If you’re not networking, you’re not working.

What is a network? Sounds like a pretty simple question, right? Wrong. The problem of with defining a network is one of resolution? Is a wooden tabletop a network? What about cotton fabric? What about the sewer system in NYC? The answer to each question depends on your vantage point. The ‘Softness’ assignment for the week of 10-4-2007 was to create a network. Collaborating with my classmates Rory Nugent, Evrim Sahin, and Caleb Clark, I explored network concepts and how to implement them into a network of our very own. Through our discussions, the idea that fascinated me most was the life cycle of a network. How does a network come into being? Is it dependent for existence on the individual nodes of which it is comprised, or does it at a certain point take on a life of it’s very own (i.e. the Internet). Is a network a network if it goes unused? Does the network’s function play any roll in defining its life cycle?

Somewhere along the way, our trusty team began to discuss the land line phone system and its incredible tentacle like span. Rory had previously done a project with phones and we all seemed interested in exploring that technology from a new perspective. We started to play around with phone network ideas, and resolved to build our own party line. We then faced the challenge of obtaining an adequate number of phones and lines to reach our objective. We turned to our favorite network for help.

We sent out a message to the ITP student e-mail list asking if other students had any phones laying around for our project. A day later we’d received a few messages and along the way uncovered a smaller network of retro phone technology collectors among the ITP community. Our friend Alice actually had a working party line she let us borrow in exchange for a phone and more stable power connector. Great deal. Yet, our team had envisioned having to figure out how to hack the party line, and now that work was already done for us.

Now, we had to figure out what the heck we were going to do with our phone system. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time whispering and giggling over the phones, and had a great time playing around with a technology none of us had used in a while (cellphones are cheaper). There was something about the clearness of the sound and intimacy of the large phones that kept us captivated for a good while. If you haven’t done so in a while, pick up a non-cordless land line phone and have a conversation with someone. It’s refreshingly nostalgic.

So what now? We hadn’t really created a phone network, but merely plugged one in. Yet, our network was different from a traditional phone network in a few respects. 1) The phone system worked on a master-slave relationship. Meaning that a primary phone had to be activated in order for the phones to be able to communicate with one another. Picture a prison phone network. The guard has control of the primary phone and can listen in on all the prisoners’ conversations. Our team also wanted to explore the notion of the death of the network.

Four our class demo, we decided to create a simple representation of the way e-mail works using our phone network. Turning back to our favorite network (the student list), we grabbed some short e-mail messages and broke them out into individual words. Caleb, Rory, and I acted as nodes in the network sending our individual messages. We scrambled our speaking order as a way to simulate packet switching on the web. On another phone, at the other end of the network was the packet assembler who had to listen in to reassemble the messages Caleb, Rory, and I were sending. Evrim had control of the primary phone and had instructions to hang up if the packet assembler took too long trying to reassemble the messages.

Through our simulation we sought to emphasize that the network exerts a great deal of control over the users and can determine the results of interaction through it.