mystery

How is it that whenever, and I mean every single time, I have to shorten an article I've written (argh, did they mean max. 8000 words including notes and references!), the result is always an improved article? I've just cut nearly 2000 words in one of my articles, and it reads so much better now. I guess this means I should definitely work to keep number of words in my final dissertation down to a minimum, right?

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.

home sweet home

You know I had the best time in Brisbane. Home's good too though: a few things I like about being back home:

• It's home!
• Being back in my office, I'm one lucky PhD-student!
• Family, friends, colleges
  
• My own bicycle (which is brand new btw, my Xmas-present from Lasse)
• Winter. Though the weather hardly qualifies as winter, there's no snow and yesterday we had 8 degrees. The climate worries me (please travel "climate-neutral")
  
• The workout-facilities at the University: first-class equipment, the best instructors and the best venues.
• Reasonably priced fruit and vegetables
• Newspapers
• TV
• Real broadband connection