Name:     Allison Koberstein	School:
Relationship:	Country:     Canada
Simon Fraser University 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, B.C. Canada V5A 1S6 http://www.sfu.ca/~akk18/tech114/website/ Team Info The Happy Hands Club! Tech 114, D203. Jan Castro (301101256), Wing Yi Chung (301090175), Jeremy Mamisao (301097037), Allison Koberstein (301086070), Bruce Hu (301049995) For our class, we did an experiment where we tested four methods of communicating a quote to each other, including paper planes, twitter, interpretive dance, and Morse code, and explored the reasons why they succeeded or failed. In fact, only one of our communication methods worked, the dominant reason being a lack of prior knowledge. Under our limited conditions some communication technologies succeeded while others over complicated the process. … From the observation of our communication methods, what we witnessed was anything but a phenomenon of “glocalization” (a combination word made out of globalization and localization) as mentioned in “The Imminent Internet.” (Wellman & Hogan, 2004) Instead of these various communication mediums interconnecting us not only globally but locally, we faced some problems such as adaptability and universal protocol-readiness issues. For example, not all of the team members had a Twitter account setup and ready to go. The grim situation was merely a reflection of Neil Postman’s (amusing ourselves to death) (Postman, 1985) dystopian-like view of modern media. Furthermore, Twitter and Morse code served to complicate and block our communication rather than facilitate it. As a result, the experiment left us further questioning McLuhan’s claim regarding bias of communication (Innis, 1972). The medium is not the message, and the medium through which the media travels serves only on a conditional basis. His “global village,” as it turned out, is merely a local village.