When Old Technologies Were New

When Old Technologies Were New Carolyn Marvin
Ch 2: community and class order p62 two narratives: electric promise vs electric threat 'electrician's: the IT professionals of the 90s hype: Telephones make life easier and better. electricity as transformative agent of social possibility electricity: a natural force under control p64 electrical communication makes interaction ‘strange’ p68 protected areas of family life...secrets laid open... listening in on secrets (via switchboard..) boundaries of public and private in flux telephone conversation as evidence in court

p70 new opportunities for infidelity, illicit behaviour.. new ways to fail (poor eloquence over the phone..) new ways to breach boundaries to courtship outside social barriers.. (cross class romance) start of the class of paparazzi p72 new ways to flout conventions (telephone girls) p74 escape from parental supervision.. p76 electric light praised for middle-class virtues of beauty, purity, safety electricity as replacement for servants.. Servants have more work (filter calls) because of the telephone chief goal: improve efficiency of ordering and commanding...

p77 ignorance (of people in things electric) makes people easier to control.. desire for simple and reliable devices...so they can be used by laymen electrified domestic life should not change (who is in charge..) burglar alarms appealing ... if they are simple. p78/79 electrically fortified castles (telephones for internal use only) communicating securely (via push buttons) with the world.. tangible imprint of domesticity on technical devices.. phonographs store house calls -> decorum of domestic sovereignty preserved >media to adorn, not change domestic life.. p81/82 fear of contracting contagious diseases via the telephone.. outside of home: telephone mostly for men p83 telephone operators: the hello girls, give wake-up calls, personal service providers..

p86 asymmetries of class status (dress) rendered useless by the telephone.. new movement between classes possible via electricity p87/88/89 issue of interpreting presence and lack of it.. (new: skype meetings) recognizing a liar by his face/body language.. wrong people could be too familiar.. social distance and telephonic anonymity telephone and good manners: profanity.. p92 crimes of confidence.. telephone crime story –> con-men on line.. (new: credit card fraud) women considered susceptible to male electric manipulation.. often successful if the perpetrator feigns membership in higher social class p97 belief that new technologies could help fight crime.. assist in police intelligence/surveillance fire alarm and police telegraph.. p100 death by electricity – connect to superstition to inflict horror..

1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in Boston .....well.... (see below).... 1729 1800 1820 1821 1830 English chemist Stephen Gray transmitted electricity over a wire. Alessandro Volta produced the first battery. Danish physicist Christian Oersted discovered electromagnetism Michael Faraday reversed Oersted's experiment and discovered induction Joseph Henry transmitted the first practical electrical signal. Samuel Morse invented the first workable telegraph Johann Phillip Reis completed the first non-working telephone World's first telephone directory, a single paper of only fifty names Butterstamp telephone (receiver and transmitter in one handhold unit ) Charles Bourseul, a French telegraphist, had conceived a plan for conveying sounds and even speech by electricity Metallic circuit( two wires connecting each telephone instead of one) AT&T First public coin telephone in Hartford, Connecticut Lee De Forest invents the three element electron tube First transcontinental telephone line between New York City and San Francisco Alec Reeves of Britain invents Pulse Code Modulation Transistor, joint invention of Bell Labs scientists William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain

1854 1881 1885 1889 1906 1915 1937 1948

http://science.discovery.com/videos/deconstructed-how-dotelephones-work.html

Philipp Reis Frustrations
Philipp Reis imagined that electricity could be propagated through space, as light can, without the aid of a material conductor, and he performed some experiments on the subject. The results were described in a paper, "On the Radiation of Electricity," which, in 1859, he posted to Professor Poggendorff; for insertion in the then well-known periodical, Annalen der Physik. The manuscript was declined. Reis had difficulty in interesting people in Germany in his invention despite demonstrating it to (among others) Wilhelm von Legat, Inspector of the Royal Prussian Telegraph Corps in 1862 (Legat, 1862). It aroused more interest in the United States In 1872, Prof Vanderwyde demonstrated Reis's device in New York where it was seen by Thomas Edison, and possibly officials of Western Union and Alexander Graham Bell. Bell, Edison and Berliner drew on Reis's device as a starting point in their subsequent development of components of the telephone.. The transmitter of Philipp Reis was based on the plan of interrupting the current, and the spring was intended to close the contact after it had been opened by the shock of a vibration. So long as the sound was a musical tone it proved efficient, for a musical tone is a regular succession of vibrations. But the vibrations of speech are irregular and complicated, and in order to transmit them the current has to be varied in strength without being altogether broken. The waves excited in the air by the voice should merely produce corresponding waves in the current. In short, the current ought to undulate in sympathy with the oscillations of the air. The Reis phone was poor at transmitting articulated speech, but conveyed the pitch of the sound well. (Wikipedia and http://www.esanet.it/chez_basilio/reis.htm

An early video phone (1950s)

Fighting crime with new communication technology

Mobile Phone Technology
Mobile phone are low-power transmitters that send and receive voice and data to/from the nearest cell sites (usually not more than 5 to 8 miles away). When the mobile phone is turned on, it registers with the mobile telephone exchange, or switch, with its unique identifier, and will then be alerted by the mobile switch when there is an incoming telephone call. The phone constantly listens for the strongest signal being received from the surrounding base stations. As the user moves around the network, the mobile device will "handoff" to various cell sites (base stations) during calls, or while waiting (idle) between calls it will reselect cell sites.
Cell sites have relatively low-power (often only one or two watts) radio transmitters which broadcast their presence and relay communications between the mobile handsets and the switch. The switch in turn connects the call to another subscriber of the same wireless service provider or to the public telephone network, which includes the networks of other wireless carriers. Many of these sites are camouflaged to blend with existing environments, particularly in scenic areas.

Digital mobile phones convert voice signals to binary information through analog to digital conversion and compress the digital stream.
The dialogue between the handset and the cell site is a stream of digital data that includes digitized audio. The technology that achieves this depends on the system which the mobile phone operator has adopted, such as GSM, CDMA and TDMA.

GSM: Groupe Spécial Mobile •Good subjective speech quality •Most popular mobile phone standard •Low terminal and service cost •Support for international roaming •Ability to support hand-held terminals •ISDN compatibility •Short Message Service (SMS) •890-915 MHz for the uplink and 935-960 MHz for the downlink •combination of Time- and Frequency-Division Multiple Access (TDMA/FDMA) Used by 2 billion people in more than 212 countries

BTS: BSS: MSC: HLR: AUC: GGSN: GPRS: PSTN: NSS: SGSN:

base station receiver base station subsystem mobile switching center Glossary: home location register http://www.gsmworld.com/technology/glossary.shtml authentication center Image source: wikipedia gateway support node general packet radio service public switched telephone network network subsystem BSC: base station controller service GPRS support node PCU: packet control unit

In a cellular system, as the distributed mobile transceivers move from cell to cell during an ongoing continuous communication, switching from one cell frequency to a different cell frequency is done electronically without interruption and without a base station operator or manual switching. This is called the handoff.
Typically, a new channel is reserved for the mobile unit on the new base station which will serve it. The mobile unit then automatically switches from the current channel to the new channel and communication continues.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_network

Traffic Channel (TCH): 26 TDMA frames @120ms each
Frames 0-11: Traffic CH frames 12: Control CH frames 13-24: Traffic CH frame 25:unused

26 frames: 120ms
TDMA frame (8 bursts): 60/13ms

burst:
15/26ms
3 tail bits 57 data bits 26 training bits 57 data bits 3 tail bits guard bits

Overview of the Global System for Mobile Communications, John Scourias, [e-mail]

SIM Cards
One of the key features of GSM is the Subscriber Identity Module, commonly known as a SIM card. The SIM is a detachable smart card containing the user's subscription information and phone book. This allows the user to retain his or her information after switching handsets. Alternatively, the user can also change operators while retaining the handset simply by changing the SIM. Some operators will block this by allowing the phone to use only a single SIM, or only a SIM issued by them; this practice is known as SIM locking.

GSM security
Communications between the subscriber and the base station can be encrypted. GSM only authenticates the user to the network (and not vice versa). The security model therefore offers confidentiality and authentication, but limited authorization capabilities. GSM uses several cryptographic algorithms for security. The A5/1 and A5/2 stream ciphers are used for ensuring over-the-air voice privacy. Serious weaknesses have been found in both algorithms.

Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA)
TDMA allows several users to share the same frequency channel by dividing the signal into different time slots. The users transmit in rapid succession, one after the other, each using his own time slot. This allows multiple stations to share the same transmission medium (e.g. radio frequency channel) while using only a part of its channel capacity

Speech coding: Pulse Coded Modulation (PCM) with linear prediction
Information from previous samples, which does not change very quickly, is used to predict the current sample. The coefficients of the linear combination of the previous samples, plus an encoded form of the residual, the difference between the predicted and actual sample, represent the signal.

Multi path equalization
At the 900 MHz range, radio waves bounce off everything - buildings, hills, cars, airplanes, etc. Thus many reflected signals, each with a different phase, can reach an antenna. Equalization is used to extract the desired signal from the unwanted reflections

Overview of the Global System for Mobile Communications, John Scourias, [e-mail]

Frequency hopping
Moving between a transmit, receive, and monitor time slot within one TDMA frame; normally on different frequencies. GSM makes use of this inherent frequency agility to implement slow frequency hopping, where the mobile and BTS transmit each TDMA frame on a different carrier frequency .

Discontinuous transmission
DTX takes advantage of the fact that a person speaks less that 40 percent of the time in normal conversation, by turning the transmitter off during silence periods.

Comfort noise
When the transmitter is turned off, there is total silence heard at the receiving end, due to the digital nature of GSM. To assure the receiver that the connection is not dead, comfort noise is created at the receiving end by trying to match the characteristics of the transmitting end's background noise.

Overview of the Global System for Mobile Communications, John Scourias, [e-mail]

Dunne /Raby Design Noir, 2001

Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are textbased posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications.

Newsweek, Sept 2003

Pedro Sepulveda- Sandoval, digital shelter