The Dead Media Notebook (60 page)

From Trevor Blake

CAPE TOWN (Reuters), South Africa has decided to shoot all pigeons in its North-West diamond producing area, because the birds are being used to smuggle gems out of the country.

“’Diamonds are leaving the country in a manner which is extremely worrying,’ Manda Msomi, chairman of parliament’s public enterprises committee, said Tuesday, reporting after a visit to state diamond mining company Alexkor.

“’Diamonds are being strapped onto the body of pigeons and flown out of the country. The law now is to shoot all pigeons on sight,’ Msomi said.

“Msomi said his task team would recommend that Alexkor should not be privatized in the near term because the company’s assets had been so run down by diamond theft.

“’There is no way we can allow the sale of Alexkor to be approved without a true valuation,’ he said. ‘The security of the product is paramount.’ “Msomi said it was possible that employees and the local community were implicated in the widespread theft and said Alexkor needed to spend about $8 million to improve security.”

[Trevor Blake remarks: I don’t think pigeon post is “media.” Pigeons are not a “medium,” they’re just doing what comes naturally, whether it’s letters or diamonds tied to their feet. Media requires intent, and pigeons lack intent to convey information. The intent of those doing the tying is the same as with non-pigeoned mail. When the intent to communicate creates a new artifact, an artifact that can be superceded, then I’d call it “media.” Humans didn’t create pigeons.]

[Bruce Sterling remarks: I couldn’t disagree more strongly. During the Franco-Prussian War, practically the entire information traffic of Paris, the besieged capital of a major industrial power, was carried on the wings of pigeons. This included news, government documents, war orders, personal mail and large sums of money (in the form of microfilmed postal orders). If this isn’t “media,” then what is?

Pigeons may be a product of nature, but homing pigeons are domesticated animals, carrying specially designed cargo harnesses, rather like horses in the Pony Express. Furthermore, the pigeons themselves are just the aerial part of a larger mail system.

It’s pleasant to see this fossil medium not only apparently thriving, but working both sides of the law. But I must say that I consider this tale of diamond-smuggling pigeons to be highly suspect. Maybe there’s a mysterious transnational network of feathered contrabandistas, or maybe this government diamond monopoly is trying to evade privatization because its books have been cooked.]

Source: Reuters New Media, March 24 1998 S. Africa to shoot diamond-smuggling pigeons

From Alan Wexelblat

I attended a talk given by Randy Katz (Department Chair of EECS at Berkeley) at MIT last week. As the title suggests, it was a fast review of communications technologies. The talk was based on a first-year course Katz teaches at Berkeley. Much of the talk (and the course, presumably) focuses on well-known dead media, such as the Nipkow disk.

Below, I extract some of Katz’s more uncommon remarks on other dead media. Some of the most interesting parts of the talk were Katz’s suggestions on how to organize study of dead media. Katz suggests a framework based on the role of government.

His argument is that communications technologies have historically been seen as ways to extend the power of the existing power structure (kings, nation- states, business cartels) to remote locations, and to that end, funding has been selectively given or withheld based on perceived power circumstances. One well-known example, of course, is the granting of a state monopoly to the entity that became AT&T.

Katz argues that we see in the history of many media a recurring pattern of invention (most often by tinkerers, not scientists/researchers) leading to efforts to get state sponsorship for R&D.

Many media die at this point, if the state refuses support. If the state grants support then the medium lives, at least for a time. This approach also speaks to the question of why/when/how media die.

Katz identifies three methods:

(1)
      
“creative destruction” (in which a new medium destroys an old one, as the telegraph destroyed the pony express)

(2)
      
“withdrawal of state favor” (as when Minitel finally died after the French government withdrew its support)

(3)
      
“market-driven death” (Betamax videotape).

Specific dead media mentioned in Katz’s talk:

MUSCLE-POWERED MESSENGERS (FOOT AND HORSE):
490 BC, Phidippides runs from Marathon to Athens with news of a battle. By 14 AD, the Romans have set up a network of relay runners.

The Roman Relay is the first known example of express mail. Normal messages were carried at the approximate rate of 50 miles/day, but express mail was marked differently and carried approximately twice as far. This is the source of the phrase “post haste” which was the marking carried on the express messages.

By 1280 AD, Kublai Khan had set up the first network of horse-using message relays. This medium finally dies about 400 years later when the Pony Express is retired (1860s). Pony Express riders covered 150-200 mi/day. The longest ride was by 14-year-old “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who managed 384 miles in one day (ouch!). The Pony Express record time for a message was 7 days, 17 hours. The message was Lincoln’s Inaugural address (March 4, 1861).

VISUAL MESSAGING MEDIA
Visual messages began with various heliographic systems before recorded history (the Aztecs apparently had such a system, as did many nomadic tribes).

[Bruce Sterling remarks: “Aztec Heliography??” We must know more!]

The first regularized visual signalling system was the Howe code, which was commissioned by the British Royal Navy in 1790. Howe’s system used 10 colored flags and a code book containing 260 entries.

The goal, of course, was to be able to signal friends without giving away the orders to watching foes. Howe revived work which was apparently originated by the fire beacons in Greece. This system was first written down in 150BC by an historian named Polybius. This is the first documented system for relaying messages reliably.

The Polybius system consisted of five torches on each of two towers. These were interpreted as the rows and columns of a matrix which had 25 elements; the Greek alphabet had 24 letters. Polybius’ writings include the first known instances of flow control, handshaking protocols and error correction. These procedures were learned by operators through an apprenticeship program. If there were written manuals they have not survived to modern days.

OPTICAL TELEGRAPHY
The French optical telegraph consisted of a tower surmounted by a large three-segmented wooden armature. The inventor, Claude Chappe, was funded by the French military and developed a code whereby arm positions every 45 degrees were defined and mapped to characters. Thus, users could make shapes such as +----+----+ and + | | [ASCII graphics don’t really do it justice.]

Initially, the system operated inside Paris only. Napoleon extended it as he conquered territory. By 1814, the system was contiguous from Belgium through France to Italy. By 1853, there were 556 stations covering a diameter of almost 3000 miles.

The system depended on the operator seeing that other towers had successfully copied his tower’s position. Then he would change his armature. Thus, messages rippled through the network in a one-character-at-a-time relay fashion. The effective data rate was 1 character every 30 seconds over a visible distance of approximately 10 miles between towers. The optical telegraph lasted until about the 1850s, when it was supplanted by the electrical telegraph.

Source: speech at MIT by Professor Randy Katz Report on Dead Media Talk: From Smoke Signals to the Internet

From Bruce Sterling

“While the wealthier residents enjoyed spacious accommodation, the majority of the population lived in crowded structures. Since most of the houses were built of wood, fire became a serious problem.
Alarms were sounded by the ringing of church bells.

Then, guns from the largest warship in port would respond with three volleys, followed by all other ships blowing their whistles. This system of warning, dramatic but not necessarily pin-pointing the exact location of the fire accurately, was used until 1880, when a more efficient system was devised.”

[Bruce Sterling remarks: the firefighters of 19
^th
-century Shanghai were unpaid volunteer brigades using hand-cranked pumps. Alerting and assembling them posed a serious challenge. There was a considerable language barrier between the German, Japanese, British, French and American emigre contingents and the Chinese locals. But fire was a general threat to all parties in Shanghai. Given these circumstances, we can see that a media solution evolved: everyone with the capacity to make public noise pitched in, with an almighty racket. However, they conveyed the alarm in order and with protocol: first the religious community, then the military, and finally, a general steam-powered shriek from private enterprise.]

Source SHANGHAI: CRUCIBLE OF MODERN CHINA by Betty Peh-T’i Wei Oxford University Press, 1987 ISBN 0-19-583831-9

From Bruce Sterling

“After 1911, theatres became known as wu’tai (stage), when raised platforms were introduced. In addition to traditional operas, there were acrobatic performances, magicians from China and abroad, puppets and, in time, Western-style plays. It was difficult to take away from the audience their considered birthright of talking, eating, and blowing whistles during the performance.

“In the 1920s, an enterprising impressario built the Chiu-mou-ti Hsing-wu-t’ai (New Theatre on Nine Mou of Land), offering a combination of live actors and motion pictures. Complicated scenery such as mountains, rivers, moving trains, and steamships were shown on a screen, sometimes with actors performing in front of it. Indoor scenery, such as tables and chairs, would be placed on stage as props.

Each play would consist of five or six scenes, alternating screen and stage actions.

The format was quite popular until it was discovered that once an actor’s face was shown on the screen, the audience would not accept a different actor in the same role on stage. As a result, the format was not copied by other theatres in Shanghai.”

[Bruce Sterling remarks: this is a charming example of cross- cultural multimedia hybridization. The Chiu-mou-ti Hsing-wu-t’ai is just one particularly exotic version of many, many efforts to somehow turn plays into films (“photoplays”) or to use projected screen techniques as theatrical special effects (Pepper’s Ghost, Riviere’s Theatre d’Ombres, the Prague Laterna Magika, etc.]

Source: SHANGHAI: CRUCIBLE OF MODERN CHINA by Betty Peh-T’i Wei Oxford University Press, 1987 ISBN 0-19-583831-9

From Dan Howland

Crandall’s Electric Sign was an early changeable electric sign. It consisted of one or more frames holding an array of electric light bulbs, arranged in patterns similar to modern LCD characters. However, there is a charming Victorian twist, Crandall’s sign displayed a serif alphabet.

With several of these frames linked together, the sign strongly resembles a baseball scoreboard. The switching device looks like a typewriter keyboard attached to an Autoharp, with electrical contacts replacing the felt pads, and current-carrying wires replacing the zither strings.

By pressing the key for a letter, contact was made with the wires, lighting the required segments of the letter. According to Scientific American, the “government” (Federal? State?) tested the system in New York Bay on the night of April 2, 1898. A single frame, three feet by five feet, sat on top of a hotel. A boat withdrew to a mile offshore, where the sign was legible to the naked eye. At three and a half miles, the sign was visible through the spyglass.

The front cover shows a Times Square-style headline: “CERVEARA’S FLEET IS AT SANTIAGO DE CUBA”. (The apostrophe appears in the same frame as the letter A, but how it would work elsewhere is a mystery.)

Apparently, the system was in regular use displaying the headlines of a newspaper which Scientific American only identifies as “well known”. Also shown is the control room for this sign. Each letter (and space!) has its own separate keyboard, 38 in all.

Source: Scientific American magazine, July 4, 1898

From Steven Black

[Steven Black remarks: The more we think we save, the more is actually lost!]

[Bruce Sterling remarks: here’s yet another set of colorful, horrific anecdotes on the fragility of digital storage media, this time appearing in the mainstream business press. It seems very likely that this once-arcane problem will slowly intensify into open scandal.]

“DATA STORAGE: FROM DIGITS TO DUST: Surprise, computerized data can decay before you know it
“Up to 20% of the information carefully collected on Jet Propulsion Laboratory computers during NASA’s 1976 Viking mission to Mars has been lost. Some POW and MIA records and casualty counts from the Vietnam War, stored on Defense Dept. computers, can no longer be read.

And at Pennsylvania State University, all but 14 of some 3,000 computer files containing student records and school history are no longer accessible because of missing or outmoded software.
“The Information Age is creating a digital dilemma.

For years, computer scientists told us that digital 1s and 0s could last forever. But now, we’re discovering that the media we’re using to carry our precious information on into the future are turning out to be far from eternal, so fragile, in fact, that some might not last through the decade.

More is at risk than government and corporate records. The danger extends to cultural legacies: new music, early drafts of literature, and academic works originate in digital form, without hard copies.