a messy post starting with Lessig on Keane and ending with me

Lawrence Lessig has written an inordinately clever review of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. I'm quite sure Keen has a few valid points, but Lessig's comments convince me more than Clay Shirky's semi-defence of Keen's main ideas.

A side-point: I find it particularly interesting to read the section entitled "The Least Important (Lessig) Fallacy", where Lessig comments on Keen's interpretations of his ideas. I do wonder how many scholars I misinterpret throughout my thesis? You know, communication and dialogues are really just continuous misinterpretations :)

Btw, I was quoted in Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet, apparently having said: "We are in the midst of a gigantic psychological experiment, which for ever will change the traditional distinction between public and private. As if I said that! Well of course, boundaries between private and public are being adjusted, partially because of individual online practices, but, "gigantic psychological experiment". Oh well, I'm learning to live with my tabloid self.

mediate/immediate

Lately, I have sometimes been using "immediate interaction" to describe face-to-face interaction, though I'm not at all sure whether it is an appropriate term. According to the Wordnet Database, immediate can be defined as "having no intervening medium", which is of course how I think of it as opposed to mediated interaction. Clearly, I am aware that communication is never immediate, but, in face-to-face situations, always mediated through the body, language, speech, non-verbal signs. I do like the online/offline distinction, but this is not always appropriate as I also discuss communication mediated through phones and even postal letters.

I can't believe I barely have six weeks left to finish my thesis. I will make it, but it feels weird. The last three years have been wonderful.

Employer Branding strategies

I just talked to a guy from Universum Communication, an employer branding company offering help for companies who are searching for attractive employees. I declined to give a talk on a seminar in May about new approaches for recruiting people. I'm learning to say no to extra work assignments, that's good. But we had a brief and interesting conversation: there's very little unemployment in Norway, and the competition for the brightest people is tough. Hence, try advertising in Facebook? or any social network service, even MySpace? You have LinkedIn of course, but the point is that having a comprehensive online presence does not at all imply less chances of a future career. Quite the contrary.

Given the beneficial conditions for well-qualified people in Norway, I should have pretty good chances of finding interesting work after my PhD?

substitute or supplement

Are you tired of discussions of whether new technologies substitute or supplement old technologies? I think Eric A. Havelock's moves beyond such a discussion in his beautiful book The Muse Learns to Write. He discusses how literacy, as it emerged with the Greek writing system, created the character of modern consciousness. Yet, it was not so that writing merely replaced or supplemented oral storytelling. Neither did the introduction of the radio represent a reversion to past oral times. No, these technological developments represent marriage and remarriage between the spoken word and the written. I've only reached page 33, looking forward to the rest. Havelock was 83 when he wrote the book.

(...) the epics as we know them are the result of some interlock between the oral and the literate; or to vary the metaphor, the acoustic flow of language contrived by echo to hold the attention of the ear has been reshuffled into visual patterns created by the thoughtful attention of the eye (page 13).

Wow, the art of writing .

phone calls

A journalist from Kanal 24 just called me, hoping that I could verify her hypothesis that we spend less time on the phone because we spend more time communicating through other means (texting, IM). I couldn't give her a definitive answer. There are just too many variables at play here. My informants often claim that they would prefer to call their friends if money was no issue. But they are young, and there's no doubt young people spend more time socializing than older users. If you're a busy grown-up professional with family obligations, there's hardly too much time chatting on the phone? Clearly texting and IM are pretty flexible (and hence valuable) communicating-tools for users with little time to spare. Actually I doubt that we are spending less time on the phone (statistics are welcome, Norsk Mediebarometer does not say anything about time spent on the phone). When 92% of Norwegians (2005) have their own cell-phone, it seems unlikely that we spend less time on the phone.

I'm not particularly fond of talking on the phone myself, though I spend a lot of time talking to Lasse (who now works in Hamar during the week). We have time to talk, there's a geographical distance between us, and the telephone supports a level of intimacy consonant with the bond we share.

No wonder I wasn't able to answer her question.

1986

During my three months in Australia, I became fond of the TV-show "What a Year" (I'm embarrassed to admit this, as it's also a quite lame show). It's because I'm rather nostalgic, to the point where past times can make me relatively emotional. NRK (the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) currently runs a series called "Back to the 80s" feeding my nostalgia. Yesterday I was was taken back to 1986: the Challenger-explosion, Thatcher visits Norway and is met by a huge demonstration, Sandra Kim wins the Eurovision Song Contest, the Swedish prime minister Oluf Palme is shot and killed. And I remember it all so clearly. I was 11 years old and increasingly paying attention to mass mediated stories of the world. To me 1986 or any other year I have lived almost has a thing-like quality.

And today I read the following in Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: "Before writing was deeply interiorized by print, people did not feel themselves situated every moment of their lives in abstract computed time of any sort" (...) Persons whose world view has been formed by high literacy need to remind themselves that in functionally oral cultures the past is not felt as an itemized terrain, peppered with verifiable and disputed "facts" or bits of information."

do network technologies change mass communication?

In a very interesting discussion on Underskog (a Norwegian, members-only social networking site) about reader-debates in online newspapers, Ida Torp Halvorsen links to a comment by Joel Stein in latimes.com. Basically, Joel Stein has no wish whatsoever to embrace the technological potentials to engage in a symmetrical interaction with his readers through e-mailing (or commenting). I am of course not very surprised, and I think Stein is quite right. His op-ed explicitly addresses what I believe is the case. Network technologies do not challenge the fundamentally asymmetrical character of mass communication.

personally mediated expressions seen from three angles

Yesterday I was fortunate to get a chance to present some of my work for people at QUT (thanks Axel for organizing the seminar). I'm beginning to realise that my overall project can be seen as an effort to understand individual mediated practices from three angles: as expressions of subjectivity, as a way of being social, and as creative acts. These aspects are clearly strongly interconnected, and yesterday I tried to focus on these interconnections.

Thanks to people for showing up and for asking me really interesting questions!

Lasse and I only have 9 days left in Brisbane, but we're definitely going to Jean's final seminar (12-2 on the 8th of Dec) and Jaz' confirmation seminar (2.30-4.30 on the 8th of Dec) before we leave. I'm really looking forward to both!

soufflés, trees and contexts

"Suppose you draw a picture alone in your room, or make a soufflé or write a song. Is this still creative? Only potentially."

This quote has amused me since I first read it a couple of days ago. It's from Keith Negus and Micheal Pickering's Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value. They try to explain how creativity is only realised when it is achieved within some social encounter (page 23). Humans do not create ex nihilo/from nothing and creative practices are part of a societal context, but I think I might answer their question with a yes: you can bake a soufflé alone at home, and it will be a creative practice. Or at least you would respond to your own creative act. Alter/Ego.

The quote is of course reminiscent to "if a tree falls down in the woods and no one is around to hear it- does it make a sound?"

Update: Negus and Pickering make no reference to Luhmann, but their argument is strongly similar to his idea of communication. To Luhmann communication is only factual as far as Ego, a receiver, creates an understanding from a communicated utterance (The Reality of the Mass Media).