Shock and Awe When the IT Stops

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Shock and Awe When the IT Stops

10/24/2005

By Terry Calhoun

Editor’s Note: Terry Calhoun transmitted this column, with his laptop balanced on a garbage can, via a random wireless connection for reasons that will become clear as you read further.

I just found out about shock and awe IT style first-hand. I have no idea why Mozilla Thunderbird crashed on me this morning. First I could not send any messages, not through my “umich” nor my “scup” identity. Then my inbox disappeared. Then Thunderbird refused to boot up at all yet, when I reinstalled it, Windows told me that I couldn’t install it – because it was already running. Of course, I could not see or use it.

Then, our local area network went down and no one had email or Web, and I could not download a new installation file. Following that, I rebooted my Vaio laptop and it refused to boot up at all. Completely gone, among other things, was my opinion column for this week. This happened while SCUP was transmitting a special 2-hour Webcast to 150 college campuses which I had managed for the past year. What a panic, at first, until we realized that only our office had the problem. The show went fine for everyone else.

Sigh. Then, when our Webcast was over, I was faced with the choice of remembering what I had written, or quickly writing about my reaction to and the experience of . . . losing everything. As you can tell, I have chosen to write about losing everything.

Actually, maybe what I just experienced was a “media disrupt,” as I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, followed by collateral damage (loss of data) from the interrupt.

I feel a certain sympathy with one early pioneer in wearable computing who, more than four years ago, was trying to live as much of his life as possible with the experience mediated through computing technology. He had spent quite a long period of time, as I remember, living with headgear through which he experienced the world around him via video camera instead of directly with his eyes. (I would have his name and more details, except that I am writing this without the Internet and am not quite sure how I am going to send it off to my editor when I am done!)

Then, at some point in early October, 2001, security guards forced the removal of his headpiece as he tried to board a regularly scheduled airline flight and the descriptions of his shock and disorientation as he experienced a severe “media interrupt” were horrifying.

The implications of what the respected college and university thinker and writer, George Keller, once described at a SCUP conference as “living our lives through screens” – desktop, laptop, television, cell phone, and more, can seem disturbing. And I think we live our lives mediated through more screens than George d'es. I include the windows in our buildings that do not open. How real is the outside when, given current technology, you could be looking into a video screen and not know the difference?

Let’s think about car windshields for a moment: One observation that I frequently make is that most drivers, especially on highways, may have the same sort of brain functioning going on when they drive as when they are watching a television set. Maybe it comes from too much “living through screens” or not. But what else can explain a line of 30 automobiles going 70+ miles per hours, each less than 15 feet from the one in front?