In At The Deep End

I had a phone call this evening from a friend who lives on the other side of town. It was an ordinary conversation about normal stuff. But afterwards I was a bit freaked out by the whole thing - even forgetting the miracles of the phone network there are amazing things happening.

1. The sound waves from her mouth travel through the air to the microphone in her phone.
2. The sound waves wobble the diaphragm in the microphone.
3. The moving diaphragm moves one part of an electromagnet relative to the rest.
4. The moving electromagnet acts like a dynamo and generates an electrical signal that is an analogue of the sound wave that hit the diaphragm.
5. Some of the signal is fed back to the earpiece in her phone - too little and it doesn’t sound natural, too much and it’s off-putting.
6. The electrical signal swims its way through the phone network to my phone.
7. When it gets to my phone it hits another electromagnet in the loudspeaker, which acts like an electric motor to wobble a cone or something big and flattish like that.
8. The wobbling cone generates a sound wave that is an analogue of the electrical signal.
9. The sound wave travels through the air to my ear.

While we were having our conversation I wasn’t thinking about any of that. The sound transmission was so good that I realised that it was a woman, speaking English, with my friend’s accent, in fact sounding just like my friend that I jumped straight to “it’s my friend Joy” without noticing any of the physics or neurological wonders going on. The phone network usually just does its job and gets out of the way so well that it’s as if she was in the room with me and not the other side of town. Sometimes it breaks down and the phone network gets in the way again - things like talking to someone on a mobile phone when they’re losing their signal - but most of the time it just works.

It then struck me (I was doing the washing up during all this thinking, which seems to encourage my mind to wander) that all the Web 2.0 hooplah does have substance. Email’s been around for ages, but blogs and fora allow people to be together when they’re not. Katy talks to friends in the evening via fora, and so has friendships that she probably wouldn’t have had without them. Often the main thing is the people and what they’re saying, but sometimes servers need fixing and the technology gets in the way again. We can share photos of the children with friends and family and they can see what we’re up to even though we haven’t met up in person, but occasionally Flickr doesn’t let us upload photos and gets in the way again.

Another thing that gets in the way is other people. Criminals try to steal control of my blog’s server so that it can join their army of bots, so we need to keep patching the blog software rather than using it to post content and take people’s comments. Greedy, sleazy and lazy people try to vandalise my blog by putting adverts for dubious products and services - if I wanted ads on my site I would carry adverts from something like Google - so I have to install Spam Karma and then occasionally check through the spam bin. And finally the nosy and worse may use what I post in ways I wouldn’t want, so we have to talk in code a bit and not mentioned our children’s names in full etc. Maybe another sign of a technology’s maturity is that it’s worth being used by criminals and scumbags.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Rants and rambles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.