a thaumaturgical compendium

Can you guess my Google Talk (Google’s new IM/VoIP beta) user name? I guess you didn’t have to!

When is Google going to change its tag line to “All your utterances are belong to us”?

It seems the only ones posting to my site these days are the script-kiddies, who have nailed both my main pages recently, using (I am assuming) an insecure PHP script on my site to allow for shell commands to pass through. I’m guessing it is a hole in WordPress (I’m still running 1.2), but I’m not sure. There are actually a lot of PHP scripts running on this site, no doubt many of them with security holes.

However, this is just urging on the inevitable. This week, if the cards are dealt right, I will be moving servers, and moving house.

The servers will be moving over to Dreamhost, and as part of the move I’m going to clean up and simplify the blog a bit. Maybe people will even be able to read it on a laptop soon! Since the redesign has taken on ever greater dimensions, and been pushed back month by month, I have decided to just do the move and then add little tweaks as I have time. With school starting this week, that “as I have time” will be the hard bit.

And at the end of the week, I’m making that move to Manhattan. We’ve found a nice apartment that will take us and our 190 pound dog in the Upper (Upper) West Side. (Around the corner from Mama Mexico). I’ll be a regular on Jet Blue flight number 1 for the next year, shuffling back to Buffalo each week to teach.

So, if blogging is a bit light over the next few days, please forgive me. And if you are going to deface the blog, please kindly move along. Someone else is far more deserving, I’m sure.

Carolyn Marvin quotes the following account in her (excellent) When Old Technologies Were New about a farmer’s encounter with the newfangled telephone (p. 20):

He then rolled up the paper and tried to push it in the aperture in the transmitter. Failing in his attempt with his finger, he took his lead pencil and jammed it in, destroying the vibrating plate. With an air of satisfaction he took his seat and awaited a reply. After about ten minutes, he became discouraged, and thinking he perhaps had not sent the message on the right line, he wrote another and jammed it into the hand telephone, and to make sure work, rammed it home as he would a ball in a rifle.

She uses this story as an example of what was seen as the dangerously technologically illiterate, in order to create a class of technological elite. We have the same stories about people who make dumb computing errors (CD-drive as cupholder, etc.). But we don’t tell this story about telephones any longer, because it is seemingly a transparent technology. It has disappeared into our everyday existence.

A friend is acting as guide to a group of rural African English teachers who are in the US for intensive language training. His major role is to teach them Microsoft Word so that they can complete their writing assignments for the term. Most have never seen a computer, none have used one, and none will have one when they get back home. But, to operate in a US university, you gotta know Word, I guess. (I’ll admit, I’m not part of this process, so maybe I missed something important there.)

Anyway, this student assistant, who helped with my cyberporn class, emigrated from Jamaica, and so has at least some cross-cultural experience. He was not prepared, though, for a group who had such limited access to communication technologies. Many had seen a phone (in their school or elsewhere) but many had never made a phone call.

His first task was to get them used to the student ID cards that provided access to their dorms, and to the use of the deadbolts on their doors. (Actually, on my block in suburban Buffalo, people leave their front doors unlocked more often than not, but on a campus, things are different.) At the door, he showed them how to swipe their ID cards through the reader. The first teacher/student tried it, positioning the card over the slot and dropping it. Eventually they got this skill down. They were provided with calling cards to contact their home schools. After a fairly careful explanation of direct dial telephones and use of calling card numbers, the first student attempted to slide his card through the seam in the telephone case.

It makes you wonder whether “good design” is possible. Design is always about treading that line of adhering to the stylistic cannon and expectations of the user (“Don’t make me think!”) while providing an experience that is aesthetically challenging that appeals to the emotions of the user. Treading that line is difficult, but it makes you really appreciate things like a Porsche 911, things that manage to be both challenging and become part of the visual and experiential rhetoric, and manage to do so throughout a long period of time and across cultures.

The visitor clearly thought that by learning a new interface, he had a new window on the world, and this led him to think about other systems through that window. I have a feeling most designers (and people who teach designers) are trying to create technologies for visitors. For me, at least, designs for residents also have value. There is value, sometimes, in the exercise of power that forces the user to become one with the interface, especially when that power is exercised openly, and mindfully.

Via Smartmobs I learn of the Ministry of Reshelving, a project to relocate all copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from fiction to non-fiction sections of local bookstores.

For those who are taking my communication theory course in the fall, please acquire these books before the semester begins. There will also be a fairly extensive collection of articles I will ask you to read, but you will have a chance to track these down when you arrive at the university. The following books have not been ordered for the university bookstore. You are on your own for ordering them. I have linked to Amazon for the books below (any kickback to be funneled toward class refreshments), but you may order these through your local book store, or any other way you like.

Required

John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air.
Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations.
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination.
Shearon Lowery & Melvin DeFleur, Milestones in Mass Communication Research
Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man
Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason

Recommended

If you do not have a copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, I strongly recommend you get a copy and (re)read it.

You may also want to consider getting copies of these two communication theory textbooks, and a sociological overview, to help make sense of the relationships among the wide variety of theories we will be discussing.
Armand Mattelart & Michele Mattelart, Theories of Communication: a short introduction
Randall Collins, Four Sociological Traditions
Stephen W. Littlejohn, Theories of Human Communication

Read First

You should read the following before our first meeting,

• The Introduction, first, and second chapters from Peters.

• Wikipedia: Communication Theory

I will distribute a course syllabus during the orientation, and I look forward to meeting you then.

For those who are taking my information science and services course in the fall, please acquire these books before the semester begins. There will also be a fairly extensive collection of articles I will ask you to read, but you will have a chance to track these down when you arrive at the university. The following books have not been ordered for the university bookstore. You are on your own for ordering them. I have linked to Amazon for the books below (any kickback to be funneled toward class refreshments), but you may order these through your local book store, or any other way you like.

Required

Thomas P. Hughes, Human-Built World
Hans Christian von Baeyer, Information: the New Language of Science
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information
Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library
Neil Gershenfeld, When Things Start to Think

Recommended

If you do not have a copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, I strongly recommend you get a copy and (re)read it.

Read First

You should read the following before our first meeting,

• Steve Sawyer, “Social Informatics: Overview, Principles and Opportunities,” ASIST Bulletin, vol. 31 (no. 5), 2005.

• Kevin Kelly, “We are the Web,” Wired, 13.08 (August 2005).

And you need to have the Hughes book read and digested by our second meeting.

I will distribute a course syllabus during the orientation, and I look forward to meeting you then.

This handbill from Pasqua Roseee in 1652 almost makes me into a coffee drinker.