iPhone Unbound!

Recent iPhone/AT&T news suggests additional ways to liberate old technology.

In his New York Times article published this week, Brad Stone describes how a clever 17-year-old with a soldering iron, a few software tools and entirely too much free time has found a way to release the iPhone from the AT&T lock, opening it up to connection to T-Mobile. (“With Software and Soldering, a Non-AT&T iPhone.” New York Times. August 25, 2007.)

This instance of technological liberation is a good introduction to a new service I am offering. Just as clever technologists are finding ways around iPhone/AT&T bondage, I have found ways to liberate other technology for the benefit of all:

• With a simple device, whose details I will post on the internet later today, you can convert any appliance from AC to DC, thereby releasing your household from Con Edison dependency. I think it was Abbey Hoffman who said "Appliances want to be free!" Or maybe he said "Steal this toaster!" I forget.
  
• An amazingly simple set of instructions will allow even a child to change from one channel on any TV set to another. This opens the device up to literally dozens of channels you may not have been aware of. Similarly, those of you who still listen to the radio may be amazed to discover that there are ways to change reception to differing types of music and even talk.
  
• A cheap, easy to apply software patch will allow your computer printer to print in almost any conceivable language. Simple plastic appliqués convert your current keyboard to the alphabet of your choice.
  
• Those of you who use your microwave only to boil water may be amazed to learn that the device can be modified to heat or cook many different types of food. As a first lesson, I will supply a package of specially developed popping corn with a simple set of instructions on how to pop in a microwave. In some cases, this may be as simple as pushing a button.

Future technology enhancement services:

1. Discover additional capabilities of your ten-speed bicycle
2. Scissors, left or right-handed?
3. Your stove can bake and broil too.
4. Shifting car gears.
5. Handy refills let you re-use that old stapler.
6. New bulbs for old: light up your life!
7. Left and right eyes provide binocular vision.
8. Tips for re-oxygenating your own blood without technology. Breathe in, breathe out!
   

Anyone wishing to contract for these or other valuable technology enhancement services, please send me a note via the US postal service. My iPhone is not currently working.

Look What’s Happened to Me! (I Can’t Believe Myself)

For super heroes, evolution is not a theory.

Our continuing pop culture fascination with mutant super humans suggests a hidden subtext promoting evolution over creationism. Like many of my generation, I’ve seen just about every superhero TV show or movie (except The Fantastic Four, nuff said). I used to watch the original Adventures of Superman when I was a boy. I caught the original Batman TV series, The Greatest American Hero (origin of the best TV theme song ever!), Wonder Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Buffy, TV-Star Trek series I, II, III, IV and V, and so on. (I include Star Trek even though the super powered characters were generally non-human). The latest chapter in video-hero evolution is Heroes, which each Monday night kicks 24’s butt.

Recently I’ve seen all the old and new Superman movies (should I say golden and tarnished silver age?), Batman Begins (which, compared to the other Batman films should have been called Batman Gets It Right), X-Men, Dos Equis, Triple Sec, and, of course, Spidey. (Does anyone besides me think that making Peter Parker a “webmaster” in the current Spider-Man comic series is just a little too cute?)

So here I am, a fifty-something baby boomer who has been brought up via the mass media on the Nietzschian belief that there can be supermen, that evolution is leading inexorably to human beings who can fly through the air, lift heavy things, cling to walls, change the weather (back at you, Mark Twain!), bend space and time and stretch their bodies like silly putty.

And why not? When you compare humanity’s current evolutionary state to our closest monkey’s uncle, it is clear that we are far superior. Our brains are so large that we only need to use 10% and often use much less. Every year some Olympian or Marathoner runs faster, jumps higher, swims more synchronously. To your average orangutan, we must seem like the types of Super Hominid into which they’d all like to evolve. But for those of us already at the top of the evolutionary trail, where is there to go but up, as in “up, up and away!”?

One clear advantage we have over the other apes is the ability to imagine the next steps in evolution and the amount of spandex that will be involved. No longer dependent on random genetic mutation to help us forage more efficiently for food or increase our ability to procreate, we can conceive of the types of super abilities that enable us to best the evil mutants who clearly didn’t get the evolutionary memo.

Evolution is no longer an environmental issue: It is a moral issue, which brings us back to creationism. If the purpose of evolution is not survival, but the triumph of good over evil, and if these stories are told with the aid of continually improving CGI, what chance have the stories collected in the Bible? If our morals and mores depend not on divine direction but on random mutation, what gives with that old time religion? One of the creepier aspects of Superman Returns, among many creepy things, was the rather obvious portrayal of the Man of Steel as a sort of divine intervener. Can a feature based on Ruben Bolling’s Godman be far behind?

By the way, I missed Heroes this week, but I did see Spider-Man 3 over the weekend.

Is the Internet Medium the Message?

In a recent post on Spotlight blogging the field of Digital Media and Learning, Howard Gardner asks "Is the Medium the Message" in the digital age and then responds:

I have no doubt that, over time, the new digital media (NDM) will change our minds—both their contents and their manner of processing information. But the most profound media effects occur slowly. Plato was afraid that writing would change thinking and memory, and he was right about that—but it took decades, perhaps centuries, for the ways that we write to alter the way that we speak, categorize, remember, or distort. So, too, the changes that were wrought by the printing press, the telegraph, and the broadcast media were substantial, but not immediately manifest or understood.

Though he is much criticized nowadays, Marshall McLuhan had genuine insights here. McLuhan argued that new media invariably begin by presenting the contents of the old media: radio and movies first presented the theatrical stage, television initially was visually-presented radio, and so on. This characterization is even true of the NDM, whose initial games, webcasts, search engines, and social networks draw heavily on prototypes developed in a predigital age. It takes time to arrive at the forms of presentation that take advantage of the distinctive features of each new medium.

On the other hand, another of McLuhan’s aphorisms may prove timebound. McLuhan famously contended “The medium is the message.” The classic example here is the 1960 television debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. Those who heard the debates on radio thought that the authoritative-sounding Vice President had won on points; those who watched the debates on television felt more in synch with the young Senator from Massachusetts. But increasingly, the print, broadcast, and other communication media are merging; in the future, users may pay no attention to the source of, or the means employed by, converging media.

I think Dr. Gardner spot on with regard to the biases of current media and the impact they are having on our society. In our analysis of culture, we Media Ecologists consider the biases regarding time and space of a medium and what attitudes, beliefs and institutions those biases encourage. Harold Innis would have noted whether a medium has permanence and therefore enables communication over time, or is portable and therefore encourages communication over space. This frame of reference has been amended by Walter J. Ong who noted that the salient feature of any human culture is whether it is completely or primarily oral and shapes it cultural institutions around the oral/aural transmission of information or is literate, possessing a means of writing down and transmitting information through sight.

Marshall McLuhan would have added that any technology can be investigated in a four-fold manner. What does it enhance? What does it obsolesce? What does it retrieve that had been lost? What does it reverse into when pushed to an extreme?

The older media have a spatial bias. They can influence mass audiences over great distances, but until recently, were ephemeral. Access to recordings of old programming or even films was not universally available. In primary orality, human memory and speech were the means by which information was stored and transmitted. In the manuscript and print era, writing allowed a disconnect between the source of the message and the recipient. Until recently, any film, TV or radio program was here today and gone tomorrow, thereby mimicking the operation of primary orality cultures. Our transmission of the content of those media remained largely oral, with some commentary in writing.

With regard to the Internet and the accompanying digital media (cell phones, cheap digital recorders and editors, etc.) it seems to me that the medium of the Internet encourages and augments the transition begun with film, radio and television to a culture of secondary orality. The new digital media remove the spatial bias of the older media by allowing the recording and replay of anything anywhere. The Internet allows for the immediate retrieval and replay of almost everything and adds external memory to our secondary orality media. This is the true transformation of our culture that we are witnessing. For example, before YouTube, the recent Imus imbroglio would have been inconceivable. His comments would have faded away immediately after they were delivered. The new media preserves moments like these (Imus’ racial slur, George Allen’s “macaca” remark, etc.) for continuous review.

Using McLuhan's "Hot and Cool" Metaphor

When trying to use the "hot and cool" metaphor of Marshall McLuhan I find it useful to avoid sweeping generalizations about media and rather concentrate on specific usage. For instance, we could compare the use of cell phones and radios while driving a car. Why is it that listening to the radio, a practice almost as old as the car itself, has never been deemed hazardous, while cell phone usage is increasingly linked with traffic accidents?

Car radios, or should I say car stereo systems, are often high fidelity. As we drive we listen to music and talk radio, but we are not expected to participate. The content of car radios often functions as "background noise."

That cell phones can cause "tunnel vision" has been reported in the science press since 2002. This article from ScienceDaily notes that:

URI industrial engineering Professor Manbir Sodhi and psychology Professor Jerry Cohen used a head-mounted, eye-tracking device on volunteer drivers and concluded that the alertness of the drivers decreased considerably when they were conducting cognitive tasks, such as remembering a list of items, calculating in one's head, or using a cell phone.

Their research also found that the tunnel vision caused by cell phone use continues well after the conversation ends, perhaps because drivers are still thinking about the
conversation.

"The debate surrounding cell phone use in cars has been directed toward concerns over holding the phone," said Sodhi. "Holding the phone isn't the main issue. Thinking is."

Links to scientific data can be found here. Cell phones are low fidelity and, in most cases, we are expected to carry on part of the conversation. Cell phones require more cerebral involvement, both because the poor audio quality forces us to mentally fill in the gaps and because the need to respond means that we need pay attention to the words being transmitted.

In these particular examples, I would designate car stereos as "hot" and cell phones used while driving as "cool." The emphasis here is on how the media are used, how much they require user involvement, both socially and cerebrally. I find McLuhan's "hot and cool" works better in specific human contexts rather than in attempts to categorize a medium in isolation.

And perhaps this leads us to a connection between McLuhan and French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss's structural methodology relies on the analysis of an aspect of a culture by choosing terms in opposition and constructing a table of all the possible permutations of that opposition. Most famously opposing nature and culture, Lévi-Strauss was able to demonstrate a logical coherence within a body of seemingly disparate myths.

When used as structural opposites, McLuhan's notion of "hot" and "cool" may be more readily understandable.

My 15 Seconds of (Radio) Fame

(Updated Below)

I just heard on the radio the content of a call I made a few weeks ago to one of the talk show hosts on Air America Radio. They are now using it as part of a promo for the network:

Announcer: The following is an actual call to Air America Radio.

I think we liberals tend to celebrate and then say "OK. We're done.
Let's go back to our own private lives." I think we need to be wary of
conservatives, or radical conservatives, or fascists. The structures are still there for them to come back. And next time they come back they'll be smarter and they'll have taken into account the mistakes they made this time.

Announcer: All it takes is a telephone and the call is free. Talk to
all of America from anywhere in America on Air America Radio.

That was me. That was my voice. Is this my 15 seconds of fame?

UPDATE: I posted this announcement on a listserve I subscribe to and received the following comments:

Your quote fits nicely into what Aristotle in his Rhetoric described as the procedure for addressing a friendly address where everyone already agrees with the speaker--as there is no need to persuade, the goal is to deepen their commitment, move them from thought to behavior, spur them on to action, or in modern parlance, energize the base.

Of course. That was always my intention.

I just wonder if there really is any greater tendency for liberals to withdraw after achieving success than conservatives.

They didn't include in my on-air quote my learned discussion concerning conservative control of a consolidated media, or the big dollars supporting conservation think tanks, or the conservative gerrymandering of congressional districts. That is what I was referring to as the "structures" that are still there favoring a conservative comeback. I also regret that I wasn't able to mention the term "media ecology" in the time allotted.

There's probably a disclaimer somewhere (on a website) that makes your intellect their property when you choose to call in. Still, it would be nice if they told you before it goes on the air.

Next time I call in I'll make sure that I retain the intellectual property rights to anything I say.

BTW, I received a response from my cousin that this doesn't constitute my 15 seconds of fame, it is just a promo for my 15 seconds of fame to come.