Holiday drinks

I just tried a new, interactive way of learning how to blend drinks, with the classic Tetris feel to it. Go here and choose Absolut holiday mix off.
With my background as a waitress and bartender, I'm quite disappointed that I didn't score any higher.

"To blog" deciphered

I had a pleasant surprise when opening my e-mail inbox this morning. Being a linguistic freak, I subscribe to a newsletter about Swedish idioms and words and the ethymology behind them. Today's word was "to blog", which surprised me a great deal, as the words are usually a bit old fashioned or rarely used. But perhaps "To blog" files under this category, rarely used, according to the one who compiles the list... ;)

I was glad to see though that the blogger is defined as someone who writes "some sort of journal at a website." and not merely as a diarist. Furthermore, the subscriber to this list is told that "One can see the journal as a middle way between a diary and a column in a newspaper, often with comments about current topics. Thus, the blogger is often a columnist on the net."

The ethymology parts states that the verb "to blog" derives from "blog", coined by Peter Merholz in 1999. The word weblog is somewhat older, as is the phenomenon of writing a diary on the net. Below is the complete text in Swedish, also found here.

Blogga

Den som bloggar skriver ett slags journal på sin
webbplats. Man kan se den som ett mellanting mellan en
dagbok och en kolumn i en dagstidning. Ofta med
kommentarer om dagsaktuella händelser. Bloggaren är
alltså ofta en kåsör på nätet. Det nya verbet blogga är
bildat av ordet blogg, själva webbjournalen. Ursprunget
är det engelska blog, en kortform av weblog som myntades
av Peter Merholz 1999 när han lekte med ordet på sin
webbplats. Blog spreds sedan snabbt, och blev populärt
genom tjänsten Blogger som startade strax därpå. Weblog
har ytterligare några år på nacken, liksom själva
fenomenet att skriva dagbok på nätet.

Weak signal

Finnish docent in Future research Mika Mannermaa has characterized our society as a "John Wayne-society". John Wayne, like the ordinary citizens of today, was outstanding at what he did and the prize tag of his expertice wasn't cheap. Anyhows, he's got a new book out, called "Out of Weak Signals, a Strong Future". Apparently, he feels that we're all surrounded by these weak signals, i.e. an idea or trend that will affect what business we do,and how. This trend is usually hard to perceive and is spotted by experts in the field.

There's an idea that I come across more and more often and perhaps that could be seen as a weak signal. The prediction is that the expert will be replaced by a generalist who knows a little bit of everything, instead of knowing everything in one tiny area. The idea is that people who have a broad perspective and a general knowledge of many things will do a lot better in life than experts concentrating on only one thing. (One reference in Swedish here.)

London calling

I'm off to London in a couple of hours. As I've never set foot in this metropolis before, I've read The Londonist-blog a couple of weeks now in order to get to know the city. The barometer of how well I know a city is how I manage the metro. By the time my return ticket expires, I've almost always gotten the hang of it, but according to Rob, I'd better not get my hopes up here.

Laughter therapy

I attended a laughter therapy course today. I learned a new word to avoid, Karoshi, and how to get high on laughter. The course didn't really give me much though, perhaps because I already know about the endorphines, the body's own drog etc. Or that I'm a person who laughs a lot anyway. But I do admit that the exercises to get us to laugh were quite stress releaving: "Pretend you're a male dog who marks his territory by peeing on it. Go out there and pee on each other."!

Google goes scholar

Google Scholar, the new search service aimed at scientists and academic researchers, is up and running now. Available here. (Source: Air-list)

film festival online

The Stockholm International Film Festival takes off today and so does its ifestival - one of the first film festivals on the internet. Internet users can watch 10 international short films and vote for their favorite.

Swiss sociologist Rico Grünenfelder participates with Pico takes off, definitely worth watching!

Long awaited, much appreciated!

The snow's finally here!

Haluatko filmitestaajaksi?

Since about 33 % of my visitors are Finnish, I'll take the opportunity to market the media lab that I'm working at, iDTV Lab, and the chance of becoming a movie tester. You get to see new movies before they hit the theatres for free, and the chance to actually have a say in the process. If you loathe the ending of the movie, there's a chance that it'll be redone. For more info and to sign up, go here.

If you're a media reseacher or PhD-student for instance, looking for a cool opportunity to test interactivity, usability or user interface, or if you have a movie or tv-programme in your drawer and want to know what the big audience will say about it, go here (pdf), or here.

Deviant art

One of my favorite photographers, Esa Wendelin, has a great forum here. Go get blown away.

Seminar on media cooperation

There's a seminar at my university today that I'll attend. I'm especially looking forward to hearing Jonas Löwgren, associate professor of human-computer interaction in Malmö, Sweden talk about media cooperation. The seminar is taking place 12.30-16.15 (Finnish local time) and is streamed here.

Blogging apathy

My blog hasn't been much updated lately. There are three primary reasons for this. Firstly, my project to get connected to the net in my appartment keeps on failing. I signed up for a ADSL-connection but the installation queue is 8 weeks.

So, I figured I'd get myself a WLAN-card for surfing meanwhile standing in line, and I did, but the connection was too fable. When I didn't get it to work properly even out on the balcony, I realized that I'll have to live without the net at home for a couple of weeks. The blog posts I have written were born at the office but I've been so busy at work that I truly have not had one minute to spare. And as my partner lives 350 kilometers away from me, when we finally meet in the weekends, other things are on my mind than browsing through the net for interesting papers and thoughts to blog about. Lack of access to and time spent on the net is thus one reason for letting down my dear readers.

The second reason is an identity crisis. Since I'm not primarily a PhD-student anymore, but a media researcher with a paycheck dropping down once a month (which is rare for PhD-students here), I've been thinking about what to do with my blog. Should I go on writing about interesting papers, academia-related issues, even though I don't have as much time to follow these matters? Or, should I broaden the perspectives and blog news, media matters and research in general or make it a more mobile one, for instance blog when I go places?

But the most significant one is the fact that my mother is very ill. She suffers from a, most likely, severe disease that no one of us saw coming. It hit us like a bolt from the blue. Therefore, I've spent many hours with her and my family. While trying to cope with the chock, I played with the thought of blogging my feelings. I still don't think it's such a bad idea to blog one's way through sorrow and the struggle against a fatal disease, but I decided not to until we know for sure all the facts about her condition. I want to have a label on the matter before blogging about it. Perhaps that's just a silly desire of having control but that's how I feel.

Mobility and election

Yesterday's local government election felt strange. I voted in advance and at that time, I was registred in the municipality where I was brought up. I knew some of the candidates and I was somewhat excited about it. But when the results came in, I was most interested in seeing who got elected in the city I've lived and worked in the last six, seven years. But none of these will decide on my future, but yet another crowd of delegates in the town I live and am registered in nowadays. And I don't have a clue who they are! Mobility is difficult sometimes...

About the outcome: voting percentage in the whole nation was 58.6, compared with 55,9 % four years ago. And yes, my candidate got elected! Image, a young, dedicated women amongst the old buffers in the local government council room. Great!

(Updates on the election here, only in Swedish and Finnish though)

Contribute a verse

A few days ago, I promoted the movie “Dead Poets Society” from a long runner in the book shelf to Friday night entertainer. A feel good movie, where one line in particular caught my attention. The English teacher, played by Robin Williams, reveals a secret about the role and importance of poetry to his students. He quotes Whitman: “O me! O life! Of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here, that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse."

Sounds like blogging to me.

Blogs as a response to the media

I was interviewed by e-mail by a journalist in San Francisco the other day, the topic was PhD-students blogging their thesis. As I have a background as a journalist, and as I've been in the interviewees role only twice in my entire life now, I'm looking forward to see the article and how the journalist cites me out of my e-mail responses. For example, how much emotions can you detect in an e-mail? Can you detect that I wish to emphasize this or that, or that I strongly oppose to this and that, if I don't write it out in plain text?

More on this topic in this week's Glaser online, where Mark Glaser talks to billionaire technology entrepreneur and owner of NBA's Dallas Mavericks basketball team, Mark Cuban. Cuban was interviewed via e-mail by a sports columnist at Dallas Morning News. Cuban felt however that the columnist got the facts all wrong so he decided to post the e-mail of the journalist and what he'd answered in his blog. That way, his readers could see for themselves what he'd really said and compare it with the column in the news paper.

Books

I looked through the book “New Media Reader”, edited by Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, today and found an article from 1992 on the end of books. The author, Robert Coover, describes the world as it was in 1992; “world of video transmissions, cellular phones, fax machines, computer networks…”. In 1992, I was 14 years old and I sure didn’t have my own cellular phone and I wasn’t acquainted with computer networks. I spent large parts of my days playing Boulderdash on my Commodore 64.

Anyways, after sketching out the year of cyberpunks and hyperspace freaks (still 1992), Coover states that at this time, one often heard claims that the print medium is a doomed and outdated technology. Of course, this was the case for the novel as well. Luckily, this didn’t turn out to be true. The annual book fair in Åbo began today and loads of people, especially young folks, were there looking for narrative pleasure and listening to authors speaking on the podiums.

Speaking of books, this one suits me in particular. (It’s a typical girl’s book about Susan getting her dream job. I’ve gotten it as a nine-year-old, if one’s to believe my flourished handwriting.) Like my namesake in the book, I’ve gotten a new job, at MediaCity's development unit iDTV Lab at my university. This means I have to move though, to a town close to my home regions. But what the heck, I’ve lived in Åbo for 6 years now so a change is perhaps just what I need.

Violating rule number one

The author of the book Lehtikeisari, Jyrki Hämäläinen, is accused of citing other writers' text without giving them the credit or mentioning his sources. The possible copyright violation by Hämäläinen, who was the editor in chief for a long time at the popular teenage music magazine Suosikki, has already been discussed by journalists and in the culture section of the largest Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, according to journalist Helena Pilke who reviews this book.

Yenayer blogs about the citing situation in French blogs, and apparently, the "rule" of citing isn't well respected there. Those of you who find this topic interesting, worrying or perhaps see it as a fast lane to stardom and celebrity, have a look at the movie Shattered Glass. It presents another angle to the citing principle as the movie is about citing non-existing people, rather than stealing other people's text. I saw it and I liked the story.

Bluff your way to the top

As a warm up for the party we were going to last night, me and my friends played Balderdash. It's a hilarios bluffing game, where you get to be creative and crazy without feeling shameful about it. The more crazy your suggestions are, the more likely you are to win. And I did.
I'm totally sold on board games like these, and now, this is on my wishlist...

Looks like I've missed The political satire tv show

The same seminar, called “The voices of politics in public”, also included the tv-producer Olli Haikka. He’s one of the guys behind Itse valtiaat, an animated political satire tv show. I didn’t take notes here but he also concluded that today, media is more about entertainment, sensations and persons than before.

While listening to him, I realized that I must be the worst consumer society-citizen ever. The show is extremely popular (it airs prime time, Saturday night). According to Haikka, it has about 700 000 viewers every week (a lot in a country of Finland’s size) and the production team is making another movie about the characters, that are Finnish politics, when they were small kids. And I’ve never seen one single episode! Not one. I stick to the Simpsons instead and I like it that way.

Silent democracy, noisy media

Since I use Jürgen Habermas’s notion “public sphere” in my PhD-studies, I went to a seminar at Turun Yliopisto today where the researcher and member of parliament Arja Alho gave a speach on the issue.

Arja Alho was Minister of Finance in Finland in the mid 1990’s but she resigned from this post as a result of the scandal around the so called Sundqvist-deal (in 1997 I think it was). She took a break from politics, took up her studies and got her doctor’s degree in sociology this year. Her thesis is called "Silent democracy, noisy media" where she looks at four Finnish case studies. Two are political decisions and two are political scandals.

Although she’s both a researcher and member of parliament today, she gave the speech as a researcher, based on her dissertation. Unfortunately, she spoke really fast and I didn’t get everything she said, but here are some hasty notes:

• She uses the notion of Jürgen Habermas, "public sphere", in her dissertation. She feels that the Finnish translation "julkinen sfääri" doesn’t quite capture what she means by the notion so she develops it: Public sphere is to her a common theatre for debate and discussion and to which everybody has access. By participating in this public sphere, the citizen can influence political decision making.


• Even though the public sphere is a dream, hard to implement, there are still grounds to at least try to realize it.


• In Finland, the public sphere is almost to a 100 % the media. Sure, there are public places like the square market but people nowadays meet at shopping malls, and not at libraries and saloons.


• She poses two rhetorical questions: Is a representative democracy enough? Can the citizens participate more? She calls for more discussion between the politicians and the citizens.


• According to studies, Finns’ trust in politicians is quite low. Perhaps it’s time for the decision makers to ponder the reasons to this, and to listen to the feedback? It’s time for them to become partners in discussions.


• She gives a brief recap on her first case study, Finland’s entry to the European monetary union in 1995. Alho found that the politicians forced through the decision to become a member of this union in secret. There was no discussion in the public sphere before the decision. The politicians didn’t discuss the union in the public sphere and therefore, the citizens didn’t get any information to base an opinion on.


• Another case study was the privatization of Sonera, a telecommunications company. Apparently, she focused on how the media disclosed that the director of Sonera, and the former minister, Pekka Vennamo had laid his hands on quite a nice sum of stock. Vennamo and the responsible minister resigned.


• In her disseration, she concludes that the political elite in Finland is small. And what’s more, there’s an oligarchy in the oligarchy in the Parliament. Some members of the government don’t have access to information and the communication needed to make a decision.


• Another conclusion is that media is more entertainment-focused today. The media present fairytales about the good and the bad guys in politics, even though political decisions rarely are either good or bad.


• All in all: We have a technocracy rather than democracy, and the media is noisy rather than analytic. When it comes to media, the noisiness is due to the demand on profit. This breeds a poor democracy.

Alho got many questions, can’t remember them all. The essence of her answers is that the starting point for politicians should be to bring arguments to the public sphere. Thus, those citizens who want to can read them, reflect on them and give feedback. Bringing arguments into the public sphere is not done by increasing the information flow but to promote communication and discussion. She wishes that the decision makers would be more of a discussion partner with the citizens who wish to influence on the politics. She calls for interactive reciprocal action.

In another answer, she develops her critique on representative democracy. She says that it is not enough to vote, lean back and see how the 200 representatives do in the next 4 years, and then exchange them if the result is not satisfying. She draws parallels to Ulrich Beck’s notion of “risk society” here.