I’m sorry I know this is delayed. I’ll get back on my game soon!

In this class, we learned of a new instrument, the steel guitar. The steel guitar is originally from Hawaii, but can generally be found in old-time country music and has positively impacted the blues. ( I don’t remember if he showed any modern time country music) Hawaiian music had also blended in with Christian hymns by the 1900’s. It was so popular that those in the US toured as Hawaiians, both original and pretenders. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, there is now a dislocation on Hawaiian music.  The class came to an end with these thoughts: music is inadvertently saturated with politics and history and does deskilling mean the same thing as using Garageband?

For that question, I would probably say yes, but then I think about how my high school band most likely used garage band to make a prerecording of what we would be playing in marching band. Those of us in marching band would listen to the music and try to imitate it, as well as working to pick out our parts from the recording so that we can compare it to the rest of the band. Doesn’t that mean I’m improving my skill?

In this class we talked about Minstrel Shows. I only have three word that would describe what I saw: unnatural, disturbing, and bad (to the point of being funny). I do not understand these shows. Or to be more clear I don’t understand the purpose of these shows. I feel that the mocking that was being done of black people, by using black face might be a type of jealousy from the white people of that time.

Here’s my reasoning. These people would get black people teach them to dance, and the songs they sing, where it would then be imitated by a white person with black face on stage. They would even imitate how a black person sounds for a laugh. So it seems that they are picking on black people right? Growing up I was taught/ teased that if a person was picking on me that must means they like me or they are jealous of me. In those terms I don’t see much of a difference. I think those Minstrel Shows where away to show what they admired about black people/slaves, to the point that as years go by it becomes rooted in history as their own sound known as country music.

I would also like to note that a lot of the instrumental part of the music sounded like it was used in cartoons such as Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes.

-Andrea Moye

This biggest thing to take away form this class is that information wants to be free.

The easiest way I understood it was what my teacher said in class. “If information was music you’d want to play it out loud with people who will enjoy it. At the same the creators of the songs and the music producers want to be paid.

We also talked a lot about computer technology and other jargon for example a hypertext. A hypertext will allow a person to go anywhere they please on the web. Like on a Youtube video. At the end of the video there is an icon or something that if clicked on will bring you to an entirely new video. The biggest thing to remember about a hypertext is that it is not linear. A hypertext has no starting point and no end point, which at the time of its creation was a revolutionary idea.

When the class was over we left with these thoughts. ” If medium is the message, what is the message of HTML, HTTP, and the www?” Information wants to be freely shared and accessed.

-Andrea Moye