WAVES
What is Waves?
Nope, not quite like the ones from the ocean. However, we swim in these waves all the time! They pass by us nearly everywhere, invisible to the naked eye. Are you picking up my signal now?
Invisible Waves is metaLAB's latest multimodal project that, according to the project lead Sarah Newman, "seeks to understand, demystify, and visualize various radio frequency technologies (including Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth, and satellite) that provide the scaffolding for 21st-century information and communication technologies. The invisibility of technology infrastructures is varied. Some are invisible because they are literally out of sight—server farms, submarine cables, and under- or over-ground wiring. This project focuses on those that are invisible because their signals are in the form of radio waves outside of the visible spectrum. Some examples include the pulsing of Bluetooth, the cellular connection via triangulated towers, and the wireless signal to a wired router."
Radio waves, while largely ignored or misunderstood, are essential to our lives in the 21st century. What would our lives be like without radio wave technologies? As Harvard College student Eli Visio notes, "Pretty much all of the things that are important to the current way of human life, like our economy, government systems, communication systems, would all be disrupted. It would cause an uproar." The metaLAB Waves project, according to Newman, focuses on the "uncanniness of the massive amounts of information moving invisibly around us, supporting our daily lives."
I am a member of the Waves team, specifically part of the research workstream that focuses on public perception of radio waves. Throughout the summer, my team (Maggie Chen, Taylor Bledsoe, and I) interviewed diverse people about their perceptions and understandings of these commonly used technologies that transmit information invisibly.
"I have discovered that this interview is going to be just a showcase of my ignorance," Harvard Professor David Atherton replied, chuckling, in response to our team's first question. To open the interview, we gave all interviewees a basic scenario about wireless technology. It could be as simple as pointing to the screen and asking, "What is your best guess about how information is transmitted in this Zoom call from my location to yours?" We emphasized that it was perfectly okay for our participants to take long pauses, to stop and think, to guess, or to be as creative as possible. After some chin-scratching and ceiling-gazing, most interviewees confidently described many of the elements involved but admitted they didn't know much more beyond that. This can be captured in education consultant Amy Chiu's thoughts: "I know I'm in the right direction. Like, I know things have to be installed. I know there are cell towers, hotspots...It's like the specifics where I'm like, 'I don't know how that works.'" When trying to describe Wi-Fi, software engineer Richard Zhang notes that what he described was like "just the steering wheel of a car, and there's like the rest of the car..." So, our interviewees seemed to be quite aware that they were missing the biggest chunks of the puzzle. For others, "magic" was also a popular answer! If Eli could be as creative as possible, "There's some wizard somewhere doing that." Similarly, Professor Atherton reflected, "At least at that very last stage, it's coming to me wirelessly, which to me is like magic. I don't really know how that works.""
So far, there has been no mention of "waves" or radio waves. Satellites and signals, sure. But, no one seemed to associate wireless technology with anything sinusoidal in shape—at least not at first. After I specifically asked interviewees what came to mind when I said the term "radio waves," the lightbulb moments were fascinating! Harvard College student Navya Ramakrishnan says, "It rings a bell of learning in school, like the [electromagnetic] spectrum, microwaves, radio waves." University of Maryland student Aarushi Dubey says, "The first thing that comes to mind is a diagram from seventh grade with all those different waves and their electro-radiation numbers listed." She knows music/audio speakers use it "because it was one of the icons on the diagram." Most interestingly, Atherton, who is a professor of East Asian Literature, excitedly mentions that the Chinese science fiction novel he's currently reading involves "sending and receiving information to and from space using radio wave technology." It turns out that this is not science fiction.
Our team then wondered how people would imagine these signals would look if they could see all the signals and waves around them. Aarushi suggests, "If I ever saw someone saying, 'Oh, do you want to put on sunglasses, and you can see all the waves in the world?' I feel like that would be so cool." Duke University student Peter Banyas says, "It would probably be like going from seeing things in black-and-white to seeing things in color." For Terry Zebulske, a retired professor of Kinesiology, maybe our world would be like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs! According to him, "It would be like bombarding, like unbelievable...for anything emitting any kind of source of waves…hitting and bouncing. It's crazy, like spaghetti!"
While a virtual tour of waves was interesting to many, some are also wary that it could be startling. Why? For some interviewees, the waves would look like "pollutants," making them "overstimulated." Richard poses the question, "Can you imagine just trying to go to bed, and then you just see a glow around your room. That'd be horrible, right?" Others like Aarushi believe that "[some] people might be like, 'Oh, my God, I'm being affected by all these waves right now in an unhealthy way.'" Navya similarly expressed, "I feel like this whole 'waves' thing is a little bit scary for people. Just in general, the proximity...even growing up standing in front of the microwave, my mom would be like 'No!'"
Jumping on the train of rumors and theories, what exactly were our interviewees hearing about cellular technologies and radio waves?
"5G causes COVID." (Remember this one, 2021?)
"If you fall asleep near an electronic device, that's gonna mess with your brain."
"Radio waves cause cancer or autism."
"If you wear headphones for too long, people say the radio waves and technology will go into your head."
"I [remember] watching an episode of The Simpsons, where the baseball player Mark McGwire is wearing a tinfoil hat and saying, 'Major League Baseball is beaming messages into our brains. That was like that conspiracy idea even before I was born, like, the government can beam stuff in your head."
You must be wondering by now: Are radio waves harmful in any capacity? Are they anything like radiation? Many of our interviewees frequently conflated the terms "radio waves" and "radiation." Depending on what one knows about radiation, calling radio waves "radiation" can (very understandably) create a lot of concern. Radio waves are indeed a form of electromagnetic radiation, as are gamma rays and visible light. However, we need to make a distinction between the two types of radiation: ionizing radiation (radioactivity) like that of nuclear power plants and non-ionizing (low energy) radiation. Radio waves have photons with the lowest energy on the spectrum and because their radiation is NON-ionizing (i.e. our molecules are not altering), they are harmless to humans. Gamma rays, a type of ionizing radiation on the other hand, have very high energy and frequency, so you definitely do not want to enter a room with those. But a room with a bunch of AM/FM radios and mobile phones? You'll be absolutely fine.
Naturally, most of us don't fully understand the workings of our new technologies, their effects on our bodies, and the highly complex scientific concepts behind them. It is also quite understandable how our inability to say that something is absolutely safe can drive fear. So, until we take the initiative to research and learn, we may find ourselves susceptible to believing, and even generating, unfounded claims.
This brings us to our team's next question: When are people willing to take the initiative and learn about something like this? When do people even care? Well, Amy admitted that "Gen Z, like [her] and [her] brother, are not sitting around talking about how [this] works. That's not [their] go-to conversation." Okay, touché, that's not my first topic of conversation with my sister either. But, if you're an online high school student like Ryan Jett, when the signal goes bad, it does become the conversation. He explains it as: "It's like, if something technology-wise breaks, you kind of panic, and you have a heart attack, you know? My printer is out or like, my keyboard doesn't work, then it's like your world's falling apart." Amy also gives us a #relatable example: "So [my friend] was telling me stories of what went on on her weekend, and...it kept chopping up. I kept on saying 'oh, is it you? Is it me?' I was like, 'what do I even do to make it less choppy?'" Even if it is an edge case, Peter reflected "when I'm driving down the road through the mountains and I'm wondering, 'why do I have no service?', [I know] it's probably because the signals and the waves aren't getting through the natural obstacles."
Connectivity truly does mean connection to online high school student Honor Hawkes, who said that "the internet is kind of [her] bridge for education. It's like [her] software environment." Speaking of online education, Educator Amy Braswell explained how, when COVID-19 began, her teaching style changed overnight. She reflected, "I had never heard of Zoom...and on March the 13th...everybody's popping up on the screen, it looked like the Brady Bunch with like 50 people." Looking back to those uncertain times, in places without a reliable Internet and technology infrastructure, it was an unideal situation for many students who had to choose between continuing their education and limiting their exposure to the disease. Despite losing the crucial in-person dynamics of a classroom, those privileged enough to continue their education online were able to do so using internet-enabled tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams. Outside of education, during lockdown, Eli said that "even though [technology] didn't replace face to face interaction, "it made [him] feel less lonely because [he] could FaceTime [his] friends and do Netflix-Zoom sessions with people."
While COVID-19 is largely behind us, it left an indelible mark on our lives, particularly for us students. According to Aarushi, "Nothing's paper-based anymore. And, nothing is in-person-based either...Now things have become a bit more asynchronous." Difficult circumstances have pushed us to adapt to and grow with technology, which brings us to our team's last question. Generally, would a better understanding of technologies and their science change the way people use them? Honor explained that "understanding something always helps you navigate it better, like if you understand a trail, then you're gonna be able to walk better on that trail." Similarly, Eli asserted that if he understood the technical side, "[he'd] probably be more aware of other people in society, and how all of our individual actions impact all of us in aggregate culture." Research coordinator Sam Huang said that wireless has "always kind of been something vague...that's just kind of in the air. And it pings off these nondescript things just lying around...So having these physical components that are so vital for it, it makes it seem more real."
So, yes, the signals and waves around us are not readily visible—most probably for a good reason. As many of our interviewees said, light pollution can become quite annoying and scary. Yet, that doesn't change the fact that radio waves do exist and are critically important to how we function every day. And not too long ago, when we lived in isolation for months on end, they dictated our every day. Sometimes, *magic* seems to be the only way to explain how these technologies work and even how integrated they've become in our every move. Yet, there could be even more wonders awaiting your discovery if you just peek behind the curtain.