History of the Information Age — Fall 2011

For my final project I decided to pair up with Abby and standardize all the citations on the timeline.  This was a challenge for me since I have never excelled at footnotes or citations in general.  I considered this to be a great challenge that I would over come and I did.  I got encouragement along the way from Abby and I was grateful to have her as my partner.  We got tripped up at first on how we were going to do the citations, however after that hiccup we were well underway.  We choose the style of the citation standardization with Professor McClurken and then sat down and did visual sketches of each type of citation we could possibly come across.  This helped me immensely considering I am a visual learner by nature.  Once shown I can almost always pick it up.  Abby and I discussed things like putting image source and source in front of all citations where they were warranted to help visitors to our blog understand what they were individually.

I enjoyed this challenge and hope to carry this with me into the future.  The things that I can look forward to taking with me through my college career is the ability to be better at public speaking, knowing how to make a documentary, and better understanding the digital world around me and how it and I effect the future of our history for the better or worse.  I think my favorite assignment in the class would have to be the print ad.  I had great partners and we had some really good ideas.  It was fun to take this random topic and do what you see only in magazines.  It was highly challenging, but I felt as though it brought our group that much closer and bonded us through out the semester.

If I could give a word of advice to my peers coming to take this class.  Don’t think this will be easy.  There will be times when you want to pull you hair out and just scream cause you don’t know what you are doing.  However that’s where the fun begins.  This class is not an individual effort it’s a group effort.  Without one it’s not the same as having all.  And remember while it may be stressful, have fun with it.

And in the spirit of the holidays. Merry Christmas!

My Christmas in my apartment style dwellings.

So this week we discussed further on issues of how to make places like JSTOR and others free.  It was interesting to see that this is a worthy concept but in some ways impossible.  Realizing that while things like the internet archive has minimal help is just amazing.  And if we even need it.  It was interesting what we learned.

So the past few weeks in class have been interesting.  Leading discussions with Mike was awesome.  The conversations that were sparked and even built upon this past week was amazing.  Then we had the documentary and man was that difficult.  There were several occasions as editor of the video that I just wanted to throw up my hands and scream.  Nothing seemed to be working and everything just seemed to fail.  However I didn’t quit til I was past the finish line.  Doing a study on tutorials was an interesting choice for this documentary considering we used tutorials a lot to finish this documentary.  I think there were trying to times in our group when we had to redo things to make them work, but in the end we got them to work.

For me personally I think this was a good experience after having gone through it.  I wish that we all had had access to programs like Adobe Premier, but we didn’t.  It looked like it was a lot of fun to create things in it, however Windows Movie Maker was a curve enough for some of us (like me).  I think the most challenging part I found was actually getting the thing to work and be able to reopen it and do what was needed.

It was interesting this week not only being a presenter but also doing the advertisement project.  I know I  was terrified to be presenting or leading the discussion this week.  However I thought this was an interesting topic of Hackers and Hacking culture.  I was really fortunate to have such great group members as I did.  However with the advertisement project I was surprised to find that while it was hard it wasn’t as hard as I thought it was.  Anthony deserves a big round of applause for his work.  Me and him spent many nights up trading back and forth ideas for the poster.  Ken also did amazing work with the pictures and the slogan.  And Claire was awesome in the research.  I did research and helped out on the research and slogan.  It was interesting looking through the pages of Life Magazine.  There were a lot of odd slogans and advertisements.  There were more half naked women in those ads than I thought.  However looking through the ads helped me and Anthony to design the one that we came up with.  It was something we all in the group noticed in the ads being more of a either  a slogan or a paragraph of text.  We figured that we should go with a paragraph of text at the bottom for sure.

After all this talk of the Internet and various other things to do with the internet.  I found myself wondering what would the average college student do without the internet?  (The tragedy right?  We might actually have to enter the library once during our careers as undergrads)  Then it really hit home this week about the second Internet that was brought up last week (I believe).  The more secure internet driven for those in command who needed secrecy like that.  With the whole Gaddafi incident I wondered what would be the ramifications of a second Internet?  Would the common Americans feel as though this was another way for the government to hide things from them. I am an American who believes discloser to be a one sided affair with a semblance to a magic act.  Its all about how good the con artist truly is.  However with the video surfacing of Gaddafi being murdered by what looks to be a mob, I wondered how essential is our cell phones and their connection to the internet (and how brutal as a society that we can watch a video of Gaddafi sobbing for his life while he is beaten and then killed without blinking). Which then lead me to wondering in amazement at how far we have come since the advent of cells phone into the smartphone power houses we have now.

Also our print ad seems to be going really well.  There was a sense of community as we came together to do it.  Everyone got a say and a voice and we tried many different things.  I have to thank Anthony for his amazing work on our project.  It really came together well.  Now what we have to do is our sources and citations and we are good.  I really thought our group did well on this stressful project hahaha.

This week was interesting.  I like how we discussed the realities of the Native peoples and their call to service.  It was an interesting development between that and culture.  When you think back on American history you would rightly consider the hard feelings and the massive distrust between those of the native peoples and the government.   How hard must it have been to serve the government that had lied and taken everything from your peoples?  I certainly couldn’t have done it.

The Enigma exercise was certainly interesting.  It gave a true sense to what these people, code crackers, certainly faced.  Even if it was on a small scale it was truely hard.  I can only imagine with the system and machine they had how long and painstaking the process was.  All in all, great week. And to learn that they are thinking of creating another version of the internet.  Man.  That’s really cool.

Also my group met in class and we discussed kind of what we wanted to do during our meeting coming up soon.  Since I will  be unable to meet with them this time, we were able to throw out ideas and things that we wanted to highlight in this session.  A lot of good ideas were being thrown around and I look forward to hearing what they group has discussed.

This week has certainly been something else.  My parents went out of town and I thought my house was being broken into.  Turns out it was an animal outside.  Gah stopped my heart for a minute.  Of course the only thing I had to help in my defense was a book.  Lame.  Anyways, I was thinking about the advertisement conversation we had this week.  The cultural ramifications of advertisement are amazing.  If you look into Japanese anime, you distinctly see a vast majority of individuals that don’t look Japanese but if you ask any Japanese person they will claim that it is, just an over fabricated individual.  However advertisements on a smaller scale could be classified as anything.  In our relationships, especially more with parent to child you can see subtle advertisements that not only link our relationships, but our emotions as well.  This can be why advertisements have stories.  It is a way that we can recognize with not only a company but also subtly link this to our daily lives.  In that way advertisement could be considered subtle brainwashing.

This week was rough. Seemed like everything was due at the same time. So stress to the max. However this week was interesting. While I was writing my paper on the radio we were comparing them in class. I found it very revealing the way radio just failed compared to the television. I loved the in class videos of the commercials. Ended up showing them to my family after class.

Edward Murrow began broadcasting in the 1940s during the outbreak of World War 2.[1]  His fame was accomplished by his ability to bring the war directly into countless American homes.  At this time radio was in nearly every American home, thus making it the mode of communication.  As many Americans sent loved one off to this dreaded war they held comfort that Murrow and his fellow war correspondents would tell them exactly what their loved ones faced.[2]  With an introduction of, “This…is London,” Murrow began his bright future that would eventually lead to a news correspondent job with CBS.[3]

Murrow’s bright career began in 1935 as a manager at CBS.  When the war broke out Murrow determined to make CBS’ “voice of authority” should be one of credited authority Murrow built a team from his fellow news staff.[4]  Murrow chose these individuals not on the radio experience but on their experience with European battlefields.  These fellow correspondents would be known as Murrow’s Boys.[5]  Murrow’s broadcasts found him on the roof tops of London buildings during the 1940’s German Blitz and flying in over twenty bombing missions over Berlin.  Bill Shadel, a Murrow Boy, was the first Allied correspondent to report on the Nazi death camps.[6]

Radio was the means to gather individuals together.  To gather around a radio was a clear and concise method that many families part took in either during dinner or after dinner, as is evident through Edward Murrow’s ‘I Believe’ radio broadcast.[7]  Radio back then was an avenue of connecting with the world.  An owner of a radio could hear any point of view from any number of multiple individuals from every walk of class, color and creed.[8]  Radio was their outside communication with the world when the war started.[9]

Today was interesting. I fell into a puddle, got lost down the rabbit hole and ended up soaked despite the use of an umbrella. This week was interesting. I learned a bunch about the postal service. From having barely thought about it because most things come in the emails, it was interesting to ponder it. It is no surprise that newspapers and the postal service have fallen on harder times. They both are being rendered obsolete in a sense. It figured to me that their current trends follow each other similarly because of this. Shall they follow together in what seems to be an inevitable downspiral? Maybe.

Just my two cents.