Sarah Bell, 2004

The Networked communities reading in this weeks dossier should have had a subheading; “Warning: I have tried to mention September 11 as many times as possible….I have also taken an extremely US biased approach”. I find this to be the case beacuse there is that unspoken asumption that events that happen in the US are automatically considered World events, and that we should read the events surrounding the September 11 terrorist attacks in the context of effecting everyone globally, when this is simply not the case. While having some very interesting points in regards to networked communities, I found the slant very Western, in assuming that everyone lives in Western style cities.

Apparently the author, William J Mitchell is British whereas reading the text, one would assume that he is North American, with the cultural significance he ascribes to September 11 and other disaster events or network blockages, such as traffic jams, nearly all the examples are North American ones. His CV and author blurb aren’t conclusive but looks like his first degree was done right here in Melbourne.

Perhaps an ex-pat who has been living in the States for too long, looking at his CV it seems he’s been there for a good many years.

The ideas of killing a network by knocking out its central hub got me thinking about my own life and how the networks I am part of could be disabled.

In fact the order-wire (two-way talk back, only one person can speak at a time) went down the other day, which made syndication of news material over the satellites very difficult. Sydney is the central hub, as they have control over switching the satellites. And they couldn’t hear us. The way to get around my order wire network failing was to turn to another network, that of the telephone. I learnt the Sydney Master Control phone number off-by-heart very quickly. I have had to organise the syndication for Sydney another time when the order-wire failed, so I simply relayed Sydney’s messages to the other states for them. That was in the evening when there was not much to sens and receive though. I would not be able to help them in that way over the busiest period of syndication from 5-7pm.

So my concluding thought would be that to seriously disable our networked Satellite Syndication community would be to take control away from Sydney, thereby freezing the satellites in their current locations, and ceasing all news material travelling interstate.

Or to disable the order-wire AND telephone system would definitely jeopardize our ability to send and receive, as we would not have any relevant information, or know when to play material out, as it would be near impossible to know that the other end was recording.

It is a quite bizarre experience to sit and think about disabling networks, as it’s really quite a taboo subject in our society, as in actively coming up with ideas on how to hinder a system, instead of enhancing it. I don’t dare even mention the ‘t’ word again, I’ll have ASIO after me…