In a prescient book published a quarter century ago, when few people had heard of the internet, Carolyn Marvin, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, catalogued the fear and loathing with which newspapers greeted the advent of the telegraph and the telephone. High on the list of perceived horrors was the inevitable moral degradation of women. Old media are still at it, constantly warning us to be very afraid of the perils lurking in the internet, computers, smart phones, cell phones, etc. The magazine Pacific Standard gamely took note of this handwringing today with an article...

04 April, 2013

Our friend in New Brunswick has been channeling Pat Boone: Dear Aliant, It’s not me, it’s you. We’ve been through a lot together. Land lines and cell phones. Dial-up, high-speed, wireless Internet sticks and now, fibre-op. I’ve treated you well. Sent you hundreds of dollars every single month. Tried to keep the lines of communication open. We’ve talked and talked – never more than during my recent move to New Brunswick. In fact, we just got off the phone with one another, marking our tenth call related to my move from Nova Scotia. I called you just now because I was alarmed to receive...

07 May, 2012

  The management of Simeon's Family Restaurant in Sydney attached a makeshift sign to the venerable but non-functioning Bell-Aliant pay phone in the restaurant's vestibule. With the explosion in cell phone ownership and use, timely maintenance of the ancient pay-per-use devices just isn't a priority any more. "Trying to find a working pay phone," wrote one friend when I posted this photo on Facebook, "is like trying to find a four-leaf clover." "I love pay phones," wrote another. "They hint at a world of possibilities."...

09 April, 2012

A US study by the Pew Research Center finds that pre-election polls favor Republican candidates when the pollster only calls landlines, and not cell phones. The gap appears to be growing as more people abandon land lines for cell service. [S]upport for Republican candidates was significantly higher in samples based only on landlines than in dual frame samples that combined landline and cell phone interviews. The difference in the margin among likely voters this year is about twice as large as in 2008. And then there's Skype. This calls to mind the 1948 US presidential election, in which polls (and pundits) predicted a...

23 November, 2010