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Lisbeth Klastrup
Lisbeth Klastrup is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Digital Aesthetics and Communication (DIAC) at the IT University of Copenhagen. Her main research interests are interactive storytelling, forms of writing on the internet and persistent online (game) worlds and universes.
Her research diary ( aka weblog, blog) is named Klastrup's Cataclysms [the older archives are still online here]. It contains links to articles and sites on the net relevant to her research, and some personal observations on her life as an academic.
A recent publication which discusses interactive "text" forms, one of her main research toorg/sites/blogtalk.net/files, is a paper published in Dichtung Digital: Paradigms of Interaction: Conceptions and Misconceptions of the Field Today.
Current academic activities, spring 2004, among others contain
- an anthology on Digital Worlds - The Aesthetics & Design of New Media with colleague Ida Engholm.
- working on project application for a joint research project on Space, Time and Mobility off- and online with researchers from University of Copenhagen and University of Aalborg.
- working as PR Officer and webcoordinator of Center for Computer Games Research - doing the odd review for Gamestudies.org
- helping out in establish a networkd for electronic literature in the Nordic Countries
'Live'-writing: weblogs and the coverage of reality
This paper will examine how blogs as a webwriting genre �remediates� and reinvents the concept of �liveness�. It tries to understand blogging as �live writing� partly through the research which have been done respectively on TV as the live phenomena and respectively tv as reality tv (the idea of intimacy, the �real-time� rendering of emotional conflict; the construction of reality), partly through Bolter and Grusin�s notion of �remediation�: how does the web remediate the notion of �liveness� (Bolter& Grusin 1999, Utterson 2003) focusing on how the notion of the web as a �better live media� is also expressed in the writings about the blog as a specific webgenre of writing.
The theoretical discussion will be supplied with examples taken from a concrete study of the ways in which the �liveness� emerges and/or is expressed in a variety of sample blogs; focusing primarily on personal diary-style blogs, but also taking into account professional journalist blogs. The paper will examine how �liveness� is expressed through the style of language (the verbal presentation of the capturing of ideas �on the fly�); the use of deixis (�here�, �now�, �blogging live from...�); the explicit reference to timestamps, and other verbal ways of pointing to the time of writing.
The fact that �everyday life� of �everyday people� is a feature of many diary style blogs has already brought forth the comparison with reality tv several times � but to my knowledge more often in passing than in an actual academic project. Furthermore, I do not wish to focus on the reality tv aspect of blogging by pointing to and discussing the mundaneness of details or �trivial� information observable (allegedly) in both media forms, but rather I will be discussing blogs in relation to reality tv, because my hypothesis is that in both in reality tv and (diary style) blogs, the desire to cover reality 24-7 is manifest. We are attracted to the possibility to �have a peek� into the life of someone else throughout all hours of the day � that is why Big Brother shows give us access to the house through live webcams online, even if the show is not running on tv. We want to know what happens now, also in the middle of the night. In the same way, the attraction of reading blogs (and reading them both day and night!) can also be explained by the desire to know, not what the blogger is doing now, but to know that the blogger is blogging (almost) now.
last update: Friday, July 23, 2004 at 10:32:09 AM-----------------------
Copyright 2004