Florae trend

I rarely follow trends when it comes to my home's interiors but as I love to keep up with what's going on, I read an article on the trends in home furnishings 2007. Apparently, country style is so hot with leaves and flowers at the forefront. I'm thrilled! I'd love to have the bureau to the right, with all sorts of peonies on it.

The science of the tingling sensation

Yesterday afternoon, my head hurt, my eyes were sore and there was not one thought worthy of a single moment of attention passing through my system. Luckily, I know what makes me hurtle out of such a coma and back to reality: running. While sweating on a tread mill last night, I localized the deep, pleasant and highly rewarding feeling also known as runner's high. For me, it's like a jellyfish of power mooching about in the center of the abdomen, with tentacles injecting tingling sensations. One had better feed this jellyfish of strength as when it's awake, it makes you feel like you're God almighty crossed with Popeye and Forrest Gump, who ran across the continent. (And yes, it's the same jelly fish arms that arre somehow annoyed when you get a stitch.)

While jogging on, I started pondering whether the runner's high experience is somehow interlinked with my barometer of a good game. According to me, a good computer game is one that makes my stomach tingle. Following the Burning Crusade of WoW, I created a Draenei character (I'm on the Al'Akir server, named Paeonia, so there, now you know to whom you want to address coins of gold) and while learning the secrets of totems, I gained wings and flew off a mountain. And I'll be damned, it actually felt like I was flying myself. The moment my character had no soil under her hoof, a tingling sensation spread in my stomach just as if I was flying myself. This emotion was more temporary and diffuse but nonetheless real and more intense than the runner's high. I'm playing with the idea to wire up some of my friends, or myself, to the skin conductance and pulse electrodes in our lab at work while playing - or flying for that matter - in WoW. There hasn't been all too many studies measuring bodily responses to playing games, although I recently read one where the researchers found a significant effect of conduciveness for pride and joy. That is when the game runs smoothly and you're likely to achieve your goal, emotions like joy and pride are likely to rise. Perhaps it is joy, or pride, I'm feeling as I'm improving my character's skills by flying off the rock, but that's not the whole truth, I suspect.

And speaking of running, why is it that one's strength and stamina improves and lasts longer when someone is running next to you at the exact same pace? Is it an heritage from our 9 months spent in mummy's belly and experiencing the simultaneous beat makes us feel secure and relaxed? I wonder if there's a relation between the heart beats of the child and the mother. Do they beat simultaneously and if the mother's heart beat takes off, does the child's heart pace keep up with her beat? It's funny how I benefit from one rhythmic beat, that is having someone next to me who's heel touches the ground the exact same second mine does while others annoy me. I utterly recent playing the piano with a metrometer accompanying me. I guess I've always regarded the metronome as an intrusion in my creativity, something that limits my freedom to interpret a minuet in my own way. Unfortunately, my piano teacher back in the 1980's didn't agree...

Schlager slayer

The truly excellent video produced in house and shown at last year's Christmas party at my work is now available on youtube. The Schlager slayer is a thriller with a great pinch of humor, made by the media students.

I'm a piece of white chocolate

I attended a seminar on language and media last weekend and opinions were raised regarding the preferences of language style of different generations. The assumption was that elderly people don’t really like reading English words in the news paper, slang or expressions like rofl. About midways in the debate, I started reflecting on which generation dwelling I confess to (I’m born 1978). Am I a Generation X:er (people born 1965-1978)? Or do I belong to the Generation Y (1979-1999) or even the MTV Generation (1974-1985)? At times, I feel like I belong to Generation Y, that is net-savvy folks brought up in an wired world where a natural source of news is the online version of the local newspaper. But then again, I don’t really feel like I match the description (although I was fortunate enough to have a commodore 64 in my room with the splendid game Boulderdash). I feel like I’m a piece of white chocolate, which is referred to as chocolate, but contains neither cocoa beans nor caffeine. It is not real chocolate, close but no cigar, kind of. Shortly, I feel like I’m too old for the net generation category but too young to tick the generation X box. I’m somewhere in between two distinct generations.

So I started listing what stands out for people, born like me in 1978 and teeter-tottering between Generation X and Generation Y. This is a highly non-scientific, statistically non-significant but indeed a subjective identification of a pattern: Many of my friends in my age value friends and family (as opposed to the job), money (ironically enough considering the earlier parenthesis), sharing and connectedness. They tend to think in terms of chains instead of hyper links. They are net-savvy and wired, but still don’t give the possibility of leveling in WoW higher priority than strolling around in the park a beautiful, sunny winter’s day. Right about here, a label for this group of people came to mind: Generation W. The “W” would be ideal, not due to the evolution of www (the web) while we were young and neither due to our life being pretty wired, but because of the typography. The W is basically two V:s in one, which symbolizes a fellowship, a togetherness. Depending on the font used, the first V is mirrored, that is identical but yet different. And because it is mirrored, it’s easy for another letter to take over (like WW). That reflects the sense for justice and thinking in terms of chains. The letter W also, depending on the font, resembles a pot which of course makes one associate to inclusiveness, togetherness.

Excited about my “new” notion, I googled it to see in what contexts it has been used and whether it is a widely used term. Apparently, there’s a tv-series with this name aired in the late 1990’s. But other than that, I did not manage to get a clear picture of what “Generation W” stands for, or who it comprises. According to one source, it’s been applied to persons born in 1980-2000 (the W stands for web perhaps). Another blogger writes about the war generation, in other words kids born or brought up while Bush is in the White house. If any of you readers are familiar with the field of generation research and how the notion of generation w is used, please let me know!

Content manifest

When people learn I blog, the general reception is a joyful “Ah, yes, I regularly read some blogs myself, it is an interesting phenomenon.” Some ask what I blog about, and with what software and ask for the url, but not once has the question of why – the reason for my blogging - been posed. I’ve pondered why that is. Perhaps it is so, because those who know me know that writing is my true element and therefore, it does not really come as a great surprise that I’m writing blog posts on the internet. Or perhaps one of the greatest human basic needs is so widely recognized that most don’t reflect on it, that is the need for self-expression. Maybe when they learn that someone blogs, they automatically think that “yeah, putting down one’s thoughts and sharing them with the world, that makes perfect sense” and wouldn’t come to think of questioning it or digging into it.

To be honest, I’m glad I’ve never been asked to “justify” my blogging as I haven’t had a clear, pin-pointed objective. I had to reflect on it when I recently updated the layout and template of my blog. I figured I should add some sort of product description of Paeonia to guide new readers. I’m not assuming people have the time to read through half my archive just to get a grasp of who I am or what topics I write about.

Tangled up in thoughts on motives for blogging, while updating my template, I came to think about the papers I used in my teaching on blogging last autumn. Susan Herring found in her study that “surprisingly many” blogs contain few or no links at all. The blogs were not as interactive as one would expect, but rather individualistic, even intimate, and they seemed to play the role of a tool for self expression. Again, the self expression. I believe that is a huge drive for us humans, perhaps increasingly more so these days. People love to talk about themselves, their life and to share stories and experiences they’ve had. Nothing new, nothing bad about that. Perhaps the fact that the majority of blogs are personal, diary-kind of blogs mirrors the need to express one-self.

Another assumption would be to consider the blog a means to reflect upon one’s identity, using Gidden’s thoughts on self-identity. He basically says that our self, our identity, is nothing we simply inherit from our parents. It’s not static or impossible to redefine, on the contrary. Our self and identity is rather a story or biography that we keep telling ourselves around us, by our clothes, our actions, hobbies and tales we tell. Naturally, this is not done in a vacuum either, the tale you tell about yourself to others and their feedback is important. This is of course something that goes on every day, you can’t build it one day and preserve it like that forever. Now, is this why diary-like blogging is so popular, because it serves as a tool to keep our story, our biography, going? Is blogging a tool to keep reflecting on ourselves and the world, and to (re)define our place in it? The beauty of it is that as you keep the story of yourself going, you also get to share it with an immense audience, who can actually give you feedback on your biography.

One thought that lands close to the one above is that the limit of how far the individualization of our society can go is perhaps close. Maybe people want to take a step back, maybe they want to be individualistic by blogging, but together with others, in blogging communities on the net. Like small islets forming an asymmetric pearl necklace in a lake, individual but still together, within reach.

Well, I did manage to identify the two main ingredients that make up Paeonia. There’s, firstly, a need for storage for thoughts, links and ideas. Secondly, I think better when I write. I formulate myself better then as I need to visualize an imagined audience. It helps getting to the core of loose thoughts. (A friend who I went to university with had a complete opposite way of doing things. At exams, he sat for hours simply thinking, with an entirely blank paper in front of him. Then the last 30 minutes, he put a perfect answer to paper, handed it in and got straight A:s. I on the other hand need to draw and write while trying to figure out what to say.) So voilà, the answer to why I blog is that I need 1) a place to store interesting things I stumble upon and 2) a creative sandbox where I can grow loads of toys and then refine those I believe in. What really bugs me though is that I don’t have much time to actually sit down in this sandpit and play with the thoughts and develop them into something. Thinking requires time and I’ve been short of that lately.

Crisp thoughts

Best idea of the day: while struggling with narrowing down and concluding my thoughts into an abstract on 200 words, I decided to take a walk around the block, in an attempt to produce some new ideas (I trick I learned while working at Åbo Underrättelser, thanks Yrsa!). Naturally, it did the trick. It's -8 outside, sunny, a small chilly breeze, these are such beautiful surroundings I live in. Life and blood returned to my head and synapses reproduced at a massive rate. There, a free tip for all with challenging tasks ahead.

tv quiz solution

A couple of weeks ago, I posted the buzz word quiz I did on hot words at the conference on iTV in London I attended. Well, here's the solution (as a pdf-file).

My blog went wii

This is how my blog appears when read on a TV screen, using a Wii. I feared that browsing (in Opera) and reading the posts on a TV screen would be troublesome, near-sighted as I am, but it wasn't. And there was no need for squinting either as the "zoom in" feature made the text intelligible and clear.

Have your say on three pilots on science

Here’s an interesting interactive project involving the TV audience as content experts. PBS, a public broadcaster in the US, is asking the viewers for help in deciding which of three TV pilots – “Wired Science”, “Science investigators” and “22nd Century” - will become a regular science series on the channel. You can watch the three pilots free of charge at the PBS website and then comment on them. Based on audience research and on the feedback of the viewers, PBS then decides which pilot makes it into a series.