Communication and Technology: A Smattering

1. At a work event last week, I added a short PowerPoint slide show to a presentation that I regularly deliver to students. There were like eight slides. The information I conveyed was exactly the same as my regular verbal presentation, but the students were way more impressed. They kept saying things like, "I don't have any questions! That was sooooo informative!" I don't know if it helped them to have the visual representation in front of them, or whether they were just impressed that I had my stuff together enough to have real life slides with the real live University logo on them. Either way, for 15 minutes of work, it was a pretty major WIN!

2. I've ordered myself the new iPhone 4S for my birthday. It's completely unnecessary and expensive and a little bit pretentious, but I'm soooooo excited for it to arrive! Siri looks downright amazing; I imagine that talking into my tiny handheld computer and having it talk back to me is going to be one of those things that makes me go, Holy crap, it's the future and we're living in it! It's funny to think that only 10 years ago I had just started using the Internet, I had just gotten my first (brick-like, green-screened, hideous, non-texting) cell phone along with my first car, and I didn't know how to search for things on Yahoo or AskJeeves or whatever was popular then. What a crazy and awesome time it is we live in.

3. I've been watching Occupy Wall Street in the news, and I'm absolutely fascinated by the protesters' use of hand gestures and "the human microphone" to communicate (you can read about the history of the method at New York Magazine). By using simple gestures and group repetition, the protesters can communicate a single speaker's information and respond to his/her ideas without relying on megaphones and amplifiers (which are often prohibited in the occupied spaces). The process is so simple and old fashioned, yet it's still marvelously effective. Not to mention the fact that it's pointedly democratic and, in my opinion, downright inspiring. You can watch a protester teaching the method to the Occupy Boston protesters here: