Nobody Knows How the Whole Thing Works

A few years ago, I attended a national conference on technological literacy… One of the main speakers, a sociologist, presented data he had gathered in the form of responses to a questionnaire. After a detailed statistical analysis, he had concluded that we are a nation of technological illiterates. As an example, he noted how few of us (less than 20 percent) know how our telephone works.

This statement brought me up short. I found my mind drifting and filling with anxiety. Did I know how my telephone works?

I squirmed in my seat, doodled some, then asked myself, What does it mean to know how a telephone works? Does it mean knowing how to dial a local or long-distance number? Certainly I knew that much, but this does not seem to be the issue here.

No, I suspected the question to be understood at another level, as probing the respondent’s knowledge of what we might call the “physics of the device.”I called to mind an image of a diaphragm, excited by the pressure variations of speaking, vibrating and driving a coil back and forth within a a magnetic field… If this was what the speaker meant, then he was right: Most of us don’t know how our telephone works.

Indeed, I wondered, does [the speaker] know how his telephone works? Does he know about the heuristics used to achieve optimum routing for long distance calls? Does he know about the intricacies of the algorithms used for echo and noise suppression? Does he know how a signal is transmitted to and retrieved from a satellite in orbit? Does he know how AT&T, MCI, and the local phone companies are able to use the same network simultaneously? Does he know how many operators are needed to keep this system working, or what those repair people actually do when they climb a telephone pole? Does he know about corporate financing, capital investment strategies, or the role of regulation in the functioning of this expansive and sophisticated communication system?

Does anyone know how their telephone works?