Some of the emerging key concerns (in my view):

- How do we define culture? Regional cultures? Sub cultures? Individual cultures?
- Do we need to define culture? Or is it better to focus on the evidence of diversity that we find in our research?
- How can we recognize what is cultural influence? How do we weigh the influence of the technology?
- How can we analyze cultures when we ourselves are culturally situated?

I find it very fruitful to get some deeper insight into different approaches to cultural studies. Not least questions to do with whether cyber culture can and should be seen as a cultural system in its own right intrigue me, since this is a distinction which I need to make clear in the part of my research which will deal with intercultural communication. Will the patterns that I will identify in my research depend on the (local) cultural values of the participants or on the culture of the particular virtual environment? I would hypothesize that the values and ways of the virtual community will leave traces in the interactional patterns, at least among users who have been involved there, or in similar environments, for some time. Nevertheless, the cultural background from the local community should also be apparent in the interaction, if the technology used allows for such differences to shine through.

Today Iíll be leaving Ume for a period of conferences followed by a period of vacation, and I probably wonít be back here until the beginning of August. This will cause blog updates to be even less frequent than at the moment. Tomorrow is midsummerís eve, and weíll be celebrating more or less according to tradition in Pite. I love living in the north of Sweden this time of the year. We really do deserve to see this much of the sun considering how dark the winter is. It calls for celebration, and I think thatís one of the reasons why midsummer is such an important holiday here. However, it should be mentioned that Iíve never celebrated a more traditional midsummer than the one we had in W¸rzburg, Germany, 2002. Together with other exchange students from Sweden and students of Swedish at the university there, we had the traditional picnic with herring and danced around the pole singing the song about the funny little frogs. Here it became clear to me how much more traditions matter when youíre away from home. We even got to sing a Swedish schnapps-song in German radio, Bayern 3 Pretty impressive, huh? On Sunday Iíll leave for Karlstad and the CATací04 conference, and on Friday Iíll meet up with Stephanie in Stockholm. Weíll take a cheap flight to Frankfurt, rent a car there and drive to Austria for BlogWalk and BlogTalk. Iím excited about getting to meet some of my new blogging acquaintances f2f! On our way back weíll stop by in Munich and also, of course, in my beloved W¸ rzburg. Back in Sweden itís time for vacation with a bit of traveling and some golf. Iím looking forward to being a tourist in my own country ñ an opportunity that I unfortunately don’t take enough advantage of. I really hope that Iíll be able to enjoy my vacation and not think too much about my job. It can be difficult at times, considering how easy this job is to take along. For me, the trickiest thing is that I finally feel that I have some time to catch up on reading that I want to do for my thesis. Throughout the semester Iím so busy reading for the courses Iím taking (and actually I should write two essays in language history over the summer too, but I will leave that until fall), that itís not until vacation that I feel that I can work on what I really want to do. I will bring some reading with me, which I hope to be able to finish during the conference-period, to leave the vacation period free for, well, vacation. Hope to see you around, and if not, have a great summer!

If you’re studying media and communication and haven’t yet visited MCS (”an award-winning portal or ‘meta-index’ to internet-based resources useful in the academic study of media and communication”), I would strongly recommend you to do so. Includes links to lots of interesting online material.

In preparation for the CATaCí04 conference that I will be attending the week after next I have started reading Culture, Technology, Communication. Towards an Intercultural Global Village , edited by Charles Ess. In the introductory chapter, Ess summarizes the different articles in the book and identifies some key concerns. He begins by questioning the dichotomies between the utopian views of internet use and CMC (exemplified in the ideas of an electronic global village) and the dystopian views (fear of ethnocentrism), and argues that by taking a global perspective on these issues it is possible to find a middle road. However, not only an intercultural approach is needed, but also an interdisciplinary. The disciplines that are represented in the book include philosophy, cultural studies and communication theory. Ess ends the introduction by presenting what may be a solution to the dichotomy problem. He suggests that by becoming cultural hybrids or polybrids we will be able to participate in thick local cultures and a thin global culture simultaneously. (This is also argued by Hongladarom in the last chapter of the book, who in her case study of Thai use of CMC found that participants used the global medium to discuss local issues, such as the status of Thai as a language etc.) More from the book + my views on this in the extended entry. (Oh there is more…)

This article by Jeanne Galvin discusses the future of the traditional journal (related to my previous post on blogs for publishing). The article begins with an introduction to the situation for electronic journals, and beginning in the section entitled Radical alternatves – scholarly skywriting, Galvin discusses alternative ways of scholarly publishing. Among the things that I found interesting was Galvinís referral to Arms who has questioned the value of peer review in ensuring the quality of work, and instead argues that much of this work is done at conferences, for instance. Galvinís discussion on copyright issues also caught my attention. Here, she refers to Harnad, who argues that journals only have copyright on the final printed version of your paper. If I understand this correctly, this implies that publishers canít argue that they wonít publish an article only because youíve already published it in your blog. (Via Stephen Downes)

• you wake up one morning, and remember your dream ending with a logout window.
• you try to find the clock at the bottom right hand corner of the book youíre reading.
• you feel frustrated that you canít navigate the scene behind the TV screen in the way you would in a graphical 3D environment online.

Hope I can have some computer free time this weekend. I seem to need it.

Today I found a very interesting post in Ton Zylstraís blog Interdependent Thoughts. Here, he discusses the importance of a media mix in order to facilitate for presence in communication. He argues that the blog could function as a central base in such multi-modal communication, both since other media can be incorporated and since it provides context, which will make the participants in communication come across as more trustworthy. In his post, Ton refers to a number of people who seem to be doing interesting things in this area. Here are a few of the links (thanks Ton): Stuart Henshallís Unbound Spiral (who by the way has a good post about what he calls The online presence spiral) David Pollardís How to save the world Elmine Wijniaís Communigations Flemming Funchís Ming the Mechanic (who also has commented on Tonís post in his blog) This is the first piece of writing I have come across that discusses presence in relation to blogs. I hope that Ton and these other people will be in Vienna for BlogTalk 2.0 when Stephanie Hendrick and I will present our paper. Among other things we will discuss presence in blogs, and it would be interesting to get their views on this.