Am I being ignored?

I’ll touch on a couple of things in the Ecologizing Mobile Media article by sharing my experience with cell phones.

With my move to Seattle, my wife and I have decided to forgo the traditional home phone and just expand my wife’s cell phone plan and get two phones. The price is roughly the same.

The decision to only have a cell phone is a good example of #4, new technology making war against the old, #5, new technology changes everything and #9 social biases. As was discussed in class with regard to VoIP, I am giving up some advantages doing this. The example though is that I choose one form over the other and my money followed. Just in my experience I think giving up the home phone is not uncommon with many people.

This brings me to the title of this post. Last week my mom tried to call my wife. The first time, my wife was standing in a crowded licensing office for our car and didn’t feel it was a good time to talk, sent her to voicemail. The second time my wife had no coverage and the third time the phone battery was dead, both calls went straight to voicemail. I need to mention my mom hates leaving voicemail and the missed call log doesn’t work if the phone is dead. Now my mom, being a little over sensitive mother–in-law, thought she was being ignored because she knows my wife always has her phone.

When everyone that calls you on a regular base knows you only have a cell phone, the expectation of a return response is different than home phones because they think you are always ‘home’. And if you don’t answer, through the magic of caller-id you will surely call back the instant you can. Mobile technology is creating a weird immediacy expectation in society similar to email.

For the record, I owned a cell phone in the past, but can honestly say I can live without one. Admittedly though, I am slowly becoming an addict of the convenience it brings. Does anyone else ever get the feeling that sometimes technology is rope being handed to us in order to hang ourselves?

Mediamorph This!

Did everyone have a crazy weekend with the papers, homework and life like I did?

My first overall impression of this article is that it was a Reader’s Digest version of Winston. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It did seem a little rushed though at the end. Again not a bad thing considering my schedule, it just seemed to have more details in the beginning than the end.

Now to the question of the effects of computing power on communication, there were a couple of things I that came to me as I was reading this. The first is about adoption of the new technologies discussed.

• Telephone: it could extend communication without delays or added complexity and that this significantly contributed the rapid adoption.
• Radio: adoption really grew after not only after content was there, but when easy to use receivers were widely available as well.
• Color TV: its adoption was slow because of two things, the new sets were expensive and difficult to tune.
• Internet: it had been around for sometime and was growing in use, but it wasn't until the creation of Mosaic and the World Wide Web that the popularity became widespread.

One factor that is common in the adoption of all of these technologies on a mass scale is the ease of use of the technology. There are other factors at work as well, but I think that every new technology, invention, service that people get exposed to, the initial thing they think is, "It this easy and is the benefit of use going to be worth effort it requires to learn?" I think VoIP is at stage right now where adoption is certainly there, but on a rapid, mass scale it still needs a device or something to shorten the learning or effort curve. Basically something that is as easy as a good old telephone.

The other thing I found interesting was all the new ways of mass communication technology coevolved together, each one benefiting to some extent from the other, and then diverged finding their niche in the human communication system. Which brings me to computers and how that is ever increasing easy to converge these different mediums (radio, TV, internet, telephone) into one, this isn't a giant revelation by any stretch, it the major theme of this program, it just makes me pause and think.

Pretend each media channel were its own separate small ecosystem, each with its own little money making animals coexisting with each other. Now, pull one these animals from an ecosystem and place it into another. The dominate little animals in that ecosystem are going to fight and squash the lone new comer. Pretend now you're God and just created a whole new type of ecosystem, one that all animals from the other ecosystems can survive in and it is also really big, room for everybody. Now place one animal from each of the small systems in the new environment so there is no dominant 'species'. That is the power of computers on media, taking a bunch of money making animals and throwing them together. The will either figure out a way to coexist or kill each other trying to be the alpha male. It's sweet.

Anyone seen the movie Pillow Talk?

As the title suggests, I won’t be getting very deep here. As I was reading about the phone I thought of that silly Doris Day movie and wondered if phone networks were conceived of sooner could have been a mass entertainment supervening necessity as strong as the business one? I bring this up because the author mentions the ‘Lovers Telegraph’ fad. I think people were the same then as they are now, and would have liked to talk on the phone. There might have even been a need for a speaker phone so the whole family could sit in the parlor and chat with Aunt Betty. The success of the record for entertainment demonstrates that there was a consumer market out there with discretionary spending.

I really enjoyed the “Informing Ourselves to Death” and had to wonder what kind of reception he received in a room full of computer scientists after he finished. Remembering where computers were in 1990 the speed seems quite prophetic. I love this part

“…brilliant young men and women, believing this, create ingenious things for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will become wiser and more decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By becoming masters of this wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige and power and some will even become famous.”

Does this make anyone else think of the dot com bubble and subsequent burst?

Chapter 1: The Telegraph.

I was a little worried about enjoying this book after reading the introduction, but chapter one about the telegraph was much better. It also made me understand why I slogging through that introduction was necessary.

Two things that hit me from reading about the invention of the telegraph:

1. I never knew why the U.S. had a privately developed telecommunication system, while countries in Europe have a public developed system. I don’t know if one is better worse that the other. Maybe that could be someone’s research.
2. The other thing I thought was interesting goes along with the area I want to research, design and usability. A major factor in the Morse system ‘winning’ over the others was the simplicity of his code. He drew on printer’s experience with type-fonts to help design a code that was easy to learn and use.
   

Just a side comment about the book and I’m going to sound juvenile here, but I wish there were more pictures of the devices the author is describing.

Beta version 0.1

Since nothing is every released as a complete product anymore, I will follow this trend and start by saying this blog is still in beta and may contain some errors.