Papers to the EuroITV conference

We just added the papers we'll present during the EuroITV event in Amsterdam to our research website. The work in progress paper titled "Different” and “exciting”. The impact of set-top box and mobile phone interactivity on TV viewing experiences is available for downloading (pdf), as is the Doctoral Concortium paper Decoding experiencing entertainment in iTV. Oh well, inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes.

Dating

I feel like a polar bear squinting against the sun after months of hibernation. Or in my case, weeks. I've been busy with a client's audience research and yesterday, after days of collecting data and analyzing it, the conclusions were finalized and the report was handed over. In such projects, I do nothing but devote my time to that, I don't check my calender to see what's up next month or follow up on interesting links I get. I'm "live by the hour" and "carpe diem" personalized. But now, when there's time for dating, that is to cruise around in the digital calender, I notice there's a lot of interesting things going on.

• The conference on Media Literacy, in which I participate with a poster, is taking place here at my university in two days. There's a blog too for posting ideas and sharing experiences during the conference, which is a great idea! I wish there were more digital meeting spaces around events taking place off-line.
  

• The date of the conference that my colleagues are organizing, Eyes on iTV, is also hurdling towards us. Registration is still open.

• I'm off to Amsterdam in two weeks, for the EuroITV conference. Makes me kind of wonder, where was I during the spring? It feels like it's 2 months or so away. I guess I need to start preparing for it.
  

• The deadline for submitting abstracts to the Virtual conference is 15th of May. More here.

• And regrettably, my loan of the excellent but yet half unread book Psychology of Entertainment is way too soon due. Which, by the way, is an excellent excuse to occupy the cozy sofa in our lab :)
  

I doubled my foot size

I made a sad discovery yesterday. I attended a class on ecological footprints and I decided to measure my own remains. Turned out to be 6.6 global hectares and compared to my last measure, which I did 2,5 years ago, it has doubled! Lately, when reading and hearing about how frustrated and stressed some feel regarding the climate change and what to do to prevent it, I’ve suspected that the real issue has been a slight exaggeration. Not so anymore. My body actually feels stressed and I feel upset that this score (it is exactly that, a score among many, but one of the better measurements of how one’s consumption influences the Earth) of mine actually doubled although I’ve tried to live in a sustainable and ecologic way.

So I started troubleshooting, that is looking for the reasons to this increase and I found two: the use of cars and flying, two things that are not merely comfort issues but necessities. I have to travel in my work in order to attend events and to conduct audience research. I guess I don’t have to fly to Amsterdam in May, but driving or taking the train means less hours at work. Lately though, I’ve wondered what it would be like to arrange conferences and meetings say in Second Life. I know students who have their classes in SL are generally satisfied and happy with it (it was tested at Åbo Akademi last semester), could it be a model for work meetings as well? Being a sociologist, I’m kinda skeptical. And as for the use of car, it’s frustrating that it’s out of my control. I’d love to have the bus as my primary transportation vehicle, like I did for 7 years when studying, but it’s hard with the current bus routes in the countryside (on Saturdays, they’re leaving once an hour to town, the last one way too early at 17:30, and on Sundays, nada, zip, rien.). I could always approach the local politicians and/or the bus companies but oh well, it’s easier not to make a fuss and jump in the car. Sadly enough.