Guest blogger

Photo by Marc Kjerland

Many New Media scholars find it productive to compare technological innovations and their impact on society across time as a way to ground their current research.  In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary traces the modern construction of the observer and visuality to the camera obscura, an early device used for redirecting light to project an image of its surroundings onto a screen or paper. The connection between texting and the telegraph seems more straightforward. After all, I did just sign up for another two years of service from American Telephone & Telegraph.

“Evans: Could you come superintend under my direction important excavation Knossos. Personal not school affair terms four months sixty pounds and all expenses paid to begin at once.

Mackenzie: Agreed coming next boat.”

Telegrams between Arthur Evans and Duncan Mackenzie regarding work at the excavation at Knossos

The 2008 Pew Internet report on Writing, Technology and Teens came amidst concerns over the “death of writing” and the “colour and poetry” of writing being lost. The Pew study also states that students do not consider texting writing, and indeed it appears to be closer to a vernacular form of speech. In their 2005 An SMS History, Taylor and Vincent describe this speech as “new linguistic repertoires that allow for the intimacy afforded in face-to-face encounters to be reproduced between physically remote interlocutors,” in other words, a unique texting argot.

Photo by tarabrown

Alternately, Caroline Habluetzel looks at texting as occupying a unique position between speech and writing, allowing it to “overcome the absence of the receiver and create what in the context of classic letter writing has been called epistolary presence, that is, a sense of presence between the two interlocutors that is more intense than geographical distance would suggest.”

This changing of our sense of place and space through time is something that I’ve always been interested in as an archaeologist. The properties of texting and telegrams are similar enough—limited transmission length, relatively expensive, conveyance of instantaneous information that is expected to be read and acted upon immediately—that it creates an intriguing parallel in history.  Tom Standage calls the telegraph The Victorian Internet in his book with the same title.

It appears that the telegraph has not destroyed writing, nor will texting. If anything, I appreciate the shortness of the telegram agreement quoted above between Arthur Evans and Duncan Mackenzie—how wonderful if more jobs had similar hiring practices!

By Only Wonder

Late in my ten-week odyssey through Berkeley’s Intensive Greek Workshop, I encountered a stranger whose shirt was emblazoned with a familiar script. When I asked him what it meant, he replied with a shrug: “It’s all Greek to me.”

It was to me too. Then he clarified: “No, it says ‘It’s all Greek to me’…in Greek.” In Modern Greek, of course, which is a language people actually speak today, as opposed to Attic Greek, which I was spending the summer attempting to learn. The embarrassment, confusion, and suspicions of irrelevancy I experienced that day may have been a metonym for my mental state this summer.

True to its name, the Workshop was intense. The course is designed for students with no previous exposure to Ancient Greek, but some prior language study is recommended. For the first six weeks, we neophytes spent six hours a day learning basic Greek grammar and went home to assiduously internalize vocabulary and increasingly irregular verb forms. To help us prepare for our daily quizzes and weekly exams, instructors offered morning and afternoon office hours and were “on call” in the evenings to handle any participle emergencies (my personal Achilles’ heel), which made us feel even more like suffering patients whom no pharmakon could cure. Read the rest of this entry »

June 2010. Last night I watched the sun set over four countries. Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are all visible from the beach on the Red Sea south of Aqaba and I had plenty of time to contemplate geopolitical vagaries as I dug my toes into the sand.  A hot wind was blowing in from the Jordanian desert and I watched the various families settle in around me.  The beach is a liminal zone in Muslim countries, where negotiations of culture, politics, and religion come into high relief.

The public beaches at the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, and the Turkish coast of the Mediterranean all have their own particular local mores and acceptable configurations of the highly contested terrain of women’s bodies.  Haram is a very rough equivalent of the word “sinful” in Arabic.  As a Western lady working in the Middle East, I hear it a lot. Pork is haram, chicken is not haram, exposing one’s hands may or may not be haram.  At first I tried fairly hard to figure out how to behave and dress respectfully, but it is contingent on so many factors that it is incredibly difficult–probably impossible since I am foreign anyway. Even my most conservative mosque-going wear was rejected at the Great Mosque in Damascus and I had to put on an Orko-like cloak to enter.  So now I just do what I can in most situations to not draw too much attention to myself, with one notable exception: The Beach. I wear a regular swimsuit and get stared at, but there are usually enough other scantily-clad foreigners to soften the impact. My tattoos also attract attention, perhaps only slightly more than on Western beaches where people pretend not to notice.

Anyway, I will always remember the first time I saw a conservative young couple come to the beach. She was dressed in a full burqa and niqab (face-veil) and he was in short swim trunks.  She sat down under and umbrella and fanned herself as he went splashing off into the sea.  He occasionally came back to check on her, but otherwise she just sat there, sweating in the 50 C heat.

Since then I have seen this same scenario played out several times, with different age-ranges in different states of dress.  I’ve only seen the vaunted burkhini twice, both times on pre-teens who were passing through another liminal state, becoming a sexually mature (and therefore covered) woman.

So it was a familiar scene last night, a woman with her husband and four children, she completely covered and the rest of the family ready for the beach.  She sat in the sand while her husband played with the children and splashed around.  A scholar that was more sympathetic would probably say that she was still the nucleus of the family, that she guarded with the rest of the beach gear, but she seemed very much forgotten in all of the fun.  So, to my surprise, she started playfully throwing rocks at her family and they giggled and dodged the rocks.  This continued until after sunset, when she finally hiked up her burqa and waded into the surf up to her knees.  I looked around and saw that many women were doing this semi-covert dusk activity and that couples were drawing closer together in the dim light of shisha coals.  There’s been daytime swimming as well, women being held tight by their husbands while their burqa swirls around them.  I guess it might not be so different than when I wore a t-shirt to the pool as a self-conscious little kid.

I think I will continue to find beaches in Muslim countries fascinating for both the changing ideas of how women should dress and how foreigners are integrated into the social scene.

You can read more about Colleen’s summer fieldwork and travels here and here.