iPart

I consider my mobile phone to be a part of me. I consider most of what I own part of me, in that sense. I judge people by what they surround themselves by - friends, beards, clothes, phones - and in that respect my iPhone is just one part of the ephemera of objects that defines me. My phone does count for more than most though. It's a first generation iPhone, which I was given for my sixteenth birthday. That means it will be four years old in just over a week. It stores all the photos I've ever taken on it since then, every person I've ever texted, every note I've made, and a shuffling collection of songs that will fit onto its sixteen gigabytes. 


People judge me for having held onto - and cared for - a now seemingly obsolete Apple product for so long. It recently somehow gained four obvious and deep scratches on the screen, all of which still bother me. I don't know quite how they happened, but I still find their mysterious existence frustrating. I have dropped this phone, carried it through countless countries across three continents, spoken to friends by call, text, Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp, planned journeys, taken photographs, recorded songs, read lines, played games, done sums, read books, transferred money, listened to music, taken photographs, found things out, drawn pictures and written essays on this phone. Amongst all my material possessions, my phone is part of me perhaps more than anything else.   

Schrödinger's Tree

So this all began with the story of a tree. 



And also with a Wikipedia page titled 'Communications and Technology NYUAD'. The latter was swiftly deleted, but it prompted a user going by the moniker Mr. Stradivarius to start a page for New York University Abu Dhabi.


I posted this to our student body's Facebook page, well aware that our own Student Government intended on creating a page for us eventually. But someone had beaten us to it. (For the bigger picture, you might need to open the images below in separate tabs/windows.)



But I didn't think us students should be beaten at our own game. What did we (or at least some of us) know that Mr. Stradivarius, a language teacher living in Japan, didn't? And so I added to the article. 

This section of the article can still be seen in the history section. But I was quickly (and very kindly) reprimanded:


So I removed the references to my and friends' blogs, and replaced them with a link to our student publication, The Fishbowl Tribune. Turns out this still wasn't good enough:


An intriguing reference to the Encyclopædia Britannica, I thought. Just before Mr. Stradivarius deleted the section of the article forever, though, a friend copied the post and it appeared on Facebook, in the comments thread of my earlier post pictured above.




The legend lives on. And one day it will return to Wikipedia.

Trust in Wikipedia

I do trust Wikipedia. I trust it a good deal more than the rest of the Internet. Having worked in newspapers and magazines with online presences, I remain skeptical of anyone with a hidden agenda, and I'm not a huge fan of just Googling away until I find a piece of information that fits with my argument either. That leaves me with Wikipedia as an unbiased source of knowledge that's easy to access, easy to use, and has very rarely let me know. I don't trust it blindly; I look for citations, and I judge those citations, but for the most part I trust that people who put that much effort into writing a page do actually know what they're talking about. Only a few days ago a friend posted a link on Facebook to an article about Silk Road, an online marketplace mostly used to sell illegal drugs. From there, I jumped to the website, a few other news stories (one from Gawker, of all places...) and then just typed Silk Road into Wikipedia and found myself here. 


The page has fifteen citations, most with significant information embedded on Wikipedia itself. Amongst these, a significant portion contain content that could only have come from a user of Silk Road. This information would never make it into an 'official' encyclopedia, simply because those compilers don't tend to frequent drug-selling websites that require the use of Tor to access. But this doesn't mean that those that do frequent these websites are any less qualified to write specifically about these websites. The wonder of Wikipedia is that it allows everyone to write about what they know about, no more or no less - or so the system would work in an ideal world. But so lively is the community know that most erroneous edits are quickly corrected, and though I won't quote that too-often-cited study from Nature, I will point out that that was several years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if Wikipedia is now more accurate than the Encylopedia Britannica.

Amateurisation of Protest

At AlJazeera.com, Jillian C. York reports on how online amateur digital rights activists are succeeding where major international organisations failed.


Pakistan's Telecommunications Agency (P.T.A.) recently attempted to establish an Internet filtering system. Online resistance came not from the obvious quarters, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but instead from individuals, who coordinated efforts to undermine the P.T.A.'s plans. They called on major companies to not work with the P.T.A., and although they were supported by these prominent global organisations, the movement was built from the bottom up. 

Headless Live-Tweeting

Found online somewhere here if you prefer the websites to screenshots.



McLuhan's Understanding of Media

Much as I often find Marshall McLuhan's bombastic writing style a little too much for his relatively simple thesis, I have to admit that I find his content especially relevant today. He has been called something of a prophet, and I do think there is something of that in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. I don't think our current situation is due to a mastering of McLuhan's message, however; I think it more due to the gradual lessening of any sort of real importance of the message. The medium has become king, but only because we've appointed it so, not because the message abdicated. 


No-one cares what is said these days - what matters is how you say it. Was it a tweet, a Facebook post, an email or a letter? The mere medium of communication says more about what you're trying to say than your use of plain old nouns and verbs. What I do question is McLuhan's sense that technology is bringing us into his 'global village'. In terms of ease of communication, perhaps he's right. But I don't believe we have today the sense of community that I think he dreamt of. The Internet is anonymous, bland and filled with opportunity for unfortunate events. We have yet to escape the Age of Anxiety, because what should have ended all fears has only spread new ones. 

What's On the Radio

When we all applied to come here, there was a lot of talk about the strong sense of community, and in a certain sense that's true. The student body of only around three hundred know all their fellow peers perhaps a little too well, but the same can't be said of the students and the faculty. Although obviously most pupils know their teachers and vice versa, as would be expected of somewhere with classes that max out at a fifteen to one ratio, most students don't know professors who haven't taught them - and not only do they not know them, they don't know anything about them.

I propose a show on the radio consisting primarily of an interview with a faculty member. Most every teacher here has an intriguing backstory, and the question of what they're doing here in Abu Dhabi is often enough to provoke an interesting conversation. This, interspersed with perhaps a few of their favourite tracks, would surely be enough to hold the student body's attention. To make the show even more relevant, the interviewees would be selected according to the university's current schedule - a faculty member putting on a play would be interviewed the week after, or a teacher setting up a new class could discuss their plans on air. 

In addition to the interviewer, there would also be the opportunity for listeners to (Skype) call in and ask the faculty members a question or two of their own. This could range from the banal to the thought-provoking, of course, and even from the trivial to the academic. Help with an algebra problem, or perhaps just wondering where to get the best chocolate in Paris? Most faculty members can answer just about anything, and this show would be the chance to put that to the test. Perhaps the show could even lead towards some sort of quiz show - faculty against faculty, with the winner returning the next week to maintain the crown.