Beach Haven

Bibliography
​Schwartz, A. B. (2015). Broadcast Histeria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News. New York: Hill and Wang.
 
In the broadcast industry, the events during the radio broadcast led by Orson Welles is the stuff of legend. It was said that as people believed they were hearing real news interruptions into otherwise normal programming, they went crazy collectively. The broadcast warned up front it was a fictitious portrayal. Several times during the program similar messages were shared. Yet, people often tuned in during times that did not include the caveats. Supposedly, people ran out into the street screaming. Others packed up the family car and headed for the proverbial hills. A few are said to have committed suicide. In this work, Schwartz examines many of these myths and debunks them. He does share some examples where a relatively small number of people did think the program real and started fleeing, but these documented examples are few.
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What Schwartz does document is a somewhat skeptical public. Newsrooms and police station phones rang off the hook. People were looking for some sort of official confirmation to what they were hearing. Was there really a Martian invasion in progress? Were people dying by alien death rays?

In the chapter titled ‘Journalism and Showmanship’ the author examines how the news covered a real story of the same time period, specifically the Lindberg baby kidnapping. Sensationalism in reporting inspired people to flood the Lindberg estate. Charles Lindberg was a celebrity in his day. He was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. “Within half an hour, newsrooms in three states had gotten word of the crime and begun frantically revising their front pages” (Schwartz, 2015, p. 13). Much of the Welles fictional story had the same trappings of what people experienced during the immediate aftermath of the Lindberg kidnapping story. The storytellers were acting in a believable manner. In other words, they were good at their writing and acting craft.

Schwartz wonders if things are all that different today. Whether one calls it fake news, misinformation, disinformation, or whatever the newest terms will become, there are people who purposefully copy realism fictitiously. Welles was in it for entertainment, and perhaps that the same goal of some modern-day trolls. It seems clear to me that some of this effort is not just for a joke, but with specific outcomes intended. Motives may be political, social, or criminal, but each looks to sway some portion of the population into a preference action or inaction. Schwartz shares several examples such as ‘the Veracruz Twitter panic’ in the popular resort of Veracruz, Mexico. A few residents of the city started reporting crimes and violence throughout the city that were not actually happening. The reports were forwarded by others, then picked up by some websites that “capitalized on this by writing fake news stories with provocative headlines” noting how such headlines “can generate a small fortune in ad revenue by exploiting gullibility” (Schwartz, 2015, p. 223).

In the same page, Schwartz does note that “the same technology that spread that false report also made it possible to verify the story in almost no time at all” (Ibid.). He argues that Americans were skeptical of the original Martian attack story but seem to be more inclined to accept the stories about the hysteria that ensued. He suggests we apply skepticism in both stories and meta-stories we hear. Perhaps we should be less inclined to accept those stories that seem to fit a narrative we already accept.

Bibliography
Ramsdell, Mike. 2006. A Train to Potevka: An American Spy in Russia. Layton: Zhivago Press.

Review by Michael Beach
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This book is an autobiographical sketch of some experiences of a CIA operative working in Russia in the waning years of the Soviet Union. Mike Ramsdell speaks of his early training days in the agency and how his unit was betrayed by another trainee with whom Ramsdell had a friendship. He tells of his bringing up in northern Utah, his marriage and divorce brought on in part by how much he was away on assignments.

The main story of the book is how his unit in Russia was attempting to turn an official into an asset for the CIA. It goes wrong and his unit is told to bug out. That is, the others in his unit are sent to the relative safety of Moscow. Ramsdell is left alone to finish sanitizing the various locations the group of American spies were using. He is eventually ordered to take a train to a safe house in the far away village of Potevka. Before he can make his get away, Ramsdell is attacked by local thugs. He escapes the assassination attempt, but barely. He is beaten and seriously injured. In this rough condition he gets on the train in a lot of pain. It’s the slow train that stops often with the lowest class ticket. He ruminates about his life and what seems to him like abandonment by the agency. As he slept, another passenger steels what little food he had, leaving him to travel for days hungry and bloodied.

Eventually he arrives only to find the safe house empty and with no food. Eventually villagers help him, but not at first. He speaks of how the local people have little for themselves because of the bad policies of the Soviet government. Several times he is stalked by wolves that at one point keep him from walking from the house to the outhouse to relieve himself. After a long stay in the bitter cold and deprivation that included Christmas, he eventually makes his way to rescue and a return to the United States.

Throughout the ordeal, Ramsdell was sustained by his memory of his relationship with his son and a coworker who later becomes his girlfriend and future wife. He wrote to them and imagined future times together. He also considered his own perspective about God and his faith. The humbling experiences at first caused him to question, but then he was drawn closer to God and found his faith growing.

The story is an interesting mix of spy thriller, introspection, and social commentary with a religious connection. Since I lived part of my life in northern Utah, I was familiar with the places he describes. I also made two work-related trips to far eastern Siberia, but after the fall of the Soviet Union. I can see his perspective offering praise and sympathy to the Russian people while questioning their government as well as our own.
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​Bibliography
Aiken, Katherine G. 2019. "The Environmental Coneqences Were Calamitous: Smelter Smoke Controversies in Progressive Era America, 1899-1918." Technology and Culture, The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology (Johns Hopkins University Press) 60 (1): 132-164.

Review by Michael Beach
 
In this article, Katherine Aiken looks at legal battles between smelter operation companies and community organizations that sued for damage created by toxic smoke. Most of these organizations represented farmers, but the author includes the “four-way interaction among farmers, industrialists, government, and technology” (Aiken 2019, 134). Aiken speaks to claims and settlements, but since this journal is about technology, as one could guess, the primary focus is on technological ways smelter owners approached reducing particulate output. Her intention with the article is to “survey major smelter smoke battles with an emphasis on the intersection of industrial growth, engineering solutions to challenges, and the role of farmers and the government” (Aiken 2019, 135).

The specific systems developed included baghouses, large buildings filled with filtering bags that captured much of the particulate matter. A weakness to this approach is it was expensive and did not stop gasses. Two related solutions were to extend the location of smoke exhaust. In one version, large underground tunnels would be used to move the smoke away from locations with people and farms to less concerning (more remote) locations. The other was to build ever taller smokestacks so the particulates were spread more widely, having less affect in any one location.

Perhaps the most exotic approach was something called ‘electrostatic precipitation’ in which emissions were passed through an electric field that caused some of the gases to break into other compounds that had other uses. This was costly in terms of electricity generation, but some of the cost was offset by revenues created from sale of the chemical byproducts.

Social and financial forces were at odds with each other. They were also connected to each other. For example, Aiken shows how farmers’ claims were argued by the smelter companies to be exaggerated. Experts on both sides made their cases. Both groups had financial motivation. The technology was developed to lower the financial impact claims of farmers while minimizing cost to smelter operators. 
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Bibliography
​Good, Katie Day. 2019. "SIght-Seeing in School: Visual Technology, Virtual Experience, and World Citizenship in American Education, 1900-1930." Technology and Culture: The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology 98-131.

​Review by Michael Beach
 
The focus of this article by Katie Day Good is the language and arguments used to extend the use of audio/visual media in the early part of the 20th century from the homes of those who could afford it into the schools as a form of education enhancement. In 1928 Anna V. Dorris, then the president of the National Education Association (NEA), urged teachers to reject “formal and bookish” instruction and “explore the pedagogical potentials of newly available audio and visual devices” (Good 2019, 99). This idea seems to inspire the play on words of the article title. Instead of site-seeing, as in going to a site to see it, the media bring the sight of a site to the classroom, hence the idea of 'sight-seeing'. One is not seeing the site, rather an edited and controlled image of the site.

After WWI the United States “began forging a rhetorical link – what cultural studies scholars call an articulation” (Good 2019, 101). The idea of forming an articulation between school instruction and “an emerging ideal of ‘world citizenship’" (Ibid.) can be linked to a push for the organization of the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations, that was forming around the same time. Isolationism as opposed to world entanglements had been a debate from the very founding of the United States. Here, NEA leaders, federal government, and manufacturers of media devices chimed together using similar rhetoric, if not similar motivations. The tension over how much international involvement should our country take on is still in headlines today. The idea of using educational media to help students understand other cultures through virtual tours in the classroom also continues, even it the technology has changed. Good points out that, “The historical association between classroom media use and the acquisition of worldly experience warrants attention in the digital and globalization age” (Good 2019, 103). She argues that such “discourses of global citizenship education, international connectivity, and the democratization of communication have helped smooth the way” of Internet deregulation and commercialization (Ibid.). She may have a point on commercialization, but one of the major attractions of the Internet is the considerable lack of regulation existing from its inception. Nonetheless, she essentially takes for granted the benefits pushed in the language she is critiquing and focuses on the way language is used to make the various cases with a resulting growth in classroom use of media for instruction.

One caution Katie Good does share is the potential of media to reinforce a Western world view and “reproduce colonial relationships through inequalities of representation and access” (Good 2019, 104). For example, through the ‘value of virtual travel’ depictions may be used to either encourage or reinforce “desirable behaviors in hygiene, health, and morality through stories and dramatizations” (Good 2019, 105). Desirable to who? Good shares some of the language used at the time. She quotes X. Theodore Barber as saying, the “heightened sense of culture and refinement surrounding [these] exhibitions attracted the ‘better classes’ as well as those who wished to be identified with them” (Good 2019, 107). The colonialism angle refers to using images as a “means of appropriating some distant place through an image” (Good 2019, 113). Just as in the physical ‘appropriation’ of some other people or place, the use of images helps form ideas about these ‘others’ through the lens of Western thought and interpretation, one of the hazards of ethnologists. These researchers do all they can to avoid ‘reflexivity’, but it’s safe to say the rest of us are not so aware of the issue or have tools to adjust our perspective under our own cultural view. Consider one of Good’s closing statements, “Consistent in the promotional rhetoric for all manner of instructional media was a dual emphasis on its ability to unify and uplift Americans around a common set of civic values while turning their attention to the rapidly changing world beyond their shores” (Good 2019, 124). As an author, Good is questioning if both of these stated goals can truly be accomplished together. Essentially, by espousing the first creators of media help color the second.
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Bibliography
Ferreira da Silva, Alvaro, and M. Luisa Sousa. 2019. "The "Script" of a New Urban Layout: Mobility, Environment, and Embellishment in Lisbon's Streets (1850-1910)." Technology and Culture: The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology 60 (1): 65-97.

Review by Michael Beach

The authors of this article look at city planning from the perspective of ‘scripting’ in the form of planning documents, and ‘scribes’ comparing public and private efforts both in tension and compliment. During the specified time-period, Lisbon was like many other European cities with haphazard growth and poor technology. As a result, there was a fair amount of health and safety concerns for city residents.

Ferreira da Silva and Sousa show planning maps as issued by the city council during the 60-year window. With each plat the street layout and utilities change, but not as previous plats had imagined. The plat design is a form of ‘scripting’ and city planners are a form of ‘scribe’. At the same time, private interests had their own designs in mind. Developers would purchase tracts of land in and on the outskirts of town, then construct private streets and buildings, often ignoring city codes and plans. Private funds were available more quickly, and construction could be carried out for less cost when not allowing for street amenities such as sidewalks, pavement, lighting, maintenance and sewers. “Opening private streets was a refuge to avoid more coercive municipal bylaws and escape the slower street construction and infrastructure by the municipality” (87).

As one might guess, compromise became common. “Sooner or later, they moved in the public domain and the city council found itself saddled with streets poorly sized and cared for” (Ibid.). In one example, a promoter named Bairro Andrade “signed a deed with the city council… giving the terrains of the five recently opened streets in the public domain” (Ibid.). In compensation, the city council agreed to “plumb, pave, and illuminate them” (Ibid.). By this point, Andrade would have already cashed in on private sale of any of the property not deeded to the city, as well as he would continue to collect rents.

I doubt these sorts of fits and starts of city planning and development were any different in other countries, or in other times. Even today one hears of shady developers and negative aftermaths of unchecked building projects. At the same time, growth under strict government control tends to slow. Weighing this tension between safety and quality as opposed to quick financial returns are social factors that have a direct impact on technological decisions. That seems to be the main point of the article.
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​Bibliography
Fairhead, James. 2015. The Captain and "The Cannibal": An Epic Story of Exploration, Kidnapping, and the Broadway Stage. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Review by Michael Beach

This is a true story. It is one of self-interested exploitation and failure. Captain Benjamin Morrell was contracted by a number of financial backers to conduct profitable sea travels to the South Pacific. He failed at each, and where he did manage to bring back cargo of any value, he absconded with it for himself. The only ‘prize’ he seemed to have any success with were two natives who were captured from separate islands in skirmishes with local people. Though neither were actually cannibals. They both spoke different languages from each other. He eventually brought them back to the United States and took them on tour in costumes that had nothing to do with their native apparel. They played as dangerous headhunters.

One named Dako learned English and became more like extended family, though never free to leave on his own. Morrell eventually returned him to his own people on a later voyage which also didn’t yield profit. The other native died while on the stage tour, and he never showed any ability with English and little is documented about him. On the other hand, Fairhead is able to share a great deal about the life and thoughts of Dako. The stories floated by Captain Morrell at the time drew a lot of attention, including that of the author Herman Melville. Dako become Melville’s inspiration for Queequeg in his novel Moby Dick.

James Fairhead captures interlacing narratives of sea adventure, scoundrel character, and the clash of western colonialism with indigenous people. Settings of a professional sailing vessel, the South Pacific, London, New York and New England offer varied cultures and social norms that clash in every way possible. The work is well documented and makes for a read that pulls one in. This is one of those case where truth is stranger than fiction.
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Bibliography
Price, Don K. 1965. The Scientific Estate. London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Review by Michael Beach
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For Don Price, there was a shift in America. The original philosophy characterized by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. He says there are two main ‘articles of faith’ concerning progress. The first concerns material benefits which “lead society to support the advancement of science and technology” (Price 1965, 1). The other basic belief asserts that advancement in science “would lead society toward desirable purposes, including political freedom” (Ibid.). Price goes on to speak of negative effects of science and technology such as the dust bowl, atomic bombs, and the great depression, all of which were at least influenced by technological and scientific decisions.

“So we are about to reach the point when both scientists and politicians begin to worry not merely about specific issues, but about the theoretical status of science in our political and constitutional system” (Price 1965, 4). Price refers to a government report by Vanevar Bush titled Science, the Endless Frontier. I’ve reviewed that document in the past along with several books critical of it. Price’s overarching theme is that science is intertwined with politics. Not only is there such a concept like political science, but also political issues have some sort of scientific perspective. If in no other way, sociology is a form of science that looks at how social issues and movements form and function. Noting such scientific fields such as physics and genetics, Price makes scientific revolution has more effect on political institutions than the industrial revolution. Here are three specific statements he makes that the rest of the book is based on.

• The scientific revolution is moving the public and private sectors closer together.
• The scientific revolution is bringing a new order of complexity into the administration of public affairs.
• The scientific revolution is upsetting our system of checks and balances.

Essentially, Don Price argues that economic and political power have become so close that he calls them ‘fused’. He also takes the position that both forms of power are inseparable with scientific change.
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Bibliography
​Hausse, Heidi. 2019. "The Locksmith, the Surgeon, and the Mechanical Hand: Communicating Technical Knowledge in Early Modern Europe." Edited by Suzanne Moon. Technology and Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press) 60 (1): 34-64.

Review by Michael Beach
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In this article, Heidi Hausse looks at a specific case of an artificial prosthetic hand designed by a surgeon named Ambroise Paré. He had a representation drawn in a publication called Oeuvers in 1575 A.D. In order to allow for increased circulation of the design, a wood cutting of the picture was created by a locksmith named le petit Lorrain. The cutting was then used to reproduce the technical drawing in many subsequently published medical books and documents. Hausse takes a look at the imprint made by the wood carving and compares it to similar printed carvings. She also explores what the pictures do and don’t convey, and who might make use of the drawings.

A couple of themes come out in Hausse’s writing. Although one might imagine the drawings would be of interest to other surgeons, in reality “artisans were a crucial audience” (Hausse 2019, 36). The technical knowledge transfer was more about replicating the apparatus than for post amputation recuperation of patients. As a result, “substantive exchanges of knowledge took place between artisans and learned men” (Hausse 2019, 37) that might otherwise not happen due to cultural status difference. “The role of craft production in the initial creation of the image allows us to consider its purpose in Paré’s surgical treatise from the perspective of an artisan” (Hausse 2019, 47).

Another theme relates to how historians sometimes question the effectiveness of the early printing press to convey technical knowledge. “Many historians have been skeptical of the printing press’s impact on the transfer of craft techniques” (Hausse 2019, 52). One reason given is the interspersing of words and numbers to clarify graphics which are readily understood by technicians, but less so for surgeons. Another reason for skepticism is that “manuals contained either too little or too much of the information needed for a task, and often omitted practitioners’ tricks” (Ibid.). Finally, such sketches might contain mistakes. A few numbers pointing to specific parts didn’t match the accompanying terms. Finally, the documents many of the people creating the documents didn’t understand how the apparatus worked. Think of those in the supply chain to bring the documents about such as “translators, editors, artists, and printers” (Hausse 2019, 55).

Some of this same skepticism might be leveled on similar modern technical documents. Perhaps the difference comes in how easy documents can be published, then corrected and republished. One point that is a common argument among sociologists of technology is the need for tacit or practical experience, that written documents are just not enough. Just think about how many times you’ve may have opened a cookbook only to understand that some of the process for adding ingredients is not always clear. Watching videos with chefs creating the same dish can be helpful, but nothing can be a substitute for making it yourself. 

Bibliography
​Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis or the Love of Technology. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press.

Review by Michael Beach
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If you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘a solution looking for a problem’ that is the gist of this case study. Bruno Latour walks the read through the idea of creating a new sort of mass transit train in Paris, France. Aramis was an experimental commuter train that was not a train. The project was to form trains from train cars that were not attached to each other. Rather, each car would travel independently of others. Whenever one car approached another on the same track in the same direction, they would communicate with each other and travel like a traditional train but remaining unattached. Each car was small and was to hold only four riders. Given each car’s independent pickup and drop-off location, their routes would connect and disconnect with other equally independent cars.

Latour takes the reader through a project that lasted several decades and never successfully became more than a proof of concept with a handful of cars on an unconnected test track. Depending who was in power at the federal level, the Aramis project varied in funding and progress. People involved were excited about the technical idea then gradually became disillusioned. Others followed later with a similar pattern. Its failure was blamed on everything from lack of vision to the shortcomings of the technical state of the art of the time. Latour also shares how the design itself shifted. The car sizes changed, slowly increasing to look more like a typical train car. The independent start and stop locations became are stations, more like traditional train stations, though greater in number than the normal trains.

In Bruno Latour’s examination of a commuter train project in Paris, France, social forces are examined and their effect on a technical project that eventually was stopped through similar social forces. One example was changing the idea of a train car that held only four people. It became apparent that this approach could lead passengers to become victims of crime. If just a few strangers happened to be on the same car, there would be fewer witnesses for criminals to concern themselves with. That risk led to ever growing numbers of intended passengers. This was a form of scope creep based on a social concern. The result was lower efficiency and less benefit as compared to the traditional train system.

Bibliography
​Lampland, Martha, and Susan Leigh Star, . 2009. Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.
 
Reviewed by Michael Beach

Convention is the word of this book. The various chapter authors consider different standards of measurement we tend to take for granted. How did we choose one length, or weight, or electrical measurement over another? In fact, standards are still not really standard. Ask anyone who totes along an electrical plug converter when they travel internationally.

One area I found surprising is the chapter by Steven Epstein that relates to the ‘standard human’. I had not idea, but when dealing with medical research or treatment the world of health has set categories of humans. In reality, we are each different and are part of a mix and continuum of humanity, each with unique DNA. No one prognosis or treatment is best for all, so the medical community sort of does it work considering clumps of humans to get the symptoms and treatments mostly right most of the time.

There are a few standards examples reviewed from my profession, including metadata and ASCII definitions. One of the jokes in the industry of communications technology is that standards are so helpful because there are so many to choose from. The implication being that with so many different standards to select from, there really isn’t a ‘standard’.
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