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.

In class today, Professor O’Malley showed us a short clip of the movie Saving Private Ryan. He had said that there is nothing realistic about this movie. It conveys impossible scenarios that make them seem real. It shows you throughout the movie perspectives of different characters. At one moment you could be someone who was dying, the next you could be a NAZI, etc. It is unrealistic to be more than one person at a time or even be in more than one place. This technique is called parallel editing. It gives you a real feeling of emotion and power and makes you think about the world and yourself in different ways. O’Malley then asked the class the question of “Do movies imitate the way we have always thought?” We have been retrained to think by the narrative art forms of movies. The next topic brought up O’Malley started with “In 1776, slavery was common and so was indentured servitude. Why can’t I own one of you now?” No one in the class could answer that question. Yes it is against the law but that’s not the only answer. It is because modern people have a sense of divided self. For example, you have a job at Walmart, hate it, but still continue to work there. You cannot be owned but you decide to do things on your own. Modern technology is getting rid of that self-concept.

Today in class, Professor O’Malley brought up a topic called the Annihilation of Space and Time. To me, this was actually a very intriguing topic. The first example involved food. When you think about food, there is only certain kinds of foods that are offered at certain times of the year right? For example, we normally only eat corn and berries in the warmer weather months and potatoes, squash, and turnips in the colder months. Our diet is constricted by the place and time we are in. But now, however, with today’s modern technologies, food can be transported wherever so we can basically eat everything all year round. This is said to be radical dislocation. Now moving on, with the invention of the railroad systems and the telegraph, two obvious changes occurred: we had instant communication with distant places, and relatively rapid transit. These are all examples of the Annihilation of Space and Time because with these new technologies, it’s basically ignoring it! The next discussing was time zones. The time of day was a function of where you sat in space and was measured with the sun. People back in the day never followed the same time in the same area, so then what time really was it? See time in my opinion is an illusion to just keep each and every individual on track with a “schedule” for their day. The year 1880 was the beginning of the formation of regional time zones, also known as the “rearrangement of the authority that runs their lives.” The time of the day now had more to do with the telegraphic signals. The industrialization period forced regular clock hours. And as time goes on, more inventions are made. The invention of the telephone leads to the most important technologies. In 1900, motion pictures were common and so were phonograph recordings who Edison invented in 1877 which was used so dead people could talk to the dead (I know that is so not happening). And in 1905, flat disks were the most common form of music production. In a conclusion, today’s modern technologies has led to the annihilation of space and time.

I never knew what the Loudness War was until today, let alone there was a difference between the music being made today and the music from the past. The Loudness War is basically built on the idea that louder is better. However, this is flawed. People think it’s what helps them stand out from the crowd, but there is no connection between the “loudness” and the sales. Mr. O’Malley said this causes music to get flat, which in return makes the emotions flat. I don’t necessarily agree with this because like said before, people don’t notice this Loudness War, and for me personally, it does not make a difference. If I like a song, I like a song throughout the whole thing regardless of this “Loudness War.”  But of course this is different for everyone and some people do notice a change. Some people don’t notice it but do notice the dynamic of the song. That is what song writers should focus on. In class we also talked about idealism vs realism. I know for sure I am an idealist so there is no argument there. After all, I was in fact raised Catholic which Professor O’Malley said religious people are idealist but that’s not the only factor.