With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic I have spent most I my time at home, working and away from friends and family. I therefore have had to significantly make use of video chat for work meetings and meeting loved ones. In an article on Vox, Adam Clark Estes writes about the history of this technology and how these changes are shaping our lives and the technology itself:
(…) hosting a party with a video chat component certainly sounds less weird today than it would have six months ago. If it was already evident that videoconferencing had become a mainstay of many offices, that it could be a prominent part of our social lives is a new idea to me. That explains my initial surprise when the folks from Microsoft Teams started telling me how their workplace software had taken on new roles, like social networking, in many users’ lives. In other words, the pandemic has fundamentally changed our relationship with these tools and with digital spaces generally.
The article further delves in the changes made to the technology to make more pleasant to use. Read the full article here.
Matt Alt at The New Yorker wrote a great piece about the Walkman, “the gadget that taught the world to socially distance”:
Hosokawa noted how listeners used the devices to tame the unpredictability of urban spaces, with all of their unexpected intrusions and loud noises. Wearing headphones functioned both as a personal “Do Not Disturb” sign and an alternate soundtrack to the cacophony of the city. This was a new form of human experience, engaged disengagement, a technological shield from the world and an antidote to ennui. Whenever nerves frayed or boredom crept in, one could just hit Play and fast-forward life a little. One of the first Westerners to grasp the import of this new human capacity was the author William Gibson, a pioneer of the genre of science fiction called cyberpunk, who wrote years later that “the Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget.”
Read the full article here.
Two interesting articles from The Fast Company:
One article about how a popular chart of the coronavirus and flattening the curve: “The story behind ‘flatten the curve,’ the defining chart of the coronavirus”
And another article on the history of an important technology in this pandemic: “the mask”: “The untold origin story of the N95 mask”
“Outtakes” from interviews by David Hoffman on the streets of New York in the late 70s when he was doing a documentary on the coming of the information age.
Fun little historical tidbit on “hacking” of technology in eighteenth century France. Apparently there were some brothers who used the semaphore telegraph system for their own gain. They used a mechanism for correcting errors when messages were relayed to transmit information. With the help of some insider person they could use to transmit their own information about the stock exchange in Paris to Bordeaux which allowed them to make a lot of money! I read the translated article at Courrier international.
Les messages relayés par les tours prévoyaient la possibilité d’une correction, une sorte de touche “retour arrière” pour effacer la position précédente quand, pour une raison quelconque, un opérateur avait fait une erreur. Les Blanc ont compris qu’ils pouvaient soudoyer l’un des opérateurs pour qu’il introduise une “erreur” quand le marché de Paris clôturait à la hausse, et une autre “erreur” lors d’une clôture à la baisse. L’“erreur” se propageait d’une tour à l’autre, jusqu’à ce qu’un complice des frères, muni d’une lunette, la détecte et en informe aussitôt les deux banquiers, qui gagnaient des fortunes à Bordeaux et semblaient toujours deviner avec un instinct surnaturel ce qui s’était passé à Paris.
In an article from 1976 I came accross in the book the Social Shaping of Technology1, Ruth Schwartz Cowan looks at the introduction of technological appliances in the home and their effects on home work. Her analysis shows that the “industrialization of the home” was very different process from what we might suspect: that it would descrease the amount of work needed to be done by housewives. Rather the technologies seems to have shifted the work and contributed to changes in aspects of the work (such as the emotional aspects).
The standard sociological model for the impact of modern technology on family life clearly needs some revision: at least for middle-class nonrural American families in the 20th century, the social changes were not the ones that the standard model predicts. In these families the functions of at least one member, the housewife, have increased rather than decreased; and the dissolution of family life has not in fact occurred.
Cowan, R. S. (1976). The ‘Industrial Revolution’ in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century. Technology and Culture, 17(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.2307/3103251 ↩︎
Fascinating film on operation, social negotiations, etiquette,… of old tech, the “party line”, where a single telephone line was shared in a community. See the video on The Internet Archive.
Must read on part of history of technology of antibiotics on animals: “The discovery that Aureomycin promoted animal growth set in motion a train of unintended consequences, from antibiotic resistance to factory farming.”.