In the New World with its blend of African and European culture,  there is a “displaced” beat. It is not just 1 and 3 like European or 2 and 4 from African, it’s displaced, or mixed. This beat is often called a swing/tango beat. It shows up in current songs as a habenera beat. Music written by white people is definitely faster beat than compared to the African culture. Never really thought about that until today. O’Malley brought up an example in class that I have seen before. If you’re walking the streets of Washington D.C., you sometimes see people with paint buckets on the street. They use these paint buckets as drums and the beat they use is the same as go go music, or the displaced beat.  Music is opaque, or formal. Someone like me, does not understand the analyzing of the song or really thinks about it. I just say something like “oh yeah i like the beat.” Really digging deep into music I still can’t grasp my head around doing. Hopefully by the end of this semester after taking this class that will change.

Minstrel shows were a very strange phenomenon. They emerged from European traditions, but in the US in 1830, it consisted of working class white men dressing up in black face. These men imitated black music and dance forms. Does this show a fond for the African American culture or is it making fun of them? It’s both. They are expressing normally forbidden longings. This was calling the attention of “whiteness” and not “blackness.” Meaning that when someone would see the show, they would ask: “Why is this white guy wearing a black face?” I think this is very strange and don’t see how this could have ended up being a good thing. I mean is it not disrespectful to the African American community, having white people dress as them? This is also more common than I thought. The song Dixie, is about the south written for white people to be sung in black face. Too old of an example? How about the famous examples of bugs bunny or mickey mouse? They are technically dark colored body characters with white face. These are all minstrel characters. The minstrel shows were popular back in the 1830s and still to this day we can find it? 50 cent himself is a popular black rapper who has a different persona’s when on stage then in public places. Is this also an example from the minstrel times? It sure is. In our current society, there are numerous racial stereotypes that are present; yet we laugh at them or fail to acknowledge their presence. Many people blame minstrel shows for the exploiting and dehumanizing the African American race. There are still so many unanswered questions I have or the public has about these Minstrel shows.

Signal to noise ratio is complicated in most working fields. Reverberation you can control, and also you can control sound. Sound is disaggregated from the natural world. For example, in a movie, they can operate how the sound is controlled. Telephony is the signal of the voice and noise was just “background” noise like static or buzzing. The farther your voice travels, the more it tends to deteriorate. The farther the signal had to go, the worse it gets. You can’t hear someones voice from New York to California.  An example of the signal to noise ratio being a problem is when a child asks a mother “hey can I borrow the car this weekend?” and the mother will respond with “you need to clean your room, do your homework, etc. in order to do that.” In a child’s mind, they are just hear blah blah blah, like static. This is a problem.

Claude Elwood Shannon started using digital communication using “yes” “no” answers. Doesn’t this work in real life? Everything is a yes no answer. One Thing Elwood is most famous for is The Mathematical Theory of Communication. He says “It is important to note that information as understood in information theory has nothing to do with any inherent  meaning in a message.” For him, information was related to uncertainty; the more uncertainty the more information. For example, in English, the “U” following the letter “Q” has no uncertainty and thus contains no information. When googling things, it does not care about meaning. It just searches “trigrams” which are a group of letters by each other to find what you are looking for. I can see his point of view with this and would have to agree with it. If it has no uncertainty it is almost ignored.

After World War II, the United States became the biggest military industrial complex. The U.S. is by far the biggest arms dealer to this day.  Max Weber argued that the key invention of the modern age (1880-1890) is information management, or record keeping. He said the world is rationalized. After the Civil War, the north has to deliver pensions to the widows or injured soldiers. This was a big big job! Montgomery Meigs was responsible for making sure the union army was well supplied. He is low key given credit for letting the north win the war. You’re excited about the Civil War. How do you join? You join as a member of the state division. Uniforms are not standardized; you could make your own. Meigs starts to change that. He imagines people as a “collection of sizes.” He makes everyone wear the same uniform and measures them. This is an example from Weber’s record keeping and rationalization. Another example is how back in the day when they were trying to store millions of records, they had nothing to store them in. They need a file cabinet. This is starting to be rationalized. Vannevar Bush during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, through which almost all wartime military research was carried out, including the Manhattan Project. He is also known in engineering for his work on analog computers and for the memex, a hypothetical adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of hypertext. In 1945, Bush published the essay “As We May Think” in which he predicted that “wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified”. He was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation.

Technology alters perception and makes us different kinds of selfs. One topic we went over in class is the ability to memorize. When Socrates was teaching Plato, he went over how writing crippled that ability. Socrates feared that students would be deceived that they were gaining knowledge from the written word, when they were really only obtaining data. The ultimate result, he argued, was that knowledge would be relegated to the printed page, rather than being internalized and having the opportunity to build our character and shape our worldview. When you look up a video on YouTube how to play a song, for example, on the violin, you really are only memorizing how to play the song. But if you were asked to read the music or learn in person, you would not be able to.  I think if new technology successfully pushes aside the benefits of books, humanity may become less contemplative, reflective, and imaginative. In my personal opinion, I do not read books for fun. I can never get into them. But I also feel like that is because that is how I was brought up. Surprisingly, through my years of school, I was never forced to read. I obviously read the book for this class because I had to, but I was not interested at all. Now the book did though have some valid points. Throughout history humanity has always shaped its thinking to interact with people. Now, we’re shaping our thinking to interact with machines. As the lines between human and computer interaction continue to blur, we may find we are reshaping ourselves in the technology’s image. We are becoming, in a manner of speaking, more machine-like. Professor O’Malley in class kept saying this one sentence over and over again: “The medium is the message.” This is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in any message it would transmit or convey, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. He identified the light bulb as a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. As society’s values, norms, and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to effects we are not yet aware of.