The in class lecture today was about the history of both the radio and the television; however, one point that was brought up that really struck me was the relationship between the number of television channels and what it says about our society. Interestingly enough, from the 1950s, when the television began to become prominent in American homes, until about 1970 there was only a handful of channels available to watch. This would mean that if a kid when to school and had been watching television the night before, it is a very high possibility for the kid next to them in class to have watched the exact same show. The amount of specialization that exists today when it comes to television and radio was non-existent back then. There exists a channel for almost anything someone can think of with the availability of thousands of channels that some cable and satellite television provider packages give out today. Whether you enjoy sports, drama, crime, suspense, horror, documentaries, science, history or even nature, there exists a channel or show that will cater to your needs. At the same time people often like to complain that “there’s nothing on tv.” (I have definitely said this plenty of times myself) I think this shows how spoiled people are becoming in terms of access to entertainment with the advancement of technology. Honestly, it is difficult even for myself to imagine living in a world where I can’t turn on the television or look at my phone to get the latest sports updates (given I am a sport management major). In the 1950s I would have been lucky to even watch a football game (especially professional given the higher prominence of college football at the time) on television. I think it is definitely worth it, for people of my generation especially, to take a step back and acknowledge how far our society has come in terms of technology and how lucky we are to have access to the things we do today instead of simply saying “there’s nothing on tv.”

This piece will probably end up being very similar to other people’s opinion in our class; however, the thing that stuck out to me the most while reading Sterne’s book was the beginning of his second chapter when he talks about the cat telephone. It’s phenomenal that something so odd can turn out to be such a great breakthrough in psychoacoustic research. At the same time, piece of information that will stick with me for a long time is how the MP3 has actually impacted music listening experience for billions of people worldwide. Sterne says that “compression practices have created new kinds of aesthetic experiences that come to be pleasurable in themselves for some audiences” meaning he sees a cultural effect that has been brought upon by the creation of a different format of music sharing. The MP3 has had effects that possibly no one had seen coming while it was being created. It completely changed how people shared music, and allowed for a new extremely easy way for people to get the music they wanted for free (pirating). One aspect that Sterne did not touch on was the way the MP3 affected how important albums are. Even though songs are still released in groups called albums, there is much more emphasis placed on individual songs rather than an artists album as a whole. This is because with the ease of singling out specific songs people enjoy and putting them in a playlist, they no longer have to worry about the next song being the “song they don’t like” from the album. Along the same lines, the most popular method of listening to music today is by paying a subscription fee to listen to a service’s available music such as “Spotify” or “Pandora Radio.” Subscription based services have been around since eMusic’s breaking onto the scene in 1998 which allowed people to download a certain number of MP3 files to their MP3 Player per month just for paying the monthly fee. This is really only the surface of what the MP3 has done; It is really amazing how one file format totally changed everything about modern day music.

The articles provided on the syllabus for this date (unfortunately I could not make it to class on this date) were extremely interesting. The article titled “Kill the Password: A String of Characters Won’t Protect You” by Mat Honan, really spooked me. It was also extremely sad that these hackers would go into his things and delete every picture he had including of his daughter simply for a twitter handle. What scared me the most was the part about reusing passwords because honestly this is something that I have been guilty of for a long time. However, after reading that part of the article I have already started changing my passwords in order to avoid the same tragedy this man went through.  These articles made me realize that if someone was able to get into one of my accounts, then they really could do anything they wanted to. They could take over my twitter, read all my emails, get access to my banking information or anything they wanted. Honestly I feel as though I should say a short thank you to professor O’Malley for bringing this important topic to our attention since it is something I’m sure most of us were not even worried about. It also made me question why companies still use this system when they know the dangers that it has. Are there alternative better ways to protect information and login to websites that is different and more secure than this system? Hopefully these questions begin to be addressed soon so that we can continue to feel secure about the things we want to keep to ourselves.

The novel “Segregating Sound” by Karl Hagstrom Miller, is really attempting to show what influenced people into the two sides of the musical color divide. The most interesting part to me was that the distribution of sheet music played a huge role in the color divide being created. The distribution of sheet music partly allowed for the popular music of the north to become customary in to the people of the south who hadn’t previously heard those songs. At the same time railroad expansion and traveling theater companies also allowed for northern music to embed itself in the culture of the people of the south, making popular northern music more and more common. The other interesting part of the novel to me was during chapter five when talks about how race records were being marketed to blacks while marketing “old-time,” “old familiar tunes,” or “hillbilly”  music to the whites. This has really stuck with me ever since I initially read this book because it keeps when on my toes when looking at how race impacts music today. I constantly try to see if there is a specific racial market towards genres of music today, or if the musical color divide is evaporating. Unfortunately, I think the color divide is still prevalent. Even though it may not be there to the extent of the race records that Miller talks about in his book, it is still something that is visible today when looking at, for example, rap versus country music in the United States. The color divide is not as prominent but still exists.

With many African Americans moving towards the north in the 1920s a new market begins to develop in the bigger industrial cities. These were mostly blues, jazz and gospel records that would appeal to the large number of migrating African Americans. One of the first well known African American artists was Bessie Smith with hits such as “Downhearted Blues” and her rendition of “Saint Louis Blues” alongside Louis Armstrong. It’s quite fascinating how today, in my experiences, most African Americans would still listen to blues; however, it would be a slightly different style with it now being called R&B (Rhythm and Blues).

In my opinion these minstrel shows were pretty disgusting in the way they originated, and are a perfect display of how socially acceptable  racism was during the 19th century.  White people would pretend to be black people simply for the amusement of other black people in order to make fun of the African American cultures of the time through skits and songs. The most interesting part is when black people are allowed to perform in the shows, so they wear black face to pretend to be a white person pretending to be black in order to openly degrade their own culture in front of hundreds of white people.  Even today, some of our famous cartoon characters have links to the minstrel show in their designs. Characters such a Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny could be direct links to the minstrel show that we continue to use without knowing the degradation that images such as them use to stand for.

During this week’s discussion we talked about several people important to technological advancement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries including Max Weber, Vannevar Bush and Lee de Forest. Though the person that stuck out the most to me personally was Alan Turning. More specifically I was interested in his idea of machines having the intelligence of humans, and our lack of ability to differentiate between the two. His idea was that in conversation, if you cannot tell if the thing you are having a conversation with is a human or a machine, then you are required to assume the thing you are in conversation with has intelligence. Today this has a very different meaning of course, and the best way to portray this would be with AI intelligence which has been implemented into robots. The video I have attached is a conversation between a robot and a human which is interesting and brings up tough questions as to the future of the relationships between humans and robots based off their intelligence.