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. 

Remembering the Radio

I actually listened to a radio show not that long ago. It was at home, in England, on BBC Radio 4. I listened to Desert Island Discs, with the comedian Michael McIntyre telling interviewer Kirsty Young about the eight songs he would take with his to a desert island. The program is something of a British institution - for something of an American perspective on the phenomenon, The New Yorker ran a profile about it here: http://jsexhu.gs/2o


I have to admit, it's not something that I listen to on a regular basis. But I was at home, and my parents tend to enjoy it - so there I was, listening to the radio. Though it was hardly that traditional. We were listening to it on our shiny iMac, with the program streaming off BBC iPlayer, their online service. I think it was streaming live, but it might have just been from earlier in the day. I suppose it's actually rather typical of the show itself - continually updating, but the essentials remain the same. 



No More Talking

On my mobile phone, at least. If I had to give up either S.M.S. or voice calls on my mobile, it would definitely be the latter. This isn't even just because I can always use a landline or Skype as an alternative - though that does play its part - in fact, I could even use applications like WhatsApp on my iPhone instead of texting if I really wanted. Instead, I just find the process of texting often easier and more convenient than calling. It sends a written record of information, it isn't always instantaneous and thereby allows deliberation and consideration, and it is often just point-blank less awkward than calling someone to check what the homework is that evening. A phone conversation still carries with it the social requisites of politeness and general enquiries into well-being. A text message is simple and quick. A phone conversation is just a conversation over a distance - a text is a text is a text. At the end of the day, S.M.S. is here to stay. 

Banning Emails for Productivity's Sake

In The Telegraph, Henry Samuel reports on a major company's planned 'zero email' policy: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8921033/Staff-to-be-banned-from-sending-emails.html


Thierry Breton, C.E.O. of Atos, plans to abolish all email communication within eighteen months, complaining that most of these messages are a waste of his employees' time. He complains that too many emails are sent - there is a 'deluge' of information - and that for each one workers lose time responding and then regaining concentration on the task at hand. 


Breton, who was formerly a French finance minister and now heads Europe's largest I.T. company, plans to implement an instant messaging system to replace email. He believes email to be an outdated form of communication, but also believes that "Emails cannot replace the spoken word."



Evaluating the Electrical Telegraph

Does the electrical telegraph annihilate space and time? On the surface, the answer to this question is an emphatic 'yes'. The electrical telegraph was the beginning of the modern world, with its insistence on the instantaneous and growing globalization. But it was merely an imperfect realisation of these aims. The codes used to transmit messages had nothing like the fluency of the written word that SMS and email can now send across the world, and of course are even further from simple human speech. 


The answer I suppose is still in the affirmative, but it's certainly tinged in grey rather than a definitive black or white. The electrical telegraph did annihilate space and time, but they were to rise from their graves for the next several decades. The reliance on the direct line, the sneakernet and the system's essentially human backbone means that the telegraph was doomed to be overtaken one day by a far broader basis for communication - the Internet. 


The telegraph does not easily allow for conversation - the time involved, although perhaps not the issues of space, means that messages can be delivered, but responses are complicated and any attempt at dialogue severely curtailed by the process of transmission and translation. We certainly discovered this during our own experiment with the electrical telegraph; once communication had been established, it was difficult to restart a message, explain our misunderstanding or even work out who was supposed to be speaking. 


These issues are all easily communicated in human conversation and online by virtue of the instantaneous transmission and globalized practices. Formatting, shorthands, and tones of voice are all examples of the latter, and are used in messages from all over the world to every other part of it. There are no issues regarding international borders or extra difficulty in crossing oceans. The telegraph began to annihilate space and time, but it would take a few more developments before the nails were firmly in the coffins. 

Evaluating the Optical Telegraph

How times have changed. The African drums described in the first chapter of The Information had to carry all sorts of extraneous information in order for the meaning to remain clear, and yet now we can communicate by txt, mssng out lttrs in evry othr wrd. In our experiment with the optical telegraph, our group was sending out messages. Here, we approached the system from far too modern a perspective. We abbreviated the message as much as possible, hoping to make the job easier for ourselves and our receivers.


What we had not appreciated was the noise involved in this form of communication. The messages were far from crystal-clear, or accurately received. Many of our symbols were misread, and in fact many of them even had double-meanings that we hadn't picked up on. To avoid this, we should have transmitted different content, thought up to avoid such conflicts in meaning. We should have been more sympathetic to our receivers - it wasn't until we tried their job that we realised how hard it was to read what the telegraph was denoting.


Many of the latest communication technologies - Blackberry Messenger and WhatsApp - now show when your recipient has read your message. There was nothing even remotely close to this with the telegraph. Our receivers resorted to clapping every time they had transcribed one of our letters, which would hardly be possible across the relatively vast distances that the telegraph was designed for. Unless you can rely on others' expertise, there needs to be some proof of receipt, much like BBM or WhatsApp. Many say that's why they prefer these services to SMS - people enjoy knowing they've been heard. 





Taylor v. Gleick: Artificial Information?

In The Artificial Ape, Timothy Taylor questions our very sense of history - what James Gleick calls the "pastness of the past". He asks us to question how we, as humans, came into being, and with that throws our relationship with technology up into the air. Are we who we are because of the technology we invented, or do we have the technology we invented because of who we are?


Gleick discusses oral literature and memory in the light of our own written society. The invention of writing - and of course these days it is difficult to see it as a conscious invention - does not fit into Taylor's own argument, and is clearly an invention that changed the way we think. There is no evidence or even plausible reasoning that humankind invented writing because we could know longer remember enough and needed a way to record what used to be the stuff of memory. 


That is not to say that Taylor's argument falls on its face. Obviously he did not intend his line of thinking to apply to every form of technology ever invented, and indeed the invention of the dictionary, described by Gleick in his third chapter, did change the way we write. This is obviously on a smaller scale, but the now inherently human preoccupation with 'the right way of doing things' can be traced back to the codification of the language with the dictionary. 


The German language even has a word for it - Rechtschreibung. Though Google gives its translation as nothing more than 'spelling', my German friends assure me it carries with it a far deeper sense of correctness in writing. Such a notion could never have come out of a solely oral language, and in such a way we can say that the invention of writing did alter the way we think. And so perhaps Taylor does triumph in the end, if only in Germany.

Inculcation by Communication

It's hard to live in Winchester and ignore the cathedral. It is monumental - you can immediately grasp its scale, but it is harder to recapture the medieval mindset and recognise its ambition and its sheer presence in the landscape. The Normans invaded England in 1066. Construction of the cathedral began in 1087, almost twenty years after the arrival of these French interlopers. They brought with them a new culture, one far closer to the concept of Western civilization that we are so familiar with today. They spread it throughout England via a concentrated colonisation that affected every level of English life. The cathedral was a means of communicating with everyone, from the peasants to the disenchanted local nobles, from the uneducated to the devout. Pope Gregory the Great had written, centuries earlier, that painting can do for the illiterate what writing does for those who can read, and so the architecture, the sculpture and the decoration of Winchester Cathedral taught the native Anglo-Saxons of the religion, the power, and the prestige of the newly-arrived Normans. 

Post by Pigeon


Before the advent of pigeon post service in 1897 between Great Barrier Reef Island and Auckland, the few inhabitants had to rely on a weekly coastal steamer service. The service - which was so popular that it inspired a competitor to go into business - was the first ever airmail postal service, and these stamps were issued years before the Wright Brother's aeroplane even left the ground. 

The practice of sending mail by pigeon actually dates back to the times of Julius Caesar, and perhaps even back to the Ancient Greek Olympic Games. Pigeons have been used for military, financial, and political purposes for centuries, and have helped with everything from domestic mail in New Zealand to secret correspondence during World War Two. 

They're an oddly idiosyncratic form of transport: they can easily be intercepted, or even killed, during their flight. They can only deliver mail home, and this one-way route means that they have to be deliberately carried to the planned release site, whether that be in a different country or a town further down the coast. Pigeons require planning, protection and postage stamps. 

They haven't even been abandoned today. Rocky Mountain Adventures, a kayaking and water sports company based in Denver, still employs a carrier pigeon to get digital copies of photographs on a memory stick from the riverside to the kiosk to print and sell. Out in the wilderness, there isn't always a wireless connection, and sometime it's best to resort to old-fashioned analogue airmail. 

Sources:
'Homing Pigeons Get Down To Business', Katy Human, The Denver Post, 24/6/2007
The Pigeon, Wendell Levi,  South Carolina, 1977
Museum of New Zealand online exhibits: Great Barrier Island Pigeongram Agency: Mail Form No 9 - http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/objectdetails.aspx?oid=292735