History of the Information Age — Fall 2011

Of all the articles discussed this past Tuesday and Thursday, I found the new hacker ethics the most interesting because of the difference between what hackers believed in during the 90s and how hackers are perceived today.  The hacker culture of the 90s seemed to have more ethical values in contrast to hackers today and normally what people think of hackers.  The first so-called “rule” Steve Mizrach discusses in this article is that hackers of the 90s do not try to harm.  It seems that they intend to uproot the precedent of hiding information from the general public’s access.  Other beliefs the hackers held were the idea of sharing information and keeping private information private.  In comparison to hackers today or what people believe hackers are like today these morals do not hold true.  It seems that present day hackers intend to harm sometimes as much as they can.  The concept that private information should not be hacked is also at stake today because the “line” where hackers are allowed to hack and not to infiltrate is left up to the hacker.  I think that this is where one can can the transformation from the typical 90s hacker to the typical hacker of today because what is left up to the hacker in the ethics of the 90s.  The hackers can push the boundary of what is ethical or not because the line is up to them.

In his most recent post, bakhtinjali discussed what our group is doing for the next InfoAge assignment – making a documentary about the transition in libraries from card catalogues to digital databases. I feel that this topic is extremely relevant to this class for a number of reasons. While it may seem like a minor detail in the transition to the modern age, I think many people don’t realize the implications of a digital database of material has on the searchablilty of information. Card catalogues were entirely dependent on the organization skills of the librarians (or part-timers) who worked at the library. Even if the librarians were meticulous about card placement, it would be extremely difficult to search. There was so much chance for human error, both on the part of the librarians and the library users. Moreover, it would be all but impossible for librarians to keep track of popular subject searches, making it difficult to ascertain what materials should be removed from circulation. While there are still flaws with the current system, the switch has improved the usability of libraries by leaps and bounds. But I cannot imagine that the transition was an easy one. There are still flaws with the current system – imagine what it was like when libraries were using DOS. I think this evolution will be fascinating to track, and I look forward to starting on this project!

Over the next couple of weeks, the information age class will be considering events in the digital age. Like our last project, Dr. McClurken has asked us to participate in a less than conventional project. We will produce a documentary, perhaps even of epic proportions. We have a considerable amount of work ahead of us. I have never done this sort of project before, but with enough foresight and good effort, I believe we can all have a fun and engaging project.

My group decided to pursue the shifts from card catalogs to digital databases. It’s a small detail, but the change surely has major consequences for librarians and borrowers who trained in and grew up with the card catalog. In trying to find individuals who could take part in the documentary, we need to consider librarians who have extensive exposure to the older system. My initial conversation with a younger librarian on campus demonstrated that the shift from card to electronic is not that recent.

Why this project? Well, unlike the last project, we do in fact have an idea that relates more directly to the information age than weight-gaining products. The choice of library cataloging practices is an excellent one. We will seek to understand how the change occurred, its impact, and implications. Given that I have never been stuck with a card catalog system, I have no idea how one would search for a book without effortlessly searching with keywords and phrases. The way you search for information shapes how you think of information, understand what information is available.

Obvious interviewees for completing this project are older librarians. Perhaps additional interviewees should include users who have worked with both systems. I wonder if such an approach would make our documentary too broad, given that we only have a 5-10 minute limit. With that issue in mind, we may have to consider how to narrow our questions down to a specific issue.

As I was looking over some techy news I came across a avery interesting article about car chargers for your phone.  There is a new product called a Ray solar charger which you can attach to pretty much anything.  It can be put on a car window, an airplane window, or outside on a table.  As long as It is out in the sun, and your phone is plugged in it will charge it.  This sounded absolutely amazing and could totally change the way we think of charging devices.  We are always so reliant on having a plug to charge our phones and this could totally change that.  This could make access to charging our phones more accessible and change some of our electrical dependancy and I think it has some real potential.

So for my print add group’s topic, we chose to research and create a Tupperware add meant to recruit women to be Tupperware dealers.  While there weren’t any adds that we found of the same nature, we felt that it fit well with the theme we were after and that it wouldn’t be a stretch to create an add of this nature from scratch.  The purpose behind this idea was that Tupperware parties acted as a sort of social gathering for post war suburban women who were delighted to find social networks after being displaced from the job force.

In our group, I was the photo editor.  I also initially proposed the idea, which was slow to be received.  It was a long shot, but the more we talked about Tupperware as a spread of information, the more sense it made.  Claire was quick to head to the library and start initial research, while Ken rushed to a friend’s house to snap some real life shots of some “vintage” tupperware.  Christine and myself began searching for photos to use to put together for that perfect vintage 1950′s add look.

I think the hardest part of the project was not only finding the time to meet up during fall break, but finding a design for the add that everyone agreed on.  After landing on a design, we then worked on the slogan.  I initially just ran with something as improv to get an idea of fonts and sizes, but we ended up sticking with the main parts, only making small adjustments to add the benefits of selling tupperware in the middle.

To conclude, I am truly looking forward to this next project and the ability to embark on a project that I have NO experience with what so ever, film.  I have never touched a film editing program, so it should be exciting to see what we can come up with.

Putting together the radio advertisement was a new experiece for me, given that it was the first time I’ve ever had to do a multi-media history project that was not simply a PowerPoint presentation. Keeping the advertisement at a length of two minutes was not something that I was concerned about until we actually started recording. This project involved a good deal of research on both radio advertisement and printing methods, and so finding the right way to condense everything to meet the time limit could have been incredibly problematic. Fortunately, we managed to do that without any real problem, but it was still worth being aware of the possibility.

We presented on our advertisement this week, and explained to the class how each of us came to the decisions we did vis a vis the advertisement. For me, that involved discussing my thought process and how I analyzed the advertisements we looked at in order to decide on fonts and stylistic elements to include in the ad.

In choosing ads to focus on, I looked exclusively at a couple that seemed illustrative of ads from the 1930s and 40s, both of which come from The F Word blog.

Because the fonts employed in the image on the right were unique–i.e., did not appear in other ads from the time–I chose to mimic the fonts used in the advertisement on the left. Stylistically, the image on the right was otherwise more representative of the majority of the advertisements. A rounded, darker bubble highlighting the headline text was quite common, as was repetition of the word “Skinny.” The fonts I chose for the body of the text was the closest I could find to the serifed, old-style font used in both of these (and in many of the other) advertisements. The style of headings in a bolder font and the non-emphasized words in the headline being in a bolder font were also mimicked from these and other advertisements.

Our group decided to create a print advertisement that focused on the social aspect of new groups being founded for women around tupperware parties. It was an interesting approach and a great idea to focus on the changes in the social status of women during the 1950s because of Tupperware parties. Not only did Tupperware allow women to become a financial aspect of home life it created an idea of the early coffee houses for women.

For the project I was able to take photographs of actual Tupperware supplied by a friend of mine who has well over a hundred pieces of unique and one of a kind items she has collected over the years as her mother did host several Tupperware parties. I also helped in creating the slogan for our advertisement. While researching the advertisements of the time period, catchy slogans were a large focus of the print. Overall the project while challenging was fun to work on.

For the advertisement project, I was responsible for coming up with the print for the body of one of the advertisements. I enjoyed looking at the various 1940’s Wurlitzer advertisements and trying to figure out what style they used back then when writing their advertisements. I noticed that in order to grab the audience’s attention, they started out by asking rhetorical questions. When coming up with the written portion of my advertisement, I tried to use a similar style. I tried to base the questions off of the fact that the purpose of the advertisement was to get people to go to places that had Wurlitzer music. The purpose of the advertisement was not to sell the actual Wurlitzer jukeboxes. Our group added a twist to the project as well. We aimed our advertisements towards modern hipsters since the 1940’s advertisements were aimed towards hipsters at that time. After doing some research on the 1940’s hipsters and modern hipsters, I tried to come up with catchy phrases that appealed to modern hipsters. It was definitely harder than I thought it was going to be to use a style similar to the 1940’s advertisements but write the advertisement for a modern audience.