What if I could just dial back my technology use to an earlier time in my life? I mused to Finn. Like the Colonial House/Frontier House/1900 House series on PBS, where people live for a while under the technological and material conditions of an earlier era. Not to be a total luddite and give up technology entirely; that’s draconian, bad academic sportsmanship, and stands to alienate me from my friends as much as it might give me transcendentalist-grade insights about Being and Nature and whatnot. The -House series on PBS never goes back to the Stone Age, and I notice they don’t appear to have made it back to medieval times yet.

So, could I just dial it back to a particular year? Would it still be possible to do so when, say, so many people I’d like to stay in touch with use Facebook as a primary means of socializing? Finn agreed this was an interesting idea.

But what year to pick, if I was going to try this strategy? 1999 would lose me my blog. 2001, my cell phone, much less a smartphone (my first acquired by accident in 2006, I think it was). There’s a fine balance of baby and bathwater. With so many technologies appearing thick and fast in the past few years, dialing back a year when one unwanted technology appeared might also lose me another really useful one. Perhaps it’s best to think about particular technologies, then, and what they win or lose for me.

2003 was the year I started grad school, and also a watershed year for spam (as we’ll hopefully all soon be able to read in Finn’s to-be-published book on the topic). I could really stand to dial back to before that particular garbage influx happened. Both the command-line account I still used for my primary personal email reader (Pine) and my blog were crushed beneath an influx from a spam-production system whose tools seemingly went from crude stone handheld things to an unthinkable number of self-replicating nanobots in what can’t have been more than a year. It took a year for spam-fighting technology like Akismet (which works wonders) to catch up. Certainly wouldn’t want to dial my blog back to a date between 2003 and 2007, I’ll tell you that much.

Those were the years I slowly and reluctantly began to ease off my reliance on my friends’ server, and move my activity to the cloud, primarily through GMail (which appeared in 2004). I’d be loath to part with GMail’s threading, searchability, and ubiquitous access; they’re net wins for me. The advertising I could do without, but it has generally not been too intrusive in GMail, so even that I don’t mind much.

Then there’s phones. I’ve written about phones recently, at least the voice side of them. Even my new device isn’t great at providing high-quality sound. I’d really rather have a land line for actual conversations (without adding to my already astronomical phone and cable Internet bill). Even despite my dissatisfaction with phone sound quality, though, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to have more phone conversations. Hearing other people’s emotions and being able to interrupt (yes, interrupt, including interrupting onesself) and otherwise respond immediately are important. Skype’s and Google’s video chat capabilities are doing some lovely work towards restoring communications resources which were traditionally unavailable through voice-only communication.

Considering the smartphone is a slightly different thing than considering cellular phone speech quality. There are few downsides I can see to having a tiny ubiquitous computer, aside from how heavily I rely on it for maps, contacts, and other affordances, purposes my brain and handwritten notes used to serve — a reliance which could get problematic in a genuine crisis situation where big networks go down. (And did, in that one horrifying time recently when Google Maps made me badly late to a consulting gig by locating my destination a dozen blocks further north on Broadway than it actually was.)

I’m writing part of this post on my phone on the subway, something that might previously have involved transcription. I like that I can do more writing in transit. I use almost no location-based services (the downside of advertising and surveillance culture outweighs the very slight possibility that I might randomly use these features to spend time with friends, in my opinion), but my phone has introduced me to the idea that I might bookmark restaurants I liked on a map, and use that feature to plan future meetups, a function that pleases me immensely. I can compose chiptunes on my phone, follow RSS feeds, find a less-weighty substitute for books, carry a camera without carrying an extra device – mobiles have finally gotten to the point I wished for in about 2003 when I found myself carrying around a half-dozen little gaming and recording devices. All good stuff.

So I’d like to have a lovely-sounding landline back, and then a cheaper tiny mobile computer; cloud access to my email (though I’d rather not have that dependent on a system which exploits my email for marketing); and my blog, liberated from the tyranny of spam-producing botnets.

What, then, about “social” technologies? Social networks? How about Twitter?

There are many ways in which I’d like to dial these two technologies back out of my life, or at least twiddle their dials until they work better than they are right now. This post is already getting tl;dr, so I’ll save that for my next post.

James Grimmelmann has been voicing his disagreement with the move over the past few days on Twitter. The way this might strengthen antitrust lawsuits against Google is one of his concerns. Another is that most people won’t understand the inclusion of social results in their search findings, and more importantly will be confused about the boundaries of public and private, what is within their own Google files and what is elsewhere in the cloud. (Doubtless, just like universal login.) And, like so many bad things dished up by social networking sites, it’s opt-out.

Ultimately James says that it’s this implementation of using social data that he objects to, not the concept in general. And that’s basically what I’m thinking, too. Because in the ideal, keying search results to people’s own posts and friends could actually do a lot to serve up more relevant results, and help people understand the things they read online better. It could have prevented the hapless people I studied in my dissertation from exposing themselves to public ridicule and security problems.

The best example I have to demonstrate this is the number of people who commented on Jonathan Coulton’s blog when he wrote a post titled “Please Please Cancel My Account.” The post read, in full:

“Here’s a recording (if that link’s swamped, here’s a mirror) of a guy trying to cancel his AOL account. Now THAT is funny. Thanks Dr. Smith…”

A number of people arrived on the thread, apparently from search engine results, and asked to have various kinds of accounts cancelled. Hi5. Facebook. Playboy. AOL, of course.

How’d it happen? Coulton and his readers figured out that at the time the first comments appeared, Coulton’s post was the #1 Google hit for the search “cancel my account.” That was in 2007. By the time I began my analysis in 2008, it still had that ranking; at some point before I finished it was down to #3, and by now it’s somewhere on the second page of results. The obvious explanation for this is that Jonathan Coulton, popular with link-writing, Internet-savvy geeks everywhere, has an incredibly high PageRank which skews the page’s calculated relevance.

Consider what the average person, when speaking to someone else, would mean to imply if they spoke the phrase “please cancel my account.” They’d likely be asking for that action to be taken. They’d assume that they were talking to a person who could actually do this for them. They’d assume that person would know which account was meant by “my account.” If those assumptions were wrong, there would be an opportunity for the person they were speaking to to reply something like “which account?” or “I can’t do that for you, you need to ask someone else.” It is exceedingly unlikely that anyone saying “please cancel my account” in a human conversation would expect the reply “Here is a funny recording of a guy trying to cancel his account,” and it is likely they’d treat that as an error that needed to be fixed through further conversation.

Search engines have traditionally ignored words like “my,” not being able to do much with them. In general, understanding context the way humans do presents a thorny problem for computers (and I love Lucy Suchman’s analysis of how it presents a problem for “intelligent” photocopiers as well). This is why semantic search is a holy grail. If computers could interpret words which require an understanding of possession; perspective and the immediate environment (“here,” “over there”); human relationships (“my mom,” “his daughter”); and person (“you,” “me”), communicating with a search engine would be a lot more like asking a question of another person who’s in the room with you.

One interesting promise of the merging of social software and search is that the word “my” could easily be made useful in interpreting search strings and directing people to pages which are actually about their own accounts. It might have staved off one or two more opportunities for people to post their usernames, passwords, home addresses, and credit card numbers (yes, saw a few of those) on pages like Coulton’s and that of others with similarly-titled posts. Likewise (as Google has been pointing out as it describes its new function) it could help distinguish between your dog and the sweet dessert it’s named for, or identify other words in your search string that are about your friends or family.

This makes for a tremendous counterbalance to Google’s original PageRank algorithm, which instead of caring about what *you* care about tends to amount to a mass averaging of what a majority of people in the world care about. (Scratch that — I mean what a majority of the more influential writers and link-makers on the Internet care about. See for example what Google thinks “western art” means, as opposed to what a teacher might want her students to study.)

Of course, all of this is in the abstract. I ultimately don’t have faith that semantically-smarter results will be the main consequence of looping Google+ into Google’s search results. James’s points are all well-taken. This also feels sort of like too little, too late; Google’s changes to their ranking systems in the past few years (valuing newer pages more highly and paying attention to things like Twitter) and changes in the overall Internet ecosphere (the rise of content farms) have made Google’s results feel increasingly poor-quality, to me. And I’m trying to sort out in my head how advertising money might play into this.

But it’s undeniable that both Google and Facebook will be investing time and resources in developing the clevverness that social network data can bring to search engines. This early stage of the inclusion of Google+ in results may be crap, and we all wish they’d done a better job and not gone opt-out on it, but it will evolve. It’s not likely to go away.

By contrast, I’d guess many people were a bit reticent when it comes to learning to use the phone for work. Answering phones was one thing — there was usually a pattern to stick to — but I remember being mired in a mild dread when I first had to call people for interviews or information when I was interning at newspapers and magazines. The calls were likely to be open ended, and in the case of investigative journalism (which I tried doing at one point in my career) might end up in the phone being slammed down and not picked up again by the person I was trying to get information out of.

With the hype over other technologies and the things they have replaced — Blogs! Killing newspapers! iPad! Causing advertisers to flee television and viewers to flee theaters! Twitter! Toppling governments! — it can be easy to lose track of the fact that *phones are still here.* And also, that they’ve changed tremendously in the past fifteen years. Not just smartphones and mobiles, PHONES. The part you put to your ear and hear people through.

I told a psychologist the other day that at the last two jobs I’ve had, there wasn’t a phone at my desk. She looked struck. I’m trying to construct in my head the world in which that happens, she said, puzzled. I personally haven’t found it strange. At the first of these two jobs, everyone in the office was on IRC, chat, or in Second Life most of the time, and if you needed to find them they’d be there. There was a sense that having phone lines, and a directory someplace where users might find it, would only invite unwanted calls. Silicon Valley-style workplaces seem to have moved away from phone culture.

Sometime since I started grad school and stopped having to make phone calls for work, I have somehow lapsed back into the phone-call-induced anxiety and timidity I had managed to pretty well overcome while working as a journalist. I’m trying to figure out whether this is related to the lack of a phone at my desk in the jobs I held from 2007-2010. This past year, there was a phone in the room, but I couldn’t get it to reach an outside line, and nobody called in. It didn’t really matter. I had my cell phone with me pretty much at all times, as I did at the previous two jobs.

Which is, measurably, not the same thing.

* * *

Harold Garfinkel, a sociologist, used phones in one of the experiments he used to demonstrate to his students how social order was constructed. Go home, he said, and record a phone that is ringing just for you. The trick was that on the recording, there was no way to know who the phone was ringing for; the ring was detached from the specific context of where in the house it was ringing, what had recently happened (had someone just asked the caller to call back?) etc. Of course, when multiple people share a line on a phone with no caller ID, there’s other cues necessary to know who a phone is ringing for: the person on the other end of the line asking for them, for one.

And of course, this is all obviated by recent developments in phone devices: caller ID, caller-specific ringtones, and all of us having our own phone with us as we venture out into the world, pretty much all the time.

Except *my* phone. My Android smartphone does not behave as a permanent clear voice line to me, personally. It behaves as a gasping, fainting, some days mortally wounded, finicky underwater-tin-can-on-a-string voice connection to people who call in only to be dumped at the moment I try to swipe the touchscreen or press the apparently retarded “call” button to say hello to them. It acts as a constantly-on, poorly-placed art experiment in touchscreen interfaces, one which likes to flirt with how marvelously conductive the outer folds of my ears are, particularly when I’m sweaty, and which likes to treat the tiniest smudge on the screen as a reason to close windows or move icons around on its desktop. It is prone to fall into daylong reboot loops, out of which it will emerge when it “feels better,” whenever that is. This makes it far less reliable than the earliest computers I ever worked with. Some days it serves only as a paperweight.

As a result, when it is functional I use it mostly for what it is: a very tiny computer. In any given situation, no matter how sensitive, I would rather text, send email, tweet, chat, post to Facebook — it occurred to me today that I’d even like an IRC client on it — than use the damned thing as a phone. Its ability to transmit voice is more reliable when I use it as a modem, tether it to my computer, and use Skype.

(Simply admitting all of this has been cathartic. I recently ran across a scene in Carla Speed McNeil’s excellent Finder series in which the hero exorcises a poorly-behaved AI-enhanced student study aid — by encouraging the owner to smash it to pieces and get a new one. Apparently this is based on McNeil’s own experience with a VCR; someone gave her a new one and a sledgehammer one birthday, and she realized that she didn’t really need to stick with the old one given the problems it was having. In my family, where cars came back from the dead, where the motto was always “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” admitting defeat in the face of bad design or planned obsolescence is very, very hard. Thanks, Carla Speed McNeil.)

The effect of trying to speak over a device that crashes, cuts out, garbles sound, and uses my ear as an excuse to dial new numbers and rearrange my apps in the middle of a call has exacerbated any anxiety I have about calling people a thousandfold.

Send text messages, I tell people I’m trying to coordinate with. Don’t call me.

But it’ll be easier if we call, they say.

And they’re right. People are used to having face to face conversations where we can interrupt others before they finish a sentence, to ask for clarification, correct misunderstandings, stop someone from saying something we already know. In most cases, voice conversation is far superior.

Voice conversation face to face has always been superior to over the phone: even older phones cut out part of the upper register of human speech, dampening certain emotional overtones which add nuance to what we say. (I told this to the psychologist, and she was surprised; she’d never heard this.)

But given the state of things with our phones — not just mine — text messages suffer far less from data loss than speaking on a phone. I will get your full sentence, without any dropped packets or sunspots that make you sound like an alien bleating around a torturer’s mouthful of ant-addled honey.

And the DELAY. Don’t even get me started on the delay. Even if the rest of the connection was fine, the amount of delay on a cell phone is enough to insert unwanted pregnant pauses. And the inconsistent duplexing — both parties being able to hear each other at the same time — also makes it hard to interrupt the other person, or know when they’re interrupting you.

I *dream* of copper wires, miles of them, gleaming as they flow lissomely into my apartment and my handset. Of the bright tips of fiberoptic cable, reliably delivering messages like cheerful, precocious Girl Scouts. Anything but the inconstant air. When I have the money, I’ll spring for a land line. Maybe an old Ma Bell handset with a rotary dial.

* * *

I started writing this months ago, but phones keep coming up, and there is more to say. I finally gave up the rotten Samsung and picked up an HTC phone instead. The phone’s interface was a constant source of pleasant surprises; I often discovered it did things exactly as I’d secretly hoped the Samsung would, in far more intuitive ways. Small-computer satisfactions aside, it actually works quite well as a phone, too. I still use it for calls infrequently enough, though, that I don’t really notice how steadfastly it connects me to others, or how nonreactive it is to the pinna of my ear.

But I am also wrestling with my current use of various technologies for keeping in touch with people, and thinking I should spend more time on the phone, less idly “liking” Facebook posts. Particularly as I seem to be moving towards even more isolated work that makes face to face conversation even less likely on a daily basis.

An old friend of mine who has always seemed to maintain a high quality-of-social-life spends almost no time on social technologies. I think perhaps I should follow suit, and try for more phone conversations.

At the same time, I have been trying to refine some ideas with Jessamyn’s help. I was bemused when I asked to chat on the phone and she rebuffed me, saying the phone was like a disease she was trying to avoid catching. And I am not always as responsive to the one person who calls me most, a former student who has become a close friend over time; when she calls to talk, I feel like she’s intruding on my schedule, and am left to wonder whether I’m just generally getting old and inflexible, or whether that’s just how phones make me feel (and, by extension, if I might be making others feel the same way when I call).

How long will it take before our technology use settles in, and ways of using the phone become consistent across a large swath of people again? Will that ever happen?

But it wasn’t until I got into flow-state with the game that it really started to feel uncannily familiar. I’ve had to do this in a game before, I thought, pulling a triangular canary back in the slingshot and mulling the best place to change its killer arc. But where…

Super Artillery.


I used to play Super Artillery on the Apple IIs in the computer lab at my elementary school, in the off hours when I was waiting for mom to be done with her job as a school administrator. Sometimes the game would be called Duper Artillery, as the game was written into the computer by other, older students who were inclined to customize the code and leave their own mark on it.(2) My assumption is that they got the code out of computer magazines, as many kids did at the time.

The game was simple: two bases, small lumps of pixels, at the bottom of the screen, each with a “cannon” a few pixels wide sticking out of it. I think some versions of the game placed the lumps on hills of different heights. There was an indicator onscreen to tell you how fast the wind was blowing, in which direction.

And that was it. No background graphics; I think there was a text readout of instructions. I’m not even sure there was color. I think there was an option to play against the computer or a friend.

You were one of the bases, and your goal was to calculate the trajectory of your ammo in order to hit the other base. To do so, you entered two parameters at the command line (there was no mouse or graphic interface at the time): angle, and velocity. When you’d entered those, the computer would trace a parabola from your base based on your parameters. It would end satisfyingly in a pixel-crater in the hill or, if you had calculated right, in the opponent’s base. We all did the usual experimental learning of blowing your own base up by shooting straight up into the air, or shooting behind you. The coders, meanwhile, entered mildly insulting lines to be issued by the code when you succeeded or failed.

This was not considered an educational game; we were not allowed to play it during class hours. And yet I’d say it ranked up there with Carmen Sandiego and probably beat out some of the stuff Scholastic had on offer. Even if the physics were simple, the parameters mystifying and not necessarily realistic, we did learn basic physical principles about velocity and trajectory; we learned that many factors — height, wind, speed, angle — could influence what seemed like a simple point-a-to-point-b proposition. Knowledge that I take so much for granted that I was mystified, when I first learned that some people shoot guns into the air to celebrate New Year’s, to think that anyone wouldn’t viscerally know that a bullet shot straight up comes straight back down and craters your base.

So Angry Birds shares a basic mechanic of Super Artillery, a mechanic that’s about as old as computers, given computers’ early job in warfare: calculate a trajectory. But what you have to do to accomplish that in each game is very different. In Angry Birds, all you need is an instinctive feel for how a trajectory will play out.(3) In Super Artillery, you are aware that someone, somewhere, needs to do calculations to achieve that trajectory, and with the help of the computer, it will be you doing it.

This is the clearest example I’ve found of how different the experience of youth growing up with technology today is from that of my generation.

(My generation(4), and the one just older than me: the young adults who constitute the majority of workers in technology now, and who are responsible for many of the major technological developments of the past fifteen years. “Digital natives,” who are supposedly naturally better at computers simply because we are young and fearless and have always been immersed in technology. The engines of what economy we have left. The dazzling learners and creators who have convinced policymakers that, if we are all to be saved from economic perdition, we must raise more of them.)

I’m going to lay out an argument that’s been tickling around my research on educational tech for years, as well as around the edges of conversations with my cohort of siblings, classmates, and Silicon Valley colleagues. That argument is:

The assumption that kids naturally learn technology just by being left alone with it is fundamentally flawed. It is flawed for one major historical reason: it is based on observations about my generation. And since we’ve grown up, technology has evolved to the point where kids no longer need to learn the inner workings of a computer just to make it run. As a result, their time with technology involves far less of the industry-grade STEM learning and practical work (disguised as play!) which enabled people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates to race to the forefront of industry and make tremendous amounts of money.

We will not see a Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates(5) coming out of this generation of kids. They will not have the knowledge. If anything we’re keeping them from developing it by locking down their access to computers and the Internet at school.

The graphic user interface is the major culprit here. When we had to know a little code to make a computer start, find a file, and load our favorite game from the command line, we learned a few things about how a computer works. By the age of seven I knew what the phrase “syntax error” meant from trying and failing to make things run: basically, computers speak a special language about which they are very particular; if you speak it wrong, they can’t understand you. They’re not like people, who are good at interpreting around mistakes and filling in gaps. I learned that errors meant I had to try putting something a different way.

Contrast this with what a kid learns about language and computing today. Word and your iPhone auto-correct your spelling for you. Internet Explorer finishes typing your internet address. Google automatically finds what you thought you were looking for. The basic lesson there is that computers are like magical people who answer questions for you, and you don’t need to worry about spelling or syntax when you use them.(6) Take that lesson with you into a Programming 101 class, and the computer will quickly and mercilessly confront you with your failings.

Similar reports of gaps in young people’s knowledge are now coming from librarians and university professors who find that students’ search skills are lacking — even though incoming freshmen may now have had access to Google since they were about five years old. They tend to pick the first result the engine gives them, and they do not develop search terms with modifiers to weed out the bad or select for the best results. It is not the experience with the technology which builds useful skills; it is the nature of that experience.

My sister, a technology coordinator and skills teacher at a college preparatory school, has taken to asking her students to diagram how their computer accesses the Internet on her first day of class. Few of them draw a connection to the wall, much less anything outside of their homes; she says they seem to have no concept that the Internet exists outside of their machines. This is what my sister has to teach around — my sister, who along with me had to engineer getting a string of free AOL accounts piped in to and set up on our family’s computer in a room remote from a phone jack, without running over others’ calls with an unearthly modem screech. If we wanted the technology, it was up to us to set it up, because our parents didn’t know much more about it than we did.

I’m getting close to shaking my fist and yelling “you damn kids, get off my lawn,” here, so I should say out of respect to younger folks that this cannot be a description of all kids, because there is no description that covers all kids.(7) The real question is, Which kids are still getting good informal learning just from playing with technology? And what was the context that got them there?

Nicholas Negroponte, Marc Prensky, “trend” journalists, and others who are convinced that young “digital natives” will naturally coax the mysteries out of any computer are wrong, dangerously so, in leading public opinion towards a faith in kids’ “natural” skills with technology. Yes, kids are curious and they learn quickly. But the context in which they learn about technology is vital to what they learn. Kids whose parents understand computers (or at minimum understand what is valuable about computers) have a jump on kids whose parents’ don’t — they always have. And if those kids are also in a context where they must make use of code and the command line, I am guessing that they will have an even greater advantage.(8)

We should continue to press Negroponte on his insistence that it’s useful to give kids computers without context — like the plan for his latest stupid stunt, airlifting laptops into remote parts of developing countries.(9) Yes, the OLPC makes it comparatively easy to get around the graphic interface and to the code. But if we drop laptops into their countries without so much as a “hey, this isn’t just a doorstop!”, what is the scenario in Negroponte’s plan in which kids will get to the command line? Where is the copy of the super-simple Super Artillery that the local high school kid coded his name into, so that the kids will realize another person made this, and they could too? Where is the computer magazine that gave that high schooler the code that he modified?(10) Where are the people who will convince these kids’ parents that the thing that looks like a toy and is full of fun games and music tools might be more worth their time than toiling in the field?(11)

Negroponte likes to point to the Hole In The Wall project in India as proof that this will work. But in the Hole In The Wall scenario there was at least a person behind the scenes to ensure that that computer turned on and kept running without breaking. In Peru, Negroponte likes to say that kids have taught parents how to read using their computers. Most of what Negroponte uses to argue for the OLPC project’s worth seems to be anecdotal (while other interested OLPC parties engage in more complex discussion). I’ll fight my anecdotes against his anyday; neither mine nor his amount to a large-scale, longitudinal studies of how people become expert computer users.

OK, I digress. Negroponte and Prensky aren’t the only game in town. There are plenty of other educators out there who want to understand technology and learning better. The ones I know best are the New Literacies researchers, who have the great strength of seeing the social meaning in all kinds of things kids do, from blogging to gaming to bathroom graffiti. Despite their good intentions, I worry this group has tried to claim too much ground in technology education while focusing mainly on end-user technologies — stuff where kids are working with graphic interfaces, and rarely touching any workings of the machine. I worry that trying to argue their findings about software(/app?) learning into curriculum standards, or into teachers’ consciousness and use of technology in school, might end up taking up time that could be spent on explaining parts of technology which have been around and will be around far longer than the latest gadget or online publishing platform — things like search engines, databases, addressing and networking, and, yes, code. These may seem like they’re a subject for math, science, or computing classes, but they’re also parts of basic literacy online. A knowledge of addressing and search engines greatly enriches users’ ability to identify the author of an article online, for example. Identifying authorship is a literacy skill.

I don’t know what the answer is, obviously. Insisting that kids start from the command line, play Super Artillery, and forgo Angry Birds would be a strange kind of Luddism, probably not productive.

It’s the usual academic’s song, I guess: more research into the usefulness of understanding how computers work is needed, as is more research into the life trajectories(12) of expert computer users. In my dissertation I found myself comparing expert and inexpert Internet users in real-life situations where the inexpert had stumbled onto pages by accident; by doing so, I was able to identify the skills expert users were drawing on to find their way around the Web. (It usually involved a knowledge of Internet addresses, the differences between kinds of software and their public/private exposure, and an understanding of search engines.) That’s one way to determine what needs to be learned. Another might be to find the other end of the spectrum: identify common knowledge gaps among the inexpert population, particularly the ones which keep them from living productive lives or being empowered to solve their own problems online.

I am actually particularly interested in researching the latter when it comes to adult technology learners, who are frequently in the same boat as student learners; most of them only learned to use computers in the last ten years. This makes for a blind-leading-the-blind situation in schools (which has long been the source of frustration driving people like me and, yes, Negroponte, to try to reach kids outside of school settings). My goal at the moment is to develop a digital literacy show for adults, and try to deploy it with the same kind of well-planned-out audience reach as Sesame Street had with kids. So, yeah… if these questions interest you too, I know a researcher who’s willing to cover ‘em… :)

(1) Yes, I know. Late to the game. Terrible thing to be, as an educational researcher these days, when one is expected to be on top of very important technology skills like blogging, MMORPGs, Second Life, tweeting about whether or not one is bringing one’s iPad to the conference, and suchlike.

(2) And one change they’d make would be adding in their names, someplace, and I read those names so often I still remember them. Jim Ho. David Filippi. They were pimply and in high school, and they were like gods to us, gods who made the computers speak and dance and sometimes killed them.

(3) Obviously, trajectory is not Angry Birds’ only mechanic: it also involves a lot of other falling-object physics, which a player also must have an instinctive feel for. It makes it a much more complicated game, and certainly a very rewarding and compelling one. (I’ve been hard-pressed to tear myself away to write this.) But my point remains: Angry Birds players do not need any awareness that someone, somewhere, or the proxy of the code they wrote, needs to calculate that trajectory in order to play the game.

(4) Which is a really dicey thing to say, “my generation.” Beyond larger methodological questions of whether generational divides really influence experience, or which ones matter, many calculations leave people of my particular birth year right on the cusp of Generations X and Y. We started college in the first year graphical Internet browsers were widely available — a pretty good dividing line, when it comes down to it, and we were right smack on that line. Some of of my classmates are now CTOs; others can’t Google their way out of a paper bag.

(5) Or Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds, or whatever flavor of brilliant creator suits your fancy. (Cmon. I had to smack the capitalists in the face with those two to make my point.)

(6) I shouldn’t overgeneralize here. One of the findings from focus groups my research team ran with Harlem teens last year was that they do, in fact, have some awareness that spelling is important online, though they weren’t so specific as to relate it to the nature of computers. “Spelling is important on Twitter,” they volunteered and agreed with each other: basically, if you spell someone’s @name wrong, your message won’t go to them. Between this, my dissertation, and an inbox at which I receive email for all kinds of people whose last name is Andrews and first initial is G (from friends who typo their address or even from themselves), I have become convinced that it’s very important to talk about spelling online as it relates to computing. We’ve recently shot an episode of The Media Show about it, though it’s not yet finished; I hope it will be helpful.

(7) There are kids out there who probably know as much as or more than I do about technology. And I’m pretty sure they hang out on 4Chan. I’m not looking for any drama, here…
Again we come to the problem of what “generation” means: clearly, some kids still get exposure to deeper aspects of computers, while most work at the level of the graphic interface. The experience of my friends who are a scant half-dozen years younger than me is usually different from my own: the programmers among them are every bit as tech-savvy as my age cohort, but they did not spend as much if any time working from the command line in elementary school. They did not go through high school without email, for that matter. The nuances here deserve far more attention than the big loud overarching case I am making here. For the moment, I’m ignoring the nuance to make the case, but I’d like to see more research on the technology histories of young programmers.

(8) I, like Bill Gates, was lucky when it came to computing context. His mom knew the future CEO of IBM; I had a grandfather who had worked at IBM, a whole family that worked at Caltech, and I went to the primary school which used to be part of Caltech. (John Battelle was another graduate of my school.)
I was a particularly lucky girl to be from a family which encouraged engineering skills and breaking out of gender norms. I notice that many of the girls from my elementary school who went into technology often came from families of scientists and engineers. Most of them also have no brothers, a trend which, from a casual survey of a roomful of women at a Game Developers Conference working group meeting, could be indicative of a broader pattern; in that room, about 2/3 of the female developers present raised their hands when asked if they did not have brothers. More research needed, etc.

(9) Just as Ivan Krstic, the former security head of the OLPC project, has pressed Negroponte. His review of the project gives great insight into where it is coming from and what’s likely to come of it.

(10) Yes, I *know* the answer is “on the Scratch website.” But Negroponte’s plan is not to load the Scratch website on starting the OLPC. And even then, I don’t think simply giving kids games, even those made by other kids, will force them think about how the games are made. I played those Apple II games and never had the impulse to code one; I didn’t take a grown-up programming class until I started grad school.

(11) And where is Lyle Hatridge, the 7th grade computer teacher who taught a class on the relatively un-fun topic of databases, accidentally inflaming my passion for making databases about my model horses, a skill on which my dissertation and career as a technologist are built? No, seriously, has anyone seen him lately? I miss him. Great guy. Totally worked as a circus clown before he was our teacher, is was a real leaves-as-toilet-paper kind of outdoorsman, advocate for bicyclists. Oh wait — he’s still at Poly! Yay! Big ups to Hatridge.

(12) u see wut i did thurr? heh heh heh

I think I’ve got the solution, though.
Ready? Sing along!

Z IS FOR ZIZEK, THAT GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME
Z IS FOR ZIZEK, THAT GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME
Z IS FOR ZIZEK, THAT GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME! OH!
SLAVOJ FUCKING ZIZEK STARTS WITH Z!

The liner notes added to my feeling of its magical importance. There’s one panel that reads:

Mai lajf is bjutifull
Mai Bet soft end Worm
Wejk ap mai lidl lembs
Sun yt uyl bi daun.
–
Oll sings,ar wondefull
Houm is neva far
Your Poppa hyrs ju nau.
Aj hijr hym krain.
Uan end Tu end Sfri end vor
Hoold on Tajt end dount let gou.
Stiks end stouns uil brejk jour bouns.
God hes left as on aur oun.
_____
Uan end Tu end Sfri end vor
Aj don’t keer end dont nou.
Hold on tajt end dount let gou.
God,hes left as on aur oun.

There is little explanation for this. It’s not lyrics, though I often wanted it to be, and there’s a song that almost uses the same language. Byrne’s explanation of the album elsewhere in the liner is that it’s a search for the myths we tell ourselves about where we come from, which sheds a little light. The Forest was originally a staged production. I don’t have a sense if the verse had a bearing on its action somehow.

To me the text echoes another text which is a touchstone to my family: Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, a post-apocalyptic travelogue about the descendents of nuclear holocaust survivors trying to piece together knowledge and religion in the ruins. The book is written in difficult but enthralling English dialect which depends to some extent on British rhyming slang. The language of these people has clearly been through as much abuse, then drift, as their ways of knowing.

I’ve always loved the puzzle of reading transliterations of broken English, loved sounding it out in my head and rolling it around on my tongue. Umberto Eco’s first chapter of Baudolino similarly enchanted me, and then, so do handmade signs in New York City. We Have Bed Bugs Spray, says the pharmacy downstairs. The things written on piragua carts and chicharron trucks make me giggle. I had that whole series on my blog about reports of food served by bilingual childcare providers in the Bronx, because they were so entertaining.

Sometimes I feel bad, like the Good White Liberal I am. Am I laughing at these people and the way they speak the language of coin I was so fortunate to be raised into? Can’t rule it out, I guess.

Back in the context of David Byrne seeking primal myths, I think I see it. The words are barely familiar, but still understandable.

In its primal state, language is flexible. It morphs and drifts. The society we live in now is highly concerned with ensuring it not change. Not just concerned with shibboleths – the ways of using language that separate high status people from low. To send language all over the globe and have it understood for commerce – to have it understood by the strict, obsessive, unforgiving brains of computers – it needs to be as uniform as possible.

Broken English, nonstandard English, forms of patois are all reminders of our power to escape from these bonds. They are manifestations of the raw power of the language centers of our brains. Testaments to our ability to transform, adapt; to grow.

(Now, that said, when it comes to music I could really do without the Mister Softee truck wreaking its own changes on the chords of The Forest…)

JUST ONE MORE REMINDER THERE’S JUST OVER 48 HOURS LEFT TO PLEDGE AND SUPPORT THE MEDIA SHOW I hate that I’m still hollering about this; I hate raising funds, but puppet needs a new pair of shoes. You know how it is.

I identify mostly as an accidental feminist. I most definitely believe in the radical notion that men and women are equal, and tend to dress, cut my hair, name myself, and live out my career goals as butch as I please, but if anything, I identify more with queer theory movements than with second-wave feminism. Though I am sometimes mistaken for one, I am not a feminist scholar. (I don’t have a “feminism” category for posts on my blog, I just realized, and I’m ok with that.) At least, I don’t seek to focus on women’s issues intentionally. My master’s thesis set out to cover race and social class differences in gaming, as less had been done on those topics than on gender. My dissertation similarly aimed to understand differences in education about the Internet. And yet in both, gender came out and smacked me in the face. Girls did everything they could to convince me they were not “gamers.” More women appeared to be struggling and failing to make sense of the Internet in my dissertation research than men.

So it sort of baffles me that I’ve worked my way onto a UN-conference-affiliated sort of panel about women in technology this Thursday, at the last minute, in some rarified company — Stephanie Alarcon from Prometheus Radio and the Hive76 hackerspace in Philly, staff from Hitachi and Comcast, and a professor from Temple who made a documentary on female programmers in World War II. And it’s not just my research they want me to talk about — I’ve been asked to air an episode of The Media Show. Chuffed.

Ended the day down at my beloved community African dance class. On Saturday, I’ll be teaching a workshop titled “Internet Self-Defense” at the annual Cultural Arts Expo. To prepare, I handed out a survey in class asking everyone there — mostly middle-aged women, a population more likely to have learned computers on the job and through casual channels than at school — to list what they’re most frustrated with, most worried about, and would most like to learn about computers and the Internet. Everyone was very helpful with the survey! I got twenty responses, more than I expected, and a very good sample of the class. The biggest concerns for the group, as they reported in open-ended written responses, were computers running slow, viruses/malware/malicious sites/popups/spam, and hacking/identity theft/financial transaction security. I’m pleased, because I actually think I have some useful information for them (as opposed to if they’d said “I need to learn AutoCAD by next week” or “Wikileaks isn’t secure enough for me, can you discuss the alternatives to Tor?” or something). Suggestions for useful resources on these topics would be appreciated.

And last but not least, I finally got my HTML-scraping code in Python to work. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever put together working code for a project which I’d actually use outside of a class, or, um, Second Life. Again, chuffed. I can’t take too much credit; Leonard, Glyph, Dave (dammit, lost track of his blog), and the ex were all tremendously helpful. Behind every successful female coder… oh, let’s not open that can of worms, shall we.

It’s easy to develop parallels to the original white privilege piece; a group at Earlham has already done it with straight privilege. The following list of linguistic privilege is a start, not complete yet. It comes from my own experiences of linguistic difference, observations in Quebec and the Bronx, my linguistics coursework, and, of course, Martin Espada, who taught me a great deal.

On a daily basis, as a person in the linguistic majority,

1. I am not asked to repeat myself; the person listening assumes they know how to parse my speech, rather than assuming I am unintelligible.
2. I have not been told I am stupid, a bad student, or otherwise flawed because of the way I speak.
3. I do not have to wait to open my mouth until I know that people around me speak the way I do.
4. I do not have to change my intonation, use of vowels, or enunciation when talking to “the people in charge.”
5. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my way of speaking and writing not to work against the appearance of my financial reliability.
6. I can speak in public without putting my intelligence or work ethic on trial.
7. I do not have to fear being turned away from jobs or social situations because of the way I speak and write.
8. Outside of school and other instructional situations, people do not feel free or obligated to correct my writing or the way I speak.
9. I am guaranteed to find teachers and professors who speak like me.
10. I can be pretty sure that people on television, in movies, or on the radio will sound like me, and that newspapers and magazines will write in a way which is familiar.
11. I can find reading material in my school which are like the books and magazines I read for fun, or like the books and periodicals my parents have at home.
12. I can fill out legal, medical, and other forms without thinking about whether my writing will work against me.

What I mean actually comes out of my exposure to a range of other traditions: scientific research, arguments against quantitative research in human behavior; history, journalism, anthropology, and linguistics; the founding documents of my undergraduate college, which presented me with a living, breathing education in the organization of academic disciplines; and ideas about education from Dewey to the “unschooling” movement.

To make this history clear for myself and others, as well as to clarify a few other things (for example, why it makes sense to me that the American Anthropology Association recently took the word “science” out of their mission statement), I’ve written up a sort of personal intellectual history over at Studyplace. It’s kind of disorganized at the moment, and doesn’t feel quite finished (jeebus, I introduced Bruno Latour towards the end and totally didn’t say what I wanted to about him), but I wanted to get it out and up there so that I can go back to thinking about other things.

Let me know what you think.