day. I took a couple of photos with my mobile at the conference, here's one of professor Kusahara.


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Off to ISEA Helsinki conference

I'm off to the great, big capital tomorrow morning, to attend the Helsinki conference of ISEA. Even Westwang's blogging the conference that's currently taking place on board the Silja Europa cruiser ferry (I would love to be there, of course for the programme but also as it would have been a nice contrast to my memories I have from diverse drinking and partying trips I've done in my youth on the ship).

Jill Walker is also blogging from the cruiser ferry. I'm really looking forward to her presentation on timestamps on Friday morning, and to my great delight, I found the abstract on her site. I won't be blogging the events the next few days, but I will contribute with a résumé and thoughts next week.

Chat behaviour

Last night, the readers of the evening paper Aftonbladet had the opportunity to chat with the Swedish ambassador Margareta Winberg (a copy of it is here, only in Swedish though). The reason was that Winberg and a collegue of hers, Annika Barthine, have written a feministic manifesto, encouraging women to make their own choises and to refuse to stay underpaid at work, among other things.

I joined in (though my question never appeared so it remains unanswered) and while waiting for the chat session to start, I noticed that the editors had chosen two questions as a headline, or introduction. I don't remember the first question, but the other one was "Do we need a feminist party?". The rest of the introduction was something like "MW will be here shortly to chat with you and answer your questions".

I remember thinking that this could get the debate off the track. Nowhere in their manifesto, or in the relating article about them, did Winberg and Barthine say they plan to found a feminist party! So why did the paper decide to pose this irrelevant question to the chatters? And as it turned out, 7 of the 16 questions posed to Winberg during the chat session were about the needs, structure and ideology of a feminist party, even though she's never said anything about founding such a party. It irritates me a lot that Aftonbladet governed the debate the way they did.

For whom do you blog?

I haven’t updated my blog for a while now and I’ve thought to myself, should this bother me? The basic idea here is: Am I writing only for myself, or am I writing for an imagined public? Am I, as a blogger, put under an obligation to regularly blog as I might have an audience that expect to read pieces of my life every now and then? This comes to mind again when reading the paper I just commented on below. Esposito writes:

Samuel Johnson was simply wrong when he famously said that no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. The truth is that recognition is the greater motivator.

Little in this world can be seen as black and white, neither can this. I guess I write both for myself and for an audience. I think better when I write so for this reason, I'm very selfish and egoistic about blogging. Plus, in this way, I have a collection of thoughts and useful links always at hand. But naturally, I hope that a potential reader is interested in the topic and might even benefit from reading my posts. And yes, it’s a motivator when someone e-mails me to ask further questions about something I blogged, or just to say hi.

If you are a blogger, for whom do you blog?

Blogs and publishing

In the current issue of First Monday, there’s an article on Open Access publishing in relation to academic research publications by Joseph J Esposito. As a remedy for the high costs of journals, and for the difficulty for scholars to get published in journals and get access to these, Esposito suggests Open Access publishing on the net. This is where blogs come in as they are a form of OA publishing. Further on, he states that the future of online publishing lies within such publishing that is personal and not professional. This is a weblog in a nutshell! Or most weblogs, I should add.

Esposito seems rather optimistic when it comes to the future of blogs, even though only 2 % of the American ICT users have created a blog, and the phenomenon is still not universal. He sees blogging as the last resort today, when you want to spread the word about something, and the local newspaper refuses to take you on. But blogs will increasingly be the first, and perhaps only, resort as blogs reach universal status. I’d love to be around that day!

To further emphasize that blogs are the ones likely to outdo world publishers, Esposito compares the weblog to the mobile phone. Blogs are creating new media forms to address new market needs, according to Esposito. So are wireless mobile phones and look at their success today. But the writer is skeptical to the chance of discourse forms - such as blogs - taking over the world of academic research soon. Unfortunately, I have to agree with him, but I hope that scholars and researchers would embrace blogging. And hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, like Morgan Freeman said in Shawshank Redemption.

An I for an i

Wired News will no longer capitalize the "I" in internet. There never was a reason for capitalizing the word in the first place, and therefore the decision.

In Swedish, and in Finnish, the capital letter I is still used in the word internet. Why? Both the Swedish language committee in Finland and the Swedish group for computer terminology in Sweden recommend capitalizing as the internet is a name and a “proper noun for a specific computer web”. I suggest we write the word with a minuscule, a lower case letter that is, in Swedish and Finnish too. Or to be more precise, that the linguists would start recommending the form "internet", because people are using this decapitalized way of writing more and more anyways.

Vacation

Zzz

I'm off on vacation now, and I'll try to relax like these two fellows. This means that the blog won't be updated in a week or so.
Cheers.

Roadmap

I got a hold of an almost one year old issue of the ladies’ magazine Amelia. The Swedish author Kajsa Ingemarsson was interviewed and she said that her motto is “Life is not a distance for transportation”.

But I wonder. I’ve spent quite some time on the roads this summer, driving through the country. And while sitting there, behind the wheel, I’ve realized that this actually is life that I’m witnessing here. Life is a highway. Some drive at top speed and won’t stop at nothing to pass others, some don’t. The roadhogs are a form of social deviation. And drivers standing still at the side of the road (the ones with a warning sign behind the cars, not the coffee yearning!) don’t participate in “everyday life”, perhaps due to illness or so.

And just as there are underlying systems that influence how you lead your life, so are there in traffic, for instance the three heavily loaded trucks in front of you, the speed limits and the quality of the road. And the fact that most people actually drive on the roads, and not through the forest, implies the choices that many make, such as creating a family and getting a job. And if you turn to a side road, this represents a change of something, field of study, job or hobby for example.

But in my opinion, this is not an appealing model of viewing life. I’d rather see life as a big meadow, where you’re free to take any path you like. Only big rocks and ditches may limit your way and actions. I imagine, perhaps in my own naïve way, that if life was a meadow, we’d make our own, individual choices and not go with the rest (that is not to nicely join the endless line of cars). But since my family has reared cattle, I’ve observed sheep graze out in the free. And there’s no individuality there. They stick to their group and follow each other, and the leader sheep, almost everywhere.

Does it sound hazy and scatterbrained? Well, I gotta focus on the traffic too, you know, so I can't waste too much energy on thinking while driving... Feel free to contribute with other analogies of life, I'd love to hear what others feel. I guess that both of these ways of looking at life has its own pros and cons. While driving the 4 ½ hour long drive tonight (in a car with no air conditioning in 27 degrees Celsius!), I’ll probably have time to give this some more thought.

Blogging polemic

Charles Cooper, the executive editor of commentary at the technology news site CNET News.com, is disappointed with the Convention bloggers. According to him, the blog posts were characterized by a see-me, hear-me tenor, and not by journalistic principles.

David Weinberger blogs this and answers Cooper in a videoreply.

Smorgasbord

I’ve taken up listening to my childhood favorite radio station again, P3. It’s one of many channels by the public service radio broadcaster in Sweden. There’s however no frequency where I live these days, so I have to listen to it via the internet, which is ok.

But not only can I listen to P3, but also to P3 Svea (only Swedish music), P3 Rockster (rock music only), P3 Street (Hiphop and r’n’b) and P3 Star. What a segmentation, I don’t know which one to choose! But since I like to listen to blends of music, and not just one genre, I usually go with the “original” P3.

Mark Glaser had similar experiences with the smorgasbord phenomenon when he tried to follow the Democratic National Convention, not via tv, radio or print media, but via blogs only.

"Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the blog-only experience was knowing where to go for what, and when. With so many blogs in on the action -- or commenting on the action from afar -- it often felt like trying to find a snowflake in an avalanche. On TV, you might have the choice of the networks (for an hour each night) or Fox News, CNN or MSNBC. But with blogs, you had to choose between a smorgasbord of offerings."

Glaser decided to use many sources to get information on the Convention, among others a "best of the blogs" blog, Technorati and Bloglines that run feeds from various weblogs. Perhaps this is the third stage of the history of media? By his famous statement “The medium is the message”, Marshall McLuhan meant that the history of the media falls into 3 periods. The first one is an oral culture, where a piece of news was narrated and the way of thought was circular. The second one was the culture of writing and printing where linear thinking develops. The third period is the electronic culture, where, according to McLuhan, the media will bring about radical shifts. Perhaps this hypertext, where the reader jumps around between websites, following links, travels back and forth in a text and in different settings is this radical shift.