How a Telephone and Telephone Network Work

1. Prof. Marc Davis, Prof. Peter Lyman, and danah boyd UC Berkeley SIMS Tuesday and Thursday 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm Spring 2005 http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is146/s05/ How a Telephone and Telephone Network Work IS146: Foundations of New Media

2. Lecture Overview • Review of Last Time • Speech and Audio as Media • Today • How a Telephone and Telephone Network Work • Guest Lecturers: Michael Smith and Ndiata Kalonji • Preview of Next Time • The Telephone from Bell to Cellphones • Guest Lecture: Genevieve Bell

3. Lecture Overview • Review of Last Time • Speech and Audio as Media • Today • How a Telephone and Telephone Network Work • Guest Lecturers: Michael Smith and Ndiata Kalonji • Preview of Next Time • The Telephone from Bell to Cellphones • Guest Lecture: Genevieve Bell

4. Assignments, Grades, Questions • Assignment 3 is graded • Pick up at the end of class • More notes will be sent out after class • Grades • Questions about Assignment 4? • Midterm is coming up

5. Readings for Next Time • Claude S. Fisher.America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, p. 21-29. • Claude S. Fisher. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, p. 33-59. • Discussion Questions

6. Ong on Orality • Orality (or “Primary Orality”) • The phase of oral culture prior to the advent of writing • Literacy • The phase from the invention of writing through the invention of the printing press up to before the advent of the first electronic communications technology • Secondary Orality • The phase from the invention of the telegraph to the present day and recovers some aspects of orality by connecting people across space through mediated interaction (e.g., the telephone) • In the modern day, aspects of primary orality, literacy, and secondary orality all intertwine in our social uses of communication and communications technologies

7. Ong on Orality • Oral communication produces sounds which have no record • It is “evanescent” • In the absence of external representations, primary orality requires internal cognitive structures to organize and store knowledge for retrieval • Rhythm • Rhymes • Aphorisms • Epithets • Memory palaces

8. Lecture Overview • Review of Last Time • Speech and Audio as Media • Today • How a Telephone and Telephone Network Work • Guest Lecturers: Michael Smith and Ndiata Kalonji • Preview of Next Time • The Telephone from Bell to Cellphones • Guest Lecture: Genevieve Bell

9. Information Theory • Quantitatively studies information flow: how people send and receive information • Meaning is irrelevant to information • Information measures uncertainty • Quantification of stimuli / signals • Measure of freedom in decision making • Yes/No question vs. Guess a word

10. Noise • Interference in the signal • Systems adjust through redundancy • Games rely on noise • Fun is struggle against noise and uncertainty • Successful signal processing requires balancing noice and redundancy

11. Infrmatn Spred • “Only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd” • Equivalent to SMS Speak • Adding noise for play: AzN pRiDe • RuLz4SpEaKiNg • Aesthetics? Ownership? • Questioning redundancy

12. Lecture Overview • Review of Last Time • Speech and Audio as Media • Today • How a Telephone and Telephone Network Work • Guest Lecturers: Michael Smith and Ndiata Kalonji • Preview of Next Time • The Telephone from Bell to Cellphones • Guest Lecture: Genevieve Bell

13. Michael Smith and Ndiata Kalonji • Michael Smith directs the digital media partnership between France Telecom R&D and the University of California, Berkeley. A noted researcher in video analysis, he is the author of numerous papers and a book on the subject. His innovations include patented video analysis and summarization technology used by SonicFoundry and the OGIS Research Institute, Osaka. He holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering. • Ndiata Kalonji is the Director of Access and Core Networks at France Telecom

14. Daniel Delmore • Weaver says that, "information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message.” ... What are some examples of games that test the information theory and the description listed above?

15. Daniel Delmore • Noise increases the uncertainty of the signal, and therefore the amount of information it contains. Is this concept of noise a good thing when it comes to information? Specifically is this a safe or not? In what context/environment is “noise” good to exist in?

16. Daniel Arnold • Salen and Zimmerman generally define information as "a measure of how certain you can be about the nature of a signal," emphasizing that the more uncertainty, the more information. Does this definition reduce the amount of information present in society? Given this definition, would you (still) consider people to be bombarded with information overload?

17. Daniel Arnold • Assuming that information simply is based on uncertainty, would this decrease the reliability of information? How do we assign credibility if all information depends on uncertainty?

18. Daniel Arnold • According to Salen and Zimmerman, "Noise increases the amount of information and uncertainty in a message." How would noise increase the amount of information in any given message? Is not all the information of a message contained in the signal itself? How exactly, does background noise add information?

19. Daniel Arnold • Given the separation of meaning and information, can meaning be labeled information when it contains some ambiguity? For instance, when a word can be defined in several different ways.

20. Lecture Overview • Review of Last Time • Speech and Audio as Media • Today • How a Telephone and Telephone Network Work • Guest Lecturers: Michael Smith and Ndiata Kalonji • Preview of Next Time • The Telephone from Bell to Cellphones • Guest Lecture: Genevieve Bell