COM257: Media History and Theory

In "Mobile Telephone History," Farley discusses the relatively brief history of mobile phones. Even though 1945 seems like an eon ago, it really is not a long time in the elaborate history of communications technologies. The first time that mobile technologies were being created was right after WWII. It was realized that a new communications system would be needed and, in Europe, during reconstruction would have been a good time to implement that.  In the early history of mobile phones, most devices were attached to vehicles. The main transmitter was in the trunk while a receiver/microphone would have been up in the front of the car. AT&T basically ran the market until the asked the FCC for more frequencies to use. To their surprise, the FCC opened up the frequencies for other, smaller companies in order to introduce some competition into the market. These companies were more specialized and did a better job than AT&T because of the fact that they used automated dialing instead of having to pay operators to place every single made call. Even though it took AT&T many years to catch up to the RCCs, they stuck around as a company thanks to the fact that they were always number one in the landline business. The first time that mobile devices were used for commercial use was in the 70's on the rail systems. Basically, these were like pay phones we see today but were mobile.

The invention of the transistor finally made it possible for cell phones to be something that people could use everyday and even own one for themself. As we saw with computers, transistors made devices much smaller and more dependable than ones using glass vacuum tubes. Eventually, companies began making and marketing the smaller cell phones like we see today in the 90's. I for one cannot imagine what it would be like without my cell phone. I use it all of the time. I feel naked without it. It's gotten to the point where if my mom calls me and I do not answer or call back immediatley, she gets worried. I also thought that the mention of the car phones was cool because I remember my mom having one in her Dodge Intrepid. I dont think that she used it very much, and it probably wasnt even very safe, but we can see how that has progressed with services such as OnStar today.

Tim O'Reilly aims to clearly define exactly what features make an application truly Web 2.0 in "What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software." He states that a major reason he wants to do this is because many businesses are claiming that their software is Web 2.0, when it actually is not, which fools consumers. Web 2.0 really took off after the .com crash in 2001, when developers began to go a different route in software development. O'Reilly outlines 7 features of Web 2.0 in the article.

One main feature is that Web 2.0 software should be a service, not a product. This means that most software should be free of charge to consumers and ad-driven. For the most part, these ads come from 2.0 advertising companies like Yahoo! and Google AdSense. These advertisers are different from 1.0 advertisers in that their ads are off to the side of the page and are made up of text. Also, they are smart, and decide what advertisement to display based on what kind of page the user is veiwing. Older advertisers used banners to advertise and could never reach smaller websites because they were not dynamic enough.

Another important factor of Web 2.0 is the user experience. In the past, websites would put up information and the users got what was fed to them. Today, users are expected to contribute when they go online. Examples of this are social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, and blogs, like the one I am using right now. RSS feeds are a major way that people find out about new posts today. When a blog is updated, the user receives an email with a hyperlink(arguably the most important peice of the internet) directing to the blog of interest. While in the past Brittainica would have been the standard for finding out information online, people now use Wikipedia- a website completely driven by what individuals add to the pages. In fact Brittainica recently had to shut down, a symbol that Web 2.0 has hit full stride in our society. Along with this comes the customability factor. Users need to be able to change the sites they use to fit their needs, which we see with Gmail, and even in the PC industry with Dell.

Also, programs today must be able to work on more that one platform. This means that information put up on a website needs to not only be viewable on a PC, but also on a Mac, cell phone. netbook, or any other device that comes out. The example used in the text was iTunes. This not only works on the computer as a database to store music, but that information is seamlessly transferred over to iPods and works just the same.

I find it interesting that in just the 7 years since the .com crash that the internet has come this far. I do remember how the Internet was when I was younger and today it is a completely different animal. Something that O'Reilly mentioned was customability, and I thought about how Facebook keeps changing and how users have no control over this. It does not seem smart to me that they are breaking one of the main codes of Web 2.0 software, as eventually users will move on to something that can better fit their needs. Something else that I found to be creepy was the mention of PayPal using the information that they have to create the first indentity database.

-Ryan Wood

Aarseth begins the section stating that he uses the term nonlinearity in a mathematical sense and relates it to geometry in that it can be skewed and distorted but not torn. He then discusses what it is that actually make up text- graphemes (letters), lexemes (words), and syntagms (phrases or sentences). He says that a texton is a group of letters and that textons make up transversal functions. He has 6 variables to classify these transversal functions. Topology is what makes up the difference between linear and non-linear text. Dynamics applies to how the scriptons in a text are allowed to change. Determinability is how often adjacent scriptons to scriptons are the same. Transiency is the time it takes for scriptons to appear to someone. Maneuverability deals with the ease of access to given scriptons. User-functionality deals with the interface.

Even though television was invented in the early 1930's, it did not really take off until about 20 years later, specifically in the year 1952, when 1/3 of the population finally owned a set. One reason it took TV so long to jump off was because America was in a depression. It was simply not a good time for people to purchase an expensive item that t hey did not need. Also, people were used to radio and did not see a need for television. It was not until a couple years after WWII that the economy was strong enough for TV to catch on. After people started getting more and more into TV, business at the cinemas dropped off sharply. Hollywood tried to keep up, but everyone, including the president would rather have stayed home and watched shows such as I Love Lucy, or Gunsmoke than leave home and spend money to watch a film.

 I find the evolution of TV kind of funny and strange. When I saw about the Westerns when I read this, I immediately thought of my great uncle Junior. He was alive back in the 50's and I guess somewhere along the way he started watching them. Ever since I was little, everytime I go over to my aunt and uncle's house, he sits in his old chair and watches them. I think it's funny that even though TV has gotten so much better and that there are so many things to watch, he still chooses Westerns. While the shows he watches haven't changed, what he watches them on has. They have a nice TV with sattellite which all just seems really ironic to me.

In the chapter, "The Age of Broadcasting," they talk about the early uses and evolution of the radio and a broadcasting tool. They talk about how radio was used differently in different parts of the world during the WWII era. With the radio, WWII was the first war where news outlets could let the population know what was going on on the front lines. However, this news did not always tell the complete story, and usually came along with some bias. This was thanks to the fact that governments had a major part in regulating the airwaves, for example, the BBC. Unlike in England, most of the funding for radio stations in the US came from commercial advertising. In Germany, the Soviet Union, and in Italy, radio was used by Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin to get their respective messages across. While people probably should have taken everything they heard with a grain of salt, they certainly did not. When Orsen Welles did his show about aliens invading Earth, everyone panicked, even though it was just an April Fools joke.

 It was interesting to see that back when radio came out, it was mostly just to get important news across. Now, the only reason that the vast majority of people listen to radio is for music. Granted, a decent percentage of people listen to talk radio, but most still tune in for the music. Today, many people dont even listen to advertisment-driven radio anymore, but pay a subscription fee for XM. Also, you can connect this article back to class when they talked about the radio announcer during the London Bombings who made the listeners feel like they were right there.

In this article, Carey discusses the telegraph and the impact it had on our society. Carey argues that the telegraph does not receive the credit it should as being one of the most influential inventions of the 19th century. Without the telegraph, he says, we would not have cell phones, the internet, or any of the other modern communication technologies. The telegraph was the first device which used electrical signals to broadcast information. Carey also discusses the parallels between the railroads and the telegraph. While the railroads made it physically easier for people to move, the telegraph made it possible to share information with people on the other side of the country without actually having to get up. This was influential in the way that news was and still is today conveyed to the public. Before the telegraph, news was very objective and differed from community to community, but with it being nationalized it had to be put in a way that would be relevant to everyone. Also, the standardization of the time zones was thanks to the telegraph because it was important that everyone was on the same page as far as time goes.

Before reading this article, I had never really thought about the impact of the telegraph. I realized that it led to the invention of the telephone, but never understood the rest of it's impact on society. Also, this relates back to the idea of new media becoming old media which we have discussed in class multiple times. Another connection to the class is with space and place and how the telegraph greatly reduced the amount of space between people by reducing the time it took to transmit messages.

In Hobart & Schiffman's article, "Printing and the Rupture of Classification," they discuss the history of the written word just before and after the invention of the printing press. They start of telling the story of a  French man who was surrounded by death. In order to relieve himself of his pain, he gathered an enormous amount of books in order to learn everything he could before he died. The point of this story was that without the printing press, he never would have been able to put together such a library all by himself.

The printing press completely changed the flow of information in the world. People could now educate themselves on any subject. However, there almost became too much information as all of the books contradicted each other and for a time, you could not really tell what to beleive. The printed word was put into a "codex," which is essentially what we call a book today. The codex was a great improvement over the papyrus roll, because one could easily flip to the desired page. Also, there was the summa, which was an attempt to cut through all of the fluff and just print facts.

Innovations are still coming in the printing world today with devices like the new Amazon Kindle. This device allows users to download books onto a portable screen for a small price. The screen displays one page and you simply click a button the flip the page. While some would think that devices like the Kindle would make books obsolete, I would not. In the past people have thought that TV would make cinema obsolete, the internet would make newspapers obsolete, and so on. Books will continue to be an important medium for the spread of information and knowledge.

In Hayles' article, "The Condition of Virtuality," he begins by describing the red hanging wires at the electronics expo in Los Angeles. When there is more current running through the building, the wires move. When there is less current, the wires are still. This introduces Hayles' definition of virtuality which states that "virtuality is the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns." Hayles goes on to talk about how the human body is located in gene, and that you cannot change the gene by changing the gene, but that it works in vice-versa. This means that information really does not mean anything untill it is interpreted. Later, Hayle discusses the idea of noise, which is data that goes through when sending information that was not neccesarilly intended to. You cannot really eliminate this noise, but can reduce it. Something else discussed in the article was patterns and randomness. There was a theory that patterns can be used in any medium as long as they keep their meaning. An example of this was putting a "life" into a computer, thus making it immortal. Hayles shoots this down saying that it is not really possible and that the creator of the theory had an irrational fear of death. The two main features of patterns were access and mutation. Access basically says that all of the info is there, but only a few people can access. Mutation talks about how the patterns and technologies are always changing.

The part about out DNA in this article was very interesting to me. It reminded me about what we learned about in Com 230 and breifly Tuesday in class about the Evil Scientist theory where we may not really even exist. If it were actually possible to take out brains operations and simply put them into a computer that would be really creepy. Besides that, I think that it should be cool to see how virtually (pun intended) everything will continue to change in terms of technology in the next couple of years and how our virtual world will continue to grow.

In Manovich's "The Poetics of Augmented Space," he spends the majority of the time discussing pioneering ways to get information across from one place to the masses. The three most important components to new technologies are video surveillance,  cellspace technologies, and computer/video displays. The paper discussed how artists are the most innovating people in this feild. Some examples he used include a WWII museum in Berlin and a Prada store in Times Square. The WWII museum used projectors to show a virtual map of where the Jews lived pre-WWII. This is a good example of a new and creative use of space to get info across. Another example was the Prada store. Beside all of the clothes (which were in glass cages), were LCD screens which advertised the clothes. This goes back to the point that people buy things based on how the ads portray them. Eventually, all of our cities and other public places will be completely full of flat screen monitors which will efficeintly display information to the public, and will look really nifty too. 

I like where the future is headed as far as displays go. I think that it will be really cool if we are really able to use "e-ink" instead of having to carry around a bookbag full of a bunch of stuff. Also, as I have noted in other blog posts, I find it truly amazing how far technology has come since I first started using computers in 97 or so. Back then, it was just a cpu screen, but today and in the future, information is being displayed in many creative and innovative ways and I find that very interesting.

In "Technologies," Kellerman discusses many different forms of technology and how they all relate to us as a country having more and more mobile freedoms, as well as the standardization of these technologies. Kellerman starts off discussing the rise of different crucial forms of technology today such as telephones, automobiles, cell phones, and the internet. He ends up using the rise of the automobile as something to compare the other technologies to. For instance, when discussing the internet, he talks about how there are no traffic jams because the users can just be directed to a different router. Later, when talking about new wireless technology, talks about roads. The roads are metaphors for wires which he says are going the way of the dinosaurs. Some day soon, people will almost rely soley on their mobile phones and thier laptops. Also, there are distinct sets of rules with technology, must like the rules of the road (stoplights, traffic patterns, etc). 

During Kellerman's peice, he also discusses how we are becoming less mobile as a society. Although it has not made a huge impact on how much we use cars, people today do a decent percentage of their shopping online. Something like 2 percent of people work from home as well (however, I do not understand how shopping online reduces automobile use, since someone still has to drive it to the house). Since the rise of cars, people hardly ever walk or ride bikes anymore either, except in bigger cities. Even there, cars have an impact because of the pollution, smells, etc.

This article makes a lot of good points about how technology is progessing faster and faster. It took cars 25 years to become mainstream, but only took the internet 7. I remember when I was younger having dial-up internet running AOL, now I'm working on wifi. Also, I thought the part about walking vs riding in cars was very interesting. I always thought it would be cool to live in a place where you could walk to just about anywhere you needed to go and not have to drive, I guess living on campus is like that now that I think about it.

In "The Database," Manovich starts talks about what exactly databases are in "new media". He first shows the company Razorfish as an example of what databases are becoming. Databases include pretty much anywhere info is stored. This could be DVD's, hard drives, movies, photographs, books, encyclopedias, and websites, among countless other forms. Manovich discussed how websites are constantly growing and how they are even linked to other sites with more information. He then talked about virtual forms of databases, most notably video games. These operate on algorithms which determine the computer's every move. Manovich later discusses databases as cinema, specifically talking about a disply in Munich using 100 screens for the 100 year history of cinema. Each screen represented a database, so it was a database on 2 levels with one being the actual history and one being the info stored on tape.

It was very interesting to me how Manovich made pretty much every form of media into a database of one kind or another. I never really thought about web sites as databases, but thinking about it, you can go to a site like ESPN.com and look at every scores from many years ago. I know there are other websites which cover a specific team and have every score possible for decades. I also thought it was funny that Manovich used CD-ROMS has his first example of databases. As we discussed in class, media is changing so fast that we rarely even use CD-ROMs anymore. They have become almost obsolete in the short time since this was written.

In "The Interface," Lev Manovich discusses how cinema, the text and HCI (Human Controlled Interface) have blended together to create the graphical interfaces that we see on computer monitors and other electronic devices today. The article first made comparisons to the movie "Blade Runner" and the first Mac computer, which came out just two years apart, to illustrate how they both represented a change in the way we would see computers for the rest of history.  Printed word was the first part of GUI's to be discussed. While it used to just be considered for hard copies, computers now use text as code for directions. It says that computers were first thought of as a simulated typewriter, meaning they were mostly used for word processing among other basic functions, but can today do so much more. The cinema part of the article talks about how people like to see things layed out for them like a story in a linear format. It discusses virtual reality and how it attempts make personal stories for each user based on their actions in the game. Cinema also describes how objects are layed out in pages for easier veiwing and improved functionality. The last part is HCI. It seemed like HCI for the most part talked about how we like for our computer programs to be consistent with other programs so that they will be simpler to use. The last part of the article was about computer screens. It talks about the history of screens and uses such how the were used for radar in the war and simpler uses like TV. The rest of the article talks about VR and how it actually does not give you very much freedom because the user is still a "slave to the machine."

I thought that this was an interesting article, expecially all of the info about virtual reality. I specifically remember one time when I was at Carowinds wanting to do some VR game which costed 5 bucks. Turns out, it was a rip-off. All you do is sit there with this big thing on your head and move around. You can not actually do what you want. Aside from that, it was interesting to read about the evolution of user interfaces seeing as just 20 years ago all screens showed were some rectangular boxes with text inside.

In Lev Manovich's article "What is New Media," he describes the relatively short history of New Media, dating back to the first computers using punch cards as memory. Manovich discusses the main historical use for computers, which was to do math problems. He shows how they were used in the census and how a very early computer was used to control a loom. In a very interesting part of the article, Manovich discusses the first time multimedia and computers crosses paths, when a computer was programmed using movie film with binary code printed on it. The rest of the article really defines a solid answer to his question, What is New Media? He comes up with 5 different criteria to better describe new media. Numerical representation deals with how computers are programmed, for example, with binary code. Modularity is how different parts of multimedia can be moved around and replaced with other peices without the whole project falling apart. Automation is how the computer program automatically helps to put a project together through tutorials and templates. Variability allows each individual to get something customized for them so that it will work how one needs it to. Transcoding is how the computer language is translated into media which a human can understand. All together, these five criteria define New Media.

Although it was long and used lots of big words, I enjoyed the article. I had always kind of wondered when New Media actually started. I had assumed that it started with the creation of the personal computer with Microsoft and Bill Gates. New Media is important for us to understand because it is changing at such a rapid pace. In the last ten years, we have seen video games and the internet rise to a completely new level. Who knows what we will see next? I for one am very excited to see what kind of new technology the future holds.