Comments on: Circular Progress in Social Media?

By: Bill Ives

Bill Ives — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:56:09 +0000

Rob Nice comparison. Your friend is doing with Skype just what my great aunt and uncle did over 100 years ago with open photo lines. Good point with privacy. There is constant privacy and selective, momentary privacy. I have been on crowded consulting engagements were everyone was on top of everyone so there were no private conversations and you just adapted but you would always find a space somewhere, usually outside, where there could be a “cone of silence” for a private conversation. There you could often be seen but not heard, like the front porch swing for courting. Bill

By: Rob Paterson

Rob Paterson — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 14:00:18 +0000

Funny how long habits remain – now with Skype many have no costs at all. A friend who travels a lot puts on Skype in his Hotel room and spends the night with his wife at home. They have dinner, watch TV and just hang out. I have not pressed him further …..

So new habits of being “On” the whole time are arising. Is not Twitter part of this?- I go nuts when Twitter is down now.

On the privacy front – I mean more the personal aspect of it. Funny how we in the west have become so solitary? Another friend from a very different background on PEI – 11 kids and a very small house – told me that none of his brothers ever slept alone UNTIL they got MARRIED!

By: Bill Ives

Bill Ives — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 03:10:55 +0000

Thanks, Rob – I am old enough to remember party lines as a regular thing in the US even in cities and long distance being very expensive so no one I knew made many long distance calls. They were a big deal and were short. People still averted talking at length on long distance even when the rates went down because of this concern and the habits created. I always assume that anything I do on the web, including email, could be made public, and act accordingly. However, I just hope it is not my credit card numbers which I do use on the web. While I agree that privacy can be overrated, there are times when privacy is a good thing and that is why I dislike moves like Beacon in Facebook while I applaud most of the transparency in the new web. Bill

By: Rob Paterson

Rob Paterson — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 02:45:04 +0000

Until about 12 years ago most of the rural lines on PEI were party lines – so you also could and did listen in to all your neighbours calls.

I wonder if privacy is over rated?

By: Bill Ives

Bill Ives — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 03:44:58 +0000

Paula Thanks for this additional story and additional context. When my great aunt was the telephone operator, it was for the local network. You had to go to another location to make a long distance call. The local network and the long distant network were not yet connected. But these were the days of real customer service before IVR destroyed it. Bill

By: Paula Thornton

Paula Thornton — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:41:51 +0000

Fabulous story of connectedness.

In a similar vein, having a recent conversation with my mom about the process of being a switchboard operator at a regional hub helped me better understand the more organic aspects of the role they played. They physically managed the lines, opening and closing connections with patch cords. That meant that they were the routers too. For long distance, a call would be patched to a major regional hub and then to the individual city (can you imagine what that would look like with today’s voice traffic?).

They also would write down and report start and stop times of the connection: they were the feeds for the key data for transactions — minutes used. They had to manually write reports of the various minutes by line in daily batches.

Talk about load balancing, my mom talked about the time she was selected to go from Louisiana to West Palm Beach, to be put up over one winter in a woman’s home (all arranged by her employer, AT&T), to help handle the increase in call routing as the population swelled due to wintering snowbirds.

Imagine the cost of a call today with that model.