Week 4 F08
From INLS 490
Week 4
Contents |
[edit] Video
[edit] Week 4
- Notes
- Reading
- Barley reading optional
- Prompt: After Blogger’s Plane Crash, Virtual Becomes Personal
- Reminders
- Post to INLS 490 class network by noon
- First assignment due 9/22 - Email to me by noon on Monday
- Week 3 Lecture Slides
- Reading
- This Week's Del.icio.us links
[edit] Prompt reading
- Technologies and the coordination of everyday life (per Cris' exercise on the list)
- Cell Phone
- Caller ID
- Text Messages
- Mobile Email/Web
- Facebook/SNS
- Technologies and the coordination of everyday life (per Cris' exercise on the list)
- What sort of relationships do these technologies sustain?
- What are key differences between direct maintenance of relationships, and ambient maintenance?
- Bridging Calhoun's levels of relationships - secondary/tertiary/quarternary
- What kind of relationships are Follower relations?
- How do we integrate ambient social intelligence into everyday life?
[edit] Historical Perspectives, Early Technologies
[edit] Standage, The Victorian Internet
- "Spies and criminals are invariably among the first to take advantage of new modes of communication. But lovers are never far behind"
- First marriag over telegraph in 1848
- Could the Telegraph "impede the course to true love". Where have we heard this before?
- Cost and lack of secrecy meant telegraph use was not mainstreamed - however, operators utilized the networks.
- Telegraph operators and personal messages
- Operators were a highly prized skilled prfession; operators existed in a highly hierarchical society.
- Finest operators worked in cities, new operators worked in rural areas.
- Despite lack of richness and cues, operators developed a deeply personal form of communication.
- Operators and signal styles
- Operators used signatures to identify self - we might think of this as similar to the avatar.
- Operators also knew each other by style - the nature of transmission
- Operators learned each other's style, leading to more efficient communication. Early Social Information Processing.
- Use of the lines for interpersonal communication
- Operators would fill lines with interpersonal communication during off-hours
- Scores, weather, financial information and personal messages would be passed. What does this remind us of?
- Operators would also engage in group chat, where many operators would join in a large discussion network.
- Gender and Telegraph Operators
- 1876 1/3 of telegraph operators were female
- Operators were segregated by gender
- Despite segregation, hierarchy, rules prohibiting fraternization, many relationships were developed over the wires.
- What is the CMC interpretation of interpersonal communication via telegraph lines?
- Similarities to chat, text, etc? Differences?
- The Telegraph and Global Culture
- "Thanks to the telegraph, the general public became participants in a continually unfolding global drama, courtesy of their newspapers, which were suddenly able to report on events on the other side of the world within hours of their occurrence"
- The telegraph shifted global perceptions through increased communication reach and speed
- In 1845, newspaper international coverage was 6-8 weeks old - length of time it took for messages to be passed via steamship
- The telegraph's second message "Have you any news?"
- Intercontinental telegraph transmission
- 1858 - earliest cables were used for global news transmission
- 1859 - Reuter provides his global business information services
- Effect of the telegraph on global policy, war and peace - an impact impossible to gauge.
- Pushback against the telgraph
- The bias towards international coverage of news led some small newspapers to suspend telegraph service.
- Earliest pushbacks against the globalization of culture and society.
- "The rapid distribution of news was thought to promote universal peace, truthfulness and mutual understanding."
- Analogies to internet culture.
[edit] Fischer - America Calling
- The marketing of the telephone
- Earliest marketing of the telephone was face-to-face
- Exhibitions in public, designed to convince potential adopters of the universality of the telephone
- Motives for use shifted over time - from telephone as utility to telephone as social device
- The "search for uses"
- Early motivations - the telephone would "increase efficiency, save time, and impress customers"
- "Save time by telephone", "Telehphone against time"
- Comparisons
- Managing uses
- Uses of the telephone
- Appropriate situations for telephone communication
- Etiquette of telephone use
- "Without any unnecessary and undignified Hello's"
- AT&T later adopts hello-girls as names for its operators
- Sociability
- AT&T reframed the telephone as a device for social interaction
- Uses included:
- "Visiting"
- "Modern housewife" narratives
- Social maintenance - kin-keeping
- Social utility/coordination
- Comparisons
- The Normalization of the Telephone
- The telephone as an "anonymous object"
- Gradually accepted as a way to conduct social business
- Integrated into family life - budgeted, became a necessity
