ABSTRACT
At the time of initially delivering this talk, I had just come from burying my father; at the time of finishing this text, I've just lit the yahrzeit candle for the first anniversary of his death. My father has been on my mind throughout my process of conceptualizing and finalizing my thoughts and has certainly been present whenever I've sat down, laptop and modem at hand, to work on it. My father and my memory of him are central to the theme of the original conference panel at the Wexner Center: technology, gender, the home. My only memory of overt physical conflict with my father (for violence was not a staple of interaction in our fairly repressed Bostonian family life) involved a disagreement about the telephone. Well, a fight actually. The memory is extraordinarily vivid, though not precise in its details. I remember my father's act of brutally ripping the telephone out of the wall—or perhaps he just ripped the line out of a jack? I'm not really sure, but either way, it left a lasting impression.
