technology

Alternate Steves: Conference Call

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

More on Alternate Histories through the eyes of Alternate Me’s. This comes from some past speculations on the internet, useful technologies, and vital functionality. In this case I wonder how conference calls/party lines could have been more widespread, giving us casual group chat long before Zoom, Teams, and so on.

Let’s meet an Alternate Steve who remembers the Conference Call Boom of the 80s and 90s . . . even if he missed the start.

I’m going to confess – I missed out on the Party Line/Conference Line craze when I was younger. Yes, I know, this is me, I’m the guy that has set up conferences. But Back In The Day it just didn’t register for me until I graduated college.

So anyway, let’s talk me in the 1990s. I’ve graduated from college and pending getting into graduate school, ended up working as an admin in an anthropology department. Pretty good gig and I figured I’d eventually go back to school to get into that PHD program. As you know I didn’t (even if I did get two more degrees).

One of the things people were talking about is Conference Calls, though everyone kept calling them Party Lines, an older name for shared phone lines. I think it honestly stuck because the term also got used by sex lines and so on. Boy did I work to call it “Conference Call,” and boy did people embarrass themselves throughout the early 90s.

Anyway at the time, I vaguely knew about Conference Calls and we all know the drill – people call one number or someone calls them and you all chat at once. It’s very standard now, but it exploded in the 80s and 90s – in ways that made perfect sense when you look back.

And in 1990 boy did I have to look back. I’m there in the office, suddenly having to catch up on all of this stuff that passed me by as I was A) in the dorms, and B) a computer guy.. I still remember sitting out a weekend with some of my co-workers to understand what was going on. And how I missed it.

You have to remember the 80s saw a lot of changes in communication. The Bell system got broken up. Compuserve and AOL were becoming noticeable. People met on internet forums in academic areas. And what happens when you’re a suddenly-regional phone company after a big breakup and you have a vision or just want money?

People are using computers to talk. But you are used to phones. So by pushing conference lines you sell phones, sell services, and get a leap on these growing services. Also some bigwigs use conference calls and you see them in movies. It was kind of a slam dunk, moreso in the business-obsessed 80s.

A lot of people claim to be the brains behind the Conference Call revolution, but I think it was more a thing of the time – everything came together. Certainly it did for us there in the office as we had PHDs and scientists who were MORE and more interested in figuring how to chat with each other without having to travel. I mean trust me, they wanted to travel (I had to do some of the billing), but you can’t rush back to the lab or something then.

Anyway all that happened while I was busy getting my degree and I only paid attention when I had to. I mean it moved slower than people make it sound because there was a lot of technical stuff, but to me it seemed fast. It had changed over four years.

So I kept learning.

Of course the Conference Call thing began creeping into many aspects of life and nerds like me were there on top of it. Sure they got pitched to business, then families, but I remember when TTRPG (Table Top RPG) was jokingly called Telephone Time RPG. Then there were writer’s roundtables, etc. Or the time I attended the Atlanta Fantasy Fair and someone did a panel by conference line, and that’s when things were definitely in full swing.

Am I saying that Conference Calls exploded even more because of enormous nerdery? Honestly, I kind of am.

I ended up staying on top of it way more than most because I worked in admin and I was a nerd. Despite missing all of it at the start, it became a pretty integral part of my life. When I moved to Berkley in the mid-90s, it was even more prominent there. People forget how cable companies and other infrastructure companies got in on the deal and how vital it was to academia.

Which, come to think of it, was also a huge bunch of nerds. Seriously, by the late 90’s I knew professors who “had to suddenly” give a class by Conference Call.

I think in a weird way the Conference Call revolution both drove and delayed the adoption of the Internet. You could do a whole lot with a line, and the fancy specialized phones that companies sold (at a big markup) that maybe you didn’t need the internet. At the same time the growing infrastructure changes led to interests in other changes. I wonder if videoconferencing like Ringer would have come about as quickly – or were they accelerated?

It’s funny now how we still use these lines. But they afford security, they’re easy to use, and they’re familiar. I get it, even if I didn’t at first.

The 80s and 90s was a time of weird technical and cultural ferment, and I could see Conference Calls getting a big boost. Certainly I knew the various zine groups and geeks I went to, cons I went to, were filled with people who’d have taken advantage of it. Considering how phone companies broke up and consolidated, I see it as a potential business opportunity.

Steven Savage

But What If It Wasn’t Worth It?

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

As I’ve mentioned a few times here, a friend once said she didn’t think any tech “innovation” in the last 15 years was worth it overall. Admittedly considering some of the innovations are supermassive web frameworks and electric vehicles that inadvertently catch fire, I sorta get that. But this brings up a larger question.

What is it we’re used to today that actually isn’t worth it?

This makes me think of my interest in Chinese history and philosophy. Watching Taoists and Confucians discuss good government, it was in context of feudalism, so it was “what if we feudalismed right?” Like maybe feudalism was part of the problem, even if some Taoists had a kind of “Anarcho-feudalism” in mind.

So how much of what we have today we think of is perfectly fine and normal is a bad idea we’ll need to get over? And I’m not talking the usual critiques of things like AI (which is easy), but other technologies and policies and the like.

Focusing America on the automobile is one that I think is a big mistake, even if I like having one. It’s led to racist zoning, sprawling suburbs, loss of public transportation, pollution, and the like. I’m not saying automobiles are bad, but man did we overdo it for various reasons.

Try to imagine if that hadn’t happened.

I’ve also wondered about the impact of parts of pop culture. Things I loved in my youth have become sprawling, money-sucking mega-franchises. Was it large company consolidation that we needed to avoid? Something else? Why is it now when I hear of anything Star Wars, Star Trek, or Marvel I just assume I won’t like it?

What was missed because we made another Star Trek?

In another case I definitely felt that too much of our world got driven by graphics. Systems get bigger, cards get larger, all so we can watch web pages that look like movies and play games that don’t look like games. A few years ago I found Team Fortress 2 (a fave of mine for ages) still runs off of CPUs and looks fine in its stylized way.

How many resources got poured into pretty? Maybe we just didn’t need as much photorealism?

I’ve also questioned office software. I mean I self-publish out of LibreOffice, which is basically Microsoft Word ten years ago. I’ve worked with tools that store enormous amounts of data no one cares about. Look I’m fine with graphics software getting more powerful (albeit again, needing the hardware) but otherwise? Not sure.

I’d like something that does its job with options, not has something that does so much more than anyone needs. Or maybe some software can be more modular.

Try asking what we’re used to now that kind of has flaws is something we didn’t need or needed less of?

Steven Savage

Dada And Empty Media

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Though i don’t discuss it as much here, I have an interest in the art movement of Surrealism and its origins. Surrealism is fascinating in its many manifestations, it intersects with politics and culture movements, and the many personalities and people are compelling. As I continue to learn about it, I keep finding new lessons, one of which I want to share here.

Surrealism’s origins are rooted in Dada, an art movement that appeared post World War I that was mistrustful of the supposed age of reason and the horrors of the time. Dada appeared to be art, in form of paintings or performances and such, but was intentionally nonsensical. Today it may seem amusing, but at the time people found it infuriating – imagine giving a speech made of nonsense words and angry folk rioting.

Dada laid the groundwork for Surrealism, something else I may discuss, but what fascinated me most about Dada beyond that was that it used the framework of existing media and filled it with nonsense. What an idea that the container of art can be abstracted from any meaningful content! Perhaps its easy to understand people angered by Dada, confronted with a play or a song or a painting that had the form of work but was filled with nothing

You can remove the art from art but still have a form we associate with art.

That idea has sat with me for some time since I had it, but I hadn’t done much with it – as my interests were in Surrealism and how the artistic framework was a vehicle for unconscious, almost spiritual expression. But lately I thought about Dada using a framework of art filled with nonsense and internet content and what we learn from it.

It’s hard to find anyone who won’t complain about nonsense, slop, propaganda, and low-effort content on the internet. I certainly do as any of my regular readers knows, and to my gratitude, tolerate. I’m sure you’re also used to encountering and complaining of such things.

We wonder how people can take such things seriously. How they can fall for propaganda or low-info listicles and the like? Well that’s because, beyond our vulnerabilities or ability to enjoy trash, it comes in the form of information. Internet dross has the shape of information or art or spiritual insight even if it’s filled with B.S.

No different than how Dada took the form of art and blew people’s minds by delivering rampant nonsense.

Think about how easily technology lets us have the form of something useful. It’s easy to spin up a website or a book or a video, pour anything into premade patterns, even go to technology or freelancers to pour something into whatever information container we chose. We have the tools to make nothing look like something, to make form so good we easily mistake it for solid value.

And, sometimes, it rubs us the wrong way. We know it looks like information but it’s not. Maybe it’s easier to understand people enraged over Dada, tricked by form. We’re in the Uncanny Valley of Communication just like they were.

This is why the history of art and media matter and why I treasure these rabbit holes I go down. The past has many lessons for the present. Come to think of it, maybe if we pay more attention to the past we’ll have a better present . . . one with not just form but form delivering real meaning and valuable information.

Steven Savage