symbiosis

Friendships through IM: Examining the relationship between instant messaging and intimacy" by Yifeng Hu et al deals with the social significance of IM in a pretty good way. Through a small quantitative survey of college students they indicate that there is a positive relationship between the amount of IM use and verbal, affective and social intimacy. The results are not surprising. Quantitative studies often confirm my impressions of user patterns. I end up thinking about what my informants tell me to get more comprehensive answers. More detail and depth. I like statistics, and I'm happy when other researchers contribute with numbers, factor analyses and interesting bivariate relations. They make good references now that I'm about to start analysing my own juicy interviews.

on the floor

Lasse and I spent the Easter working hard to get rid of the old vinyl covering our bedroom floor. The room is 7 sq.meters. Small. The wooden floor beneath turned out to be really nice but was covered with old paint, glue, cement and the vinyl. Bedroom floor now looks amasing, but. I don't think I ever want to do the same thing in the livingroom. Our livingroom is three or four times the size with the same vinyl. It will just take too long. Removing the cement really sucked. Working with the sanding machines was rather cool though and not too difficult.

me and my selves

I spent the afternoon/early evening with philosophers discussing among others chapter 1 from Espen Aarseths book Cybertext, a Sherry Turkle-article: "Who am we" and Jean Baudrillard's classic "Simulacra and simulations". The discussions were ok, and I'm especially impressed by Hallvard Fossheim who managed to make some sort of sense of Baudrillard. I'm somewhat suprised by the discussion of the Turkle-article though. "Who am we" is sort of a very brief and even more popularised version of her Life on the screen. I'm not very provoked by her postmodern/poststructuralist theories of multiple selves. I just reckon it's part of the early 90's virtuality frenzy. But in this constellation of people her theoretical foundation (or lack thereof) was perceived as inadequate and deficient and seemed to seriously annoy certain people. Guess I'm just too ignorant to care.

cruelty

I'm in a movie-going mood these days. Last seen: Ett hål i mitt hjärta by Lukas Moodysson. At least 6 people left the movie, which made me wonder why people are so provoked. The movie is definitely challenging, and most critics in Norway find it speculative and just too much. I constantly had to remind myself that this was a movie, that the actress Sanna Bråding wasn't really humiliated, Moodysson just makes it look that way by the combination of images, and when it looks like the male characters abuse her like when they force food into her mouth (it was disgustingly sadistic ) we are made to believe she was actually forced to eat obscene amounts of food. She wasn't really raped, she wasn't really abused. I'm definitely happy I watched the whole movie. Lukas Moodysson has these sort-of happy endings to his movies. Lilja 4-ever ends with suicide, but there's still a kind of happiness (angels and religiously and like). I find the same in Hål i mitt hjerta. But the movie should have the same ending as some movies have about animals. "No humans were hurt during the making of this movie."

closer

I saw Mike Nichols Closer yesterday, and generally I liked it. The characters of Clive Owen and Jude Law are miserable. I've seldom seen a movie where men are portrayed so pitifully. Go see it if you'd like to see the wicked faces of love and lust.

she/he

Since it is International Women's Day: I'm having a look at Herbert Blumer's Symbolic interactionism. Perspective and method. It's not very difficult to see that the essays were written a few decades ago. I find it utterly annoying to read sentences like: "One can do this [see oneself as a self and an object] only by placing himself in the position of others and viewing himself or acting towards himself from that position."

hyperpersonal communication

I gave a lecture on online interaction on the course Online games and online-socialising yesterday. It was fun and a good opportunity to present quotations from interviews. As on the InterMedia-seminar on Social software in December, I referred to Samantha Henderson and Micheal Gilding's article "'I've never clicked this much with anybody in my life': trust and hyperpersonal communication in online friendships (New media and society, vol. 6(4)). Unfortunately and a little embarrassingly I didn't exactly remember what 'hyperpersonal communication means. It is not, as I assumed, just another word for computer-mediated communication. The student who suggested to look at the original meaning of hyper was quite right. Hyper in the sense of above, more than normal, excessive. The concept is taken from Joseph Walther "to desribe the way in which online communication sometimes 'surpasses the level of affection and emotion of parallell face-to-face communication." I might take a look at that Walther-article, which can be found in Communication Research (1996), vol. 23(1)

slightly exaggerating?

I just don't believe the numbers presented in Politiken today, suggesting that Danish youth in the Northern part of Jylland send and receive 100 sms in average every day. According to Statistics Norway's Norwegian media barometer 2003, Norwegian youth (16-19 years old) send in average 9,5 sms everyday.