1. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 1IS146 – SPRING 2005 How a Telephone and Telephone Network Work 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/ IS146: Foundations of New Media

2. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 2IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 3IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 4IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 5IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 6IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 7IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 8IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 9IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 10IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 11IS146 – SPRING 2005 Infrmatn Spred “Only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd” –Equivalent to SMS Speak Adding noise for play: AzN pRiDe –RuLz 4 SpEaKiNg –Aesthetics? Ownership? Questioning redundancy

12. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 12IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 13IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 14IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 15IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 16IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 17IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 18IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 19IS146 – SPRING 2005 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. 2005.03.01 SLIDE 20IS146 – SPRING 2005 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