By Darren Abrecht, McClatchy Interactive
Wireless mesh networks hold promise for lowering barriers to network connectivity. They also hold the potential to alter the balance of power in cyberspace, and revive the hopes of those who once believed that the Internet could provide a forum for open communication beyond the reach of corporate or government censorship.
Verizon and AT&T have both expressed interest in bidding on wireless spectrum in the FCC’s January 2008 auction. So has Google. Many analysts see this unusual move as a ploy to force the telecoms to observe open access rules which Google supports but which the telecoms oppose. However, at least one technology pundit, PBS’s Robert Cringely, believes that Google is planning to use the spectrum to build a large-scale mesh network and bring wireless broadband to the masses.
Meshes behave differently than the communications networks we’re familiar with. In our existing communication infrastructure, most client devices connect directly to a service provider’s network. When you make a cell phone call, for instance, the first stop for the signal after leaving your handset is your carrier’s nearest tower. If your phone can’t find a tower owned by your carrier or one of its roaming partners, you don’t get to make the phone call.
With a wireless mesh, however, other client devices become links in the communication infrastructure. A cell phone that was part of a mesh network wouldn’t necessarily be stranded if it couldn’t find a tower right away. It could search for other cell phones within range, and then bounce a signal from mobile to mobile until it found a tower. If the person you’re trying to call isn’t too far away, you might be able to connect to them without even using a tower. A Swedish company called TerraNet is trying out a cell phone system based on this concept. TerraNet phone calls, which are free, are routed using only other cell phones and the Internet.
The same principle has been used to extend the range of Wi-Fi Internet access points. MIT is working with the city of Cambridge, Mass., to provide free Internet access throughout the city by means of a wireless mesh. A company called Meraki is doing the same for San Francisco. Meraki is partially funded by Google, adding fuel to the rumor of a wireless ‘Googlenet.’
While a mesh network can provide a route to the Internet backbone, using a mesh to connect individual users in a peer-to-peer fashion may prove to be the more revolutionary application. The One Laptop Per Child project plans for its devices to be used in this way, communicating directly with each other to enable chat, voice-over-IP, and project collaboration without accessing the Internet.
Bringing the power of social computing to the world’s poor is just one revolution that mesh networking could bring about. If everyone used their laptop as a server, client and router, it just might breathe life back into the dream, once held by many, that the Internet could be a positive force for liberty.
In 1996, early in the Internet’s explosion as a popular medium and just prior to its broad commercialization, activist and Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow released “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” a cyber-libertarian manifesto. Addressed to the “governments of the Industrial World,” the declaration asserted the identity of the Internet as an autonomous democratic community, exempt from the authority of existing governments.
The declaration was widely read and its sentiments broadly shared among early adopters. However, the Wild West of the early Web was not to last. Its independence was a consequence of the cultural gap between computing enthusiasts and authority figures, not an intrinsic feature of the Net itself. No one has believed in the independence of cyberspace since the government of the world’s most populous nation erected the “Great Firewall of China”—an electronic censor monitoring all Net traffic in that country—to restrict the free flow of ideas to its people.
In the U.S., the government and Internet backbone corporations have worked together to compromise civil liberties, often using copyright, pornography and terrorism as pretexts to invade the privacy of civilians. AT&T is the target of a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company collaborated with the NSA to illegally spy on American citizens. A federal judge has ruled the lawsuit may go forward, despite the government’s attempt to have it dismissed on state secret grounds.
Wireless mesh networks could allow users to communicate by routing signals through computers held by private citizens, without the need to pass through a backbone controlled by corrupt government and corporate entities. The result would be to wrest control of the infrastructure from powerful interests and bring it under the domain of the public good.
©2007 McClatchy. Reprinted with permission.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Time and the Technium
I recently discovered that, in addition to his widely-read “Cool Tools” blog, former Wired executive editor and Long Now Foundation board member Kevin Kelly has a blog called “The Technium.” If you’ve never heard of it, go read a few entries. It’s everything I hope this blog could someday be.
In the inaugural post, “My Search for the Meaning of Tech,” Kelly introduces the idea of the Technium:
In order to understand how technology and society evolve and transform each other, however, the concept must be freed from the contemporary moment. Technology is more than a handful of arbitrary categories that history has brought to momentary prominence. Once you drop the “cutting-edge” requirement, it becomes difficult to draw a line between artifacts that count as technology and those that don’t. Eventually, one must concede that technology includes all structures, concrete and abstract, which humans have created in order to bring about some imagined, desired end.
Viewed in this way, technology becomes inseparable from techne, one of Aristotle’s five categories of human knowledge. The study of technology becomes the study, not of artifacts or a disembodied historical force, but of human being and knowing.
In the inaugural post, “My Search for the Meaning of Tech,” Kelly introduces the idea of the Technium:
It’s a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology—one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.We all have a habit of referring to only the leading edge of innovation as “technology”—in part, no doubt, because of the process of naturalization I described earlier. Things that count as “technology,” in our vernacular way of speaking, include computers, biotech, advanced manufacturing processes, space-aged alloys. Things that don’t count include bricks, novels, roads, languages.
In order to understand how technology and society evolve and transform each other, however, the concept must be freed from the contemporary moment. Technology is more than a handful of arbitrary categories that history has brought to momentary prominence. Once you drop the “cutting-edge” requirement, it becomes difficult to draw a line between artifacts that count as technology and those that don’t. Eventually, one must concede that technology includes all structures, concrete and abstract, which humans have created in order to bring about some imagined, desired end.
Viewed in this way, technology becomes inseparable from techne, one of Aristotle’s five categories of human knowledge. The study of technology becomes the study, not of artifacts or a disembodied historical force, but of human being and knowing.
Monday, September 24, 2007
I can't let you do that, Dave
Two articles caught my eye over the weekend because of their opposed views on the relationship of society to technology: Regina Lynn’s “Rude People, Not Tech, Cause Bad Manners” at Wired.com and George Johnson’s “An Oracle for Our Time, Part Man, Part Machine,” at NYTimes.com.
Lynn’s column argues against a common complaint: that an increasing number of people defer face-to-face interaction in order to connect via IM, cell phones, etc., often leading to obliviousness of people in their immediate, physical vicinity.
According to Lynn, technology doesn’t impede, but only enables interpersonal relationships. An IM-only friend is as real as an in-the-flesh friend. Indeed, for the socially awkward, electronically mediated relationships may be deeper and more open than those conducted face-to-face. And the real problem with too-loud-in-public cell phone conversations is less the gadget than the oaf holding it.
I tend to agree, with some reservations. If technology is capable of enabling “good” socialization, it must likewise be capable of magnifying our rudeness.
Lynn sees us as in control of our actions. The technology has no insidious impact on human behavior. It is powerless and thus blameless: cell phones don’t offend people, people offend people. Yet no one can claim that antipathy towards public cell phone use isn’t a social phenomenon, or that it could exist if there were no cell phones.
Johnson’s piece begins by breaking down the etymology of “algorithm” before omenously announcing, “It was the Internet that stripped the word of its innocence.”
He takes issue with two distinct, but closely related phenomena of the internet age: the automation of judgment through the use of powerful algorithms, e.g. Google’s PageRank or NewsRank, and systems—both human- and machine-directed—which perform knowledge-intensive tasks through crowdsourcing, e.g. Wikipedia or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Johnson fears that these entities are robbing of us of judgment and enslaving us to a technological hive-mind. His is less an argument than an appeal to the viscera: on his account, these entities are horror-show symbiotes of man and machine, perhaps a “buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts”, or “an organism with an immune system of human leukocytes”. The illustrations accompanying the article belong to a type commonly seen in the media of fearful technological essentialism: crude cyborgs of human tissue and forms superficially evocative of industrial tech.
It seems unlikely that Wikipedia will overthrow the nation-state as the leading technology for the subjugation of individual will (though virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, for one, is troubled by the possibility). Systems can and do take on a direction of their own, but they are always created to satisfy a set of human interests. Rather than framing our fears in terms of man-versus-machine, let us ask who the machine is working for, and if their values are our values.
Lynn’s column argues against a common complaint: that an increasing number of people defer face-to-face interaction in order to connect via IM, cell phones, etc., often leading to obliviousness of people in their immediate, physical vicinity.
According to Lynn, technology doesn’t impede, but only enables interpersonal relationships. An IM-only friend is as real as an in-the-flesh friend. Indeed, for the socially awkward, electronically mediated relationships may be deeper and more open than those conducted face-to-face. And the real problem with too-loud-in-public cell phone conversations is less the gadget than the oaf holding it.
I tend to agree, with some reservations. If technology is capable of enabling “good” socialization, it must likewise be capable of magnifying our rudeness.
Lynn sees us as in control of our actions. The technology has no insidious impact on human behavior. It is powerless and thus blameless: cell phones don’t offend people, people offend people. Yet no one can claim that antipathy towards public cell phone use isn’t a social phenomenon, or that it could exist if there were no cell phones.
Johnson’s piece begins by breaking down the etymology of “algorithm” before omenously announcing, “It was the Internet that stripped the word of its innocence.”
He takes issue with two distinct, but closely related phenomena of the internet age: the automation of judgment through the use of powerful algorithms, e.g. Google’s PageRank or NewsRank, and systems—both human- and machine-directed—which perform knowledge-intensive tasks through crowdsourcing, e.g. Wikipedia or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Johnson fears that these entities are robbing of us of judgment and enslaving us to a technological hive-mind. His is less an argument than an appeal to the viscera: on his account, these entities are horror-show symbiotes of man and machine, perhaps a “buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts”, or “an organism with an immune system of human leukocytes”. The illustrations accompanying the article belong to a type commonly seen in the media of fearful technological essentialism: crude cyborgs of human tissue and forms superficially evocative of industrial tech.
It seems unlikely that Wikipedia will overthrow the nation-state as the leading technology for the subjugation of individual will (though virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, for one, is troubled by the possibility). Systems can and do take on a direction of their own, but they are always created to satisfy a set of human interests. Rather than framing our fears in terms of man-versus-machine, let us ask who the machine is working for, and if their values are our values.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Dedication
text–script–machine is dedicated to the memory of Ronald Anderson, SJ, my friend and advisor, who passed away in June at the age of 57.
Ron was a Jesuit priest and held PhDs in physics and philosophy. His research involved applying the techniques of literary analysis to 19th century scientific texts, in order to better understand the development of electrical theory. He was also deeply interested in how the Catholic faith might respond to the challenges of postmodernism.
It was Ron who introduced me to science and technology studies, and I will sorely miss not being able to correspond with him as I set out on this endeavor.
Ron was a Jesuit priest and held PhDs in physics and philosophy. His research involved applying the techniques of literary analysis to 19th century scientific texts, in order to better understand the development of electrical theory. He was also deeply interested in how the Catholic faith might respond to the challenges of postmodernism.
It was Ron who introduced me to science and technology studies, and I will sorely miss not being able to correspond with him as I set out on this endeavor.
about that official launch...
I had intended to do a sort of “grand opening,” including a mass email announcement, a new design, and a rigorous posting schedule. But I seem to be easing into things—collecting notes for good topics to write on, letting people know one-by-one, and so on. This is working for me so far, and I think I’m going to keep it up.
I’m a trained graphic designer—if not a practicing one—so using the default blogger template bugs me. There will be a new design along at some point. I’m also going to do my best to post at least three times a week from here on out, though life will get in the way at times.
If you have a Google account, please feel free to log in and comment on or argue with any post you see here. If you’re just tuning in, the original post features some brief notes on what this blog is about.
I’m a trained graphic designer—if not a practicing one—so using the default blogger template bugs me. There will be a new design along at some point. I’m also going to do my best to post at least three times a week from here on out, though life will get in the way at times.
If you have a Google account, please feel free to log in and comment on or argue with any post you see here. If you’re just tuning in, the original post features some brief notes on what this blog is about.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Shiny plastic cases
One of the things that fascinates me about technology is what I call technological encapsulation, the process of obfuscation by which the engineering miracle is brought down to earth and made humane.
We’re really not all that interested in how the gadget got here. We only want it to exist, ready-to-hand, to help us in satisfying our wants and needs. And so we hide each of its Aristotelian causes, except the final cause, which is our own reason for employing it.
Like a grain of sand in an oyster shell, the technological artifact must be physically enclosed. Otherwise, its rude workings may remind us of the inferiority of our understanding to that of the technologists who created it. Thus its formal and material causes are hidden from view. And since we might object to the environmental or socioeconomic misdeeds that were likely involved in the creation of any modern artifact, its production process is hidden behind factory walls, in foreign nations, and concealed as an industrial secret.
Of course, we must be complicit in the process of technological encapsulation; if we wanted to open the case or research the production process, we could. And some people do—but this is a distinctly different attitude in approaching the object than the manufacturer intends, or most people practice.
If the process of encapsulation is complete, the technological artifact will enter our world as a “natural” object, or at least a humane one. But the process is almost never complete, and so most artifacts require the passing of a generation to become naturalized.
Witness, for instance, the phenomenon of typewritten text. An entire generation of writers railed against the dehumanizing aspects of the clattering mechanical beast. Of course, the pen it replaced was also unnatural, strictly speaking, but had the advantage of familiarity. Now, typewriters are quaint collectibles, calling to mind a more romantic era when the novel was king and writing was still performed with mechanical devices in physical space. And modern techies of a conservative bent swear by “plain text,” i.e., typewritten text, as the simplest, most honest incarnation of the written word.
We’re really not all that interested in how the gadget got here. We only want it to exist, ready-to-hand, to help us in satisfying our wants and needs. And so we hide each of its Aristotelian causes, except the final cause, which is our own reason for employing it.
Like a grain of sand in an oyster shell, the technological artifact must be physically enclosed. Otherwise, its rude workings may remind us of the inferiority of our understanding to that of the technologists who created it. Thus its formal and material causes are hidden from view. And since we might object to the environmental or socioeconomic misdeeds that were likely involved in the creation of any modern artifact, its production process is hidden behind factory walls, in foreign nations, and concealed as an industrial secret.
Of course, we must be complicit in the process of technological encapsulation; if we wanted to open the case or research the production process, we could. And some people do—but this is a distinctly different attitude in approaching the object than the manufacturer intends, or most people practice.
If the process of encapsulation is complete, the technological artifact will enter our world as a “natural” object, or at least a humane one. But the process is almost never complete, and so most artifacts require the passing of a generation to become naturalized.
Witness, for instance, the phenomenon of typewritten text. An entire generation of writers railed against the dehumanizing aspects of the clattering mechanical beast. Of course, the pen it replaced was also unnatural, strictly speaking, but had the advantage of familiarity. Now, typewriters are quaint collectibles, calling to mind a more romantic era when the novel was king and writing was still performed with mechanical devices in physical space. And modern techies of a conservative bent swear by “plain text,” i.e., typewritten text, as the simplest, most honest incarnation of the written word.
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