In Transit

On my way to South Africa for what promises to be a fascinating conference on African Technopolitics. I’m vaguely nervous as my paper has a goodly chunk of material from the chapter of my work-in-progress that has given me the most trouble. I don’t know what everyone else is going to make of it. The paper’s also rather repetitive as I wanted to deal with the problem of unpredictability in technological history on several levels and so found myself restating my points quite a lot just to be sure I was staying focused.

I’ve written quite a lot in this space about the importance of open access models of scholarly dissemination. If you want an absolutely fantastic example, go to the University of Natal-Durban’s Department of History website and click on the “Research” tab and follow the link to past seminar presentations. (There isn’t a direct URL, which is something that I gather is going to be fixed). It’s very basic, but how many departments of history or anthropology at major American research universities do you know that maintain anything like this sort of archive of presentations, seminars, or scholarly work?

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Right now I’m sitting in Heathrow, where I’ll be for another six hours or so. I flew out of JFK last night; I’ll get to Johannesburg tomorrow morning and then a quick flight from there to Durban. I’m right at that point where I’m starting to feel that weird, almost flu-like sense that comes from long transits in airports and airplanes.

I’m still struck at how hostile many airports are to the kind of travel that many people are obliged to pursue, particularly the inevitable lay-overs. JFK is the king of suck as far as flying goes: it’s possibly the worst major airport in the world. Inconvenient and expensive to get to, and very poor services once you’re there. Yesterday afternoon, I got to my terminal in time for the World Cup, but the bar with the television sets had big signs up saying, “No World Cup here”. I asked why, and the guy behind the bar shrugged and gave me a hostile glare. So about a hundred people crowded into one of the gate waiting areas where it was on TV, until finally a second bar opened during the second half and put it on the screen. Total hostility all around from the folks working the terminal except for the British Airways staff and oddly enough, the TSA guys, who were the nicest and most professional I’ve seen anywhere in the US.

Heathrow’s ok, but again, just no recognition of what contemporary travel entails. I asked the British Airways help desk if there were any power outlets for laptop users. Blank stare. Then, “There are computers you can put coins into over there!”. (A couple of terminals where you can pay for Internet service by the minute or something). I finally found a desk next to a power outlet in a Terminal 1 lounge. It’s the ONLY one I’ve found, and I’m not the only one to have found it, either. The guy using it before me clearly recognized it was a rare treasure. (There’s some T-Mobile kiosks where you can plug in, but they come with chairs that could be used as torture devices in Gitmo if they run out of waterboards.) There are a few other outlets here so I can recharge later today if I need to. Also there’s some nice lounging chairs here that let me get a bit of a nap, thank god, but again, there is nowhere near enough of them. You can see about forty covetous stares watching the current occupants of the lounge chairs, waiting for a vacancy.

I’m also a bit sick of LONG flights where everyone can power their laptops with an appropriate converter except for the people flying steerage. Come on, throw us a frikken bone here. On the 747 I was on last night, there was only one section that couldn’t plug in. It’s not much to ask when you’ve got your knees jammed into the seatback in front of you, etcetera.