HACkers blog

The issue of social spaces has surfaced in a number of fora recently. Of particular interest has been the question of social spaces engaging people across persistent divides of "race" and colour, and how best to foster an institutional culture and climate that resolves (or at least addresses, constructively) these challenges.

Reflecting back on social interactions to which I've recently been party, if you'll forgive the pun, I've noticed another divide which manifests on these occasions. Mostly, in academic departments, the staff on conditions other than academic are under-represented - often entirely absent. On occasion they are present, but in a service / organising capacity. Sometimes - if there are sufficient of them - they attend, but keep to themselves, apart from their "academic" colleagues. Seldom are they there, in a purely social capacity, mingling with their colleagues on academic conditions, as equals.

Very often these "non-academic" staff are black. Very often their "academic" colleagues are white. But not always. And, in my experience, the black "academics" are more likely to attend than the "non-academics" of any shade - beyond those who are required to be present in an organisational capacity. The class distinctions persist even beyond the "racial" ones, it seems.

Part of the reason for this perhaps lies in what happens at many of these things. They may be termed "social", and there may be eating and drinking and music - but often the discussion sounds awfully similar to that which one would hear on an average day in the tea room, the passage, the staff meeting. Work. An interesting discussion with an Honours student where terms like "intertextuality" and "genre" are more likely to feature than "babelas" or "bokkie", or some grumbles about space allocation, or non-recurrent budget impacting on teaching load. And, of course, mutters about rising administrative load and decreasing administrative support. (Discussions on cricket don't count. Cricket is by all observable accounts a routine part of the average academic's day.)

So what do "non-academic" staff discuss when they get together? Rising administrative load, decreasing (central) administrative support - generally framed as "Bremner / Faculty shoving more stuff at us without the resources to do it" - and... patronising, hostile or arrogant attitudes of academics. Patronising, hostile or arrogant attitudes of students. Things that sound, to an uninformed ear, awfully like... work. (Not much cricket. But then cricket isn't really a routine part of the average "non-academic's" day.)

If social mixing across the divide is to succeed, perhaps the first step would be some kind of consciousness-raising process to enable staff to discover that there is some kind of life beyond work... and that it's OK to admit to having one, really.

One of the fun aspects of the power outages has been the discovery that cellphones can have a use beyond mere irritation value. In the throes of last weeks frequent and unpredictable outages, students were using them as torches to find their way into, and out of, the labyrinthine darkened passages of subterranean floors of Beattie and Arts, to illuminate darkened noticeboards containing critical information, and to shed light on their note-taking endeavours in pitch-dark lecture venues.

Those of us stuck without landlines found them useful to phone down to Isengard to enquire the time of meetings we suspected we might have agreed to, and text colleagues updates on the location of last warm water lurking in a hydroboil for a desperate cup of plastic coffee.

The radio function also allowed some contact with the outside world, with "up to the minute" news broadcasts from local radio stations allowing us access to the spin doctors from Eskom and the City Council and anyone else who had something vacuous to say on the matter.

Holding a cellphone to one's ear also became a useful means of avoiding eye-contact with manic colleagues desperate to know when this was all going to go away, while grabbing the opportunity to tell you just how awful it all was, how the contents of their fridge were rotting as you spoke, and god only knows how they were going to cook supper for their extended family who were arriving that evening from Uzbhekistan.

Cell numbers also became a hot commodity. The cell number for the ED: P&S was trading for more than that of the EDICT; while those of local links in the chain like the keeper of the keys were the top sellers. All over Campus, bins are overflowing with discarded SIMS as people discard discovered cell numbers and resort to new PAYG SIMS in a desperate bid for anonymity.

And then there were those who "lost" their phones...

The spam onslaught continues unabated. Cleaning out one's daily dose does seem like a pernicious waste of time, generally, but I've discovered that it has an educational aspect as well.

For example, much of the spam assailing these blogs purports to arrive from, or via, eastern Europe. I'm sure much can be made of that by someone with the interest to do so.

Of further interest to me has been the content of the spam. I've discovered that Levitra and Cialis are alternatives to Viagra, and that someone, somewhere, thinks Britney Spears posters are a good idea. (Perhaps the wimpy mechanic's alternative to Lolo Ferrari?). I've also discovered that dogs are raced somewhere, that diet pills have the least imaginative names, and that you can buy migraine medication online without prescription. Huh?

Anyone who's had a migraine will know that the medication leaves you hungover and feeling not much better than the migraine which had you grabbing for it in the first place, so it's unlikely to be highly prized as a recreational drug. Presumably, then, those people buying it are doing so for its intended purpose. So... why the need to go online, under the counter?

I can't somehow picture someone beset by an incipient migraine, their head exploding and their eyes doing a 1970s disco revival, going to sit down at the PC and trawl through their spam for an illicit source of Sumatriptin. Quicker, surely, to pick up the phone and grunt at the local pharmacist, who will supply against your standing prescription and send Speedy Gonzales around on his motorbike to deliver...?

Then again, I've heard that some men get headaches from Viagra, so perhaps it's a prophylactic measure when ordering that?

Quite fun, these power outages. Well, watching people tumble down like skittles on the dark dangerous stairways of the Arts Block is perhaps only fun if you've pushed them, but other aspects of the outages certainly rank up there with marks processing and salary negotiations and all the other things people do for "fun" at UCT.

One of these fun aspects is the necessity to speak to people rather than simply firing off a message electronically. And, when the phones are down, to speak to them face-to-face. Instead of three lines of text saying "please switch off and unplug all delicate electronic equipment because the power is unstable and prone to spikes and dips which can cause costly, inconvenient or heart-rending damage", sent unilaterally, one has an interaction. One reconnects with people long last _seen_, exchanges social cues as well as just information, and one also collects - input, comment, anecdote, feedback. Cautionary tales about Brenda's daughter's hairdryer that spontaneously burst into flame in the middle of the night, or The Atrium transformer that fried, or the husband that received an electric shock on opening the fridge, add texture to formal emails issued from ICTS about the risks of undisciplined power wreaking havoc on susceptible equipment.

Another is the "downtime" that forces one into contemplatory activities rather than the kneejerk automaton mode much of one's working day demands. One suddenly finds oneself with time to read, to reflect, to review. Meaning, as well as action, line up for acknowledgement as products of one's daily labour. The sunset looks different.

But perhaps the most fun comes from watching people's reactions. Most people fray rather rapidly around the edges, and - confronted with their own powerlessness (of all kinds), some project a kind of omnipotence onto others. And so one gets shouted at for things entirely outside of one's sphere of influence, such as ICTS installation schedules, the inability to teach due to infrastructural unavailability, or the apparently conflicting messages one receives from different sources within the Institution.

But perhaps the best part of the outages has been the unplugging of the hideous handdryers, and the reappearance of handtowels, in the cloakrooms.

The Faculty of Humanities is proud to unveil its new 125-seater undergraduate computer laboratory, on the Ground Floor of the Beattie Building (next to the Bessie Head lab). This new lab - tastefully designed to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of Humanities students - is now in need of a name which will reflect its location within the Humanities Faculty of the University of Cape Town.

Please submit the name you propose for the lab, together with a brief motivation and your contact details (name, daytime contact number or email address) in writing in one of the specially marked boxes , or via email to vicki@humanities.uct.ac.za by 17h00 on Tuesday 28 February 2006.

The winner will receive a beautiful new 512MB Nerdstick with which to impress their friends.

Please note: This competition is only open to bona fide UCT students and staff.

 (More)

Blogs are like tamagotchis. If you neglect them, they die. Like those electronic pets that pushed countless primary school teachers into nervous breakdowns, blogs require regular feeding, attention, and care.

And so yesterday, after a long hard day in meetings and fighting my way through swathes of urgent email, it was time to attend to my blog. I clicked on the bookmark, and waited while the browser attempted to resolve the host.

"Networking problem", the error message reported. I decided that perhaps blog neglect was not as severe as child neglect, and went off to shrug on the parenting role.

But only briefly. At home, the discomfort of an email inbox bursting with urgent, unread mail prompted me to crank up the computer and go online. And once online, my conscience prickled me - my blog! I clicked the bookmark.... time out!

In my inbox was a mail from ICTS announcing that they'd disconnected the link connecting the chunk of the universe that contained the Blog server, because of a rogue DHCP server sowing chaos and destruction. Curses!

Fortunately the rogue was traced, neutralised, and the link restored, during the course of the morning. The blogspot was back. The tamagotchi, in suspended animation, came back to life and demanded attention. And, as you can see, received it.

Flags, and probably consulates, are burning over the publication in some European media of cartoons deemed blasphemous. Locally, one was carried by the Mail and Guardian on Friday, prompting a pre-emptive court-order barring the Sunday media from publishing any further. Outrage was the order of the day.

The Sunday Independent, which claimed that it had had no intention of carrying the cartoons, was incensed at this assault on its Freedoms. The Sunday Times probably expressed similar sentiments, but as I don't read it, I can't say for sure. The editor of the Mail and Guardian apologised for having published - after her mother was taken to task.

Much of the discussion in my vicinity centred around just how offensive the cartoons were, anyway - and whether the global response was within proportion. And whether a judge from a different religious background would have been of the same view, locally. Did the cartoon - at least, the one we saw - constitute an assault on the dignity of Muslims, I asked a selection of my Muslim friends. Views ranged, predictably, from those who thought that Muslims, like anyone else, were free to boycott media which carried things they didn't like, to those that thought that in the current context of global assaults on Islam, anything defamatory was inflammatory and best suppressed.

But, that said, most confessed to finding the cartoon very funny. Which raised that awkward dilemma - do you laugh at an offensive joke if it's funny? There seemed informal consensus that only the group who were the "target" of the joke had the right to laugh, that everyone else should shake their heads in outrage and disgust - but often these things had more than one potential "target". I'm quite sure that what I found offensive about the cartoon published in the M&G would not be the same as some Taliban official, and we'd probably identify different entities as the "butt" of the joke.

On the other side of the globe, censorship was drawing flak from a different source. Google had finally buckled and instituted censorship to keep on the right side of the Chinese State. The outcry across the planet was resounding - Google, that anti-Microsoft, had given in! As C3PO would say, "we're doomed!"

Are we? In the 1980s, repressive legislation prevented reporting on a host of political and other matters. Did this stop the truth from emerging? Not remotely - it merely stopped people from believing in the media as a comprehensive source of information. Only those who wanted the comfortable reassurance of State propaganda elected to believe it - the rest of us sought our information elsewhere, and found enough to support our suspicions. A closed portal is no match for an open mind.