When Isolation and Disconnection are Desirable

In his article on Scuttlebutt, Bogost asks, “What if isolation and disconnection could actually be desirable conditions for a computer network?” He says this in the context of describing how Dominic Tarr, the creator of Scuttlebutt, lives largely offline in a sailboat in New Zealand, but it makes me think of the not-yet-wireless phone in my house growing up. Before I got older and started carrying around a heavy black rectangle of potentiality and dread, it worked like this: You t...

 Memory Systems as a Shared Resource

This inspired them to depart from testing memory for lists of words and events, and to explore the amount of rich, in-depth information remembered by couples about experienced events. They found these social exchanges led to clear collaborative memory benefits, which could take three forms: “New information” such as finally snatching an elusive name of a musical thanks to a chain of prompts between the two parties. Richer, more vivid descriptions of events including sensory information. ...

 All Human Acheivement is the Result of Networking

Human achievement is entirely a networking phenomenon. It is by putting brains together through the division of labor—through trade and specialization—that human society stumbled upon a way to raise the living standards, carrying capacity, technological virtuosity, and knowledge base of the species. We can see this in all sorts of phenomena: the correlation between technology and connected population size in Pacific islands; the collapse of technology in people who became isolated, like n...

 Overview of Optical Networks

Optical fibers can transmit digitized light signals over long distances because of the purity of glass fiber combined with improved electronics technology. With some acceptable transmission loss, low interference, and high-bandwidth potential, an optical fiber is almost an ideal transmission medium. Optical communication systems may sometimes be combined with electrical components. In such systems, electrical data bits are converted into light, using a certain wavelength; when the transmissio...