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

In this class we talked about signal to noise ratio. We also talked about A Life At Play where we talked about Shannon. His work is reconsidering the process of communication. In the beginning of the class My professor taught us that the signal means what you want to hear and the that noise is everything but the signal. For an idealist (which I am) the signal would be the ideal for them.

Something to take away from the book is that language is full of redundancy the example we got (which is hilarious by the way) was U ppl dnt reed t bok which most people will read easily as you people didn’t read the book. The key point in this was that we do not need a lot of letters to make a sentence, or even a word. The biggest thing I took away from the class is that Information and meaning are two different things and that Information theory is indifferent to meaning.

We also listened/ watched the teacher make a song on garage band that was both really good and slightly triggering.

-Andrea Moye

I know i’m late but it should be fine the sun isn’t even up yet!

In this class we continued on from yesterday. What I took away as the most important was that in World War II is an example of a command and control system which would become seemingly permanent after WWII. I also think that an important part of the lesson was that thanks to Vannevar Bush that have the mindset we do now about the growth of technology and efficiency. I think this because as mentioned in class during the Cold War we had a lot of information that was being siloed, but Bush was thinking of alternative ways acting on the information given; thus giving a democratic outlook on computers by the end of the Cold War. My teacher also talked about the creation of memex, which is like a smartphone but the size of desk, as well as the ENIAC, which stands for Electronic Numerical Integrate And Computer. This tool has vacuum tubes, unfortunately it is less capable than the phone mainly because sound going through something overtime becomes less and less vibrant, making it hard to hear.

Today’s class was a lot easier to understand and helped explain any confusion I had on Week 4 Day 1. I think my favorite part of this class was learning how Douglas Englebert was responsible (partially?) for creating the images/ icons we see on the computer screen rather than having to type in a command in order to pull up a file.

-Andrea Moye

Today we talked about idealism vs. realism in the physiological sense. So from what i understand i am an idealist. Reason being that i do believe in God and i am working up to his ideals. But I may be more of a realist so i’m not exactly sure. Ever since i was young i would question why i like a certain thing or question the meeting of something, yet I do have an ideal to follow. So what am I?

… I’ll just go with idealist since i seem to agree with that more when we were going over it in class…except for music. That is my only exception. i know that I like a song based on the beat it has or if I can sing to it. The only question is, is this my ideal or my reasoning?

Who knows, i sure don’t

-Andrea Moye

In this class we talked about the book The Shallows and we focused mostly on the concept of the “medium is the message”.  From what I understand this means that what is most important is the message. If I send a text the important part is the message. In the sense of a computer the important part is what I’m looking up… right?

Another thing we talked about is the concept of reading to yourself. Which pretty much is like reading to another version of yourself. My teacher made a point to ask whether this is weird. To me I think of thinking to yourself or even thinking out loud. I mean you look like a weirdo when you think out loud (or so I’ve been told) so how is reading to yourself weird?

Finally we also talked about points of views. In movies (the old-time ones) first show one part of the movie from one point of view before switching it to show what the other person is experiencing at the same time. Movies now show the point of view of everybody! In the movie we saw today we were a solider, a nazi, a fish, a ghost…etc. long story short we were many things within the movie  which just seems to externalize the concept of point of views. Really we get different points of view in books we read but as my teacher said we only internalize that concept, much different from the movie where we switch pov in a matter of seconds.

-Andrea Moye

So this class was very repetitive. Some key words/ phrases I got from this class was that my generation may be impoverished and the unspoken question of what do you believe? But one thing I do agree with my teacher is that attention is a large part of the reason that we as a generation don’t mind the compression of music. I know that when i’m doing homework I play music as background noise that I will occasionally tune into as like a mental breather from whatever assignment i’m doing at the moment. So at the very least in my case, attention is a large reason that I don’t care all that much about the compression of music. But I disagree of being impoverished. Like art music is in the eye of the beholder and I believe that we each have our own taste in music. Personally I don’t listen to the radio but the music I do listen is also compressed. This music I found last year and I’ve pretty much retreated from the radio or latest songs since then. I believe that because of these compressed songs that I was able to find these new songs like nightcore and Gaming music. I feel that in the analogy of freshly baked bread and wonder bread, I am the Sara Lee bread that has that great rich taste.

-Andrea Moye