My childhood happened during the later 1960s and through the 1970s, and today’s discussion of radio and TV (among other things) really resonated with me. I remember the TV set my family had when I was little – a very boxy black-and-white set. Already TV to me was magical, and although I didn’t perceive it at the time, it really was creating a sense of common culture and community within me as it was doing to countless others. I was still pretty young when we got a color TV, and that provided an even closer connection. I loved, loved, loved the classic TV sitcoms that were created during the 1960s, and some of the ones in the 1970s. Most of the 1960s shows I saw in reruns – my bedtime was too early in those days to allow me to watch the evening shows. I remember being so envious of my older brother because he got to stay up to see some show that I thought was called “Snow Tracks.” I could hear the opening music from my bedroom, and it sounded like an exciting show. Only later did I find out that it was called “Star Trek,” and I became quite a fan of those reruns too. Saturday nights were a big deal for my family. If we weren’t at a movie or some other kind of entertainment, we watched the wonderful Saturday night line-up of shows. We would have snacks galore, and would have such a wonderful time together, sharing our “TV community.” And friends and other family members shared it too – they would know exactly what happened on these shows because they were watching them too. It was a comforting kind of culture to be part of. As my own children grew up, and we were barraged by a ridiculous number of channels and an increasing number of electronic devices, I was very aware of that old connection breaking down. It has always made me feel a little sad and a little lonely for the past. I don’t mean to sound dramatic about it. There is plenty that we share nowadays as well. As a matter of fact, we have many, many more informative, hilarious, and touching film clips, photos, stories, whatever thanks to the internet. But the enormous variety is so great that it’s impossible to have a simple well-defined common culture or community that is a solid backdrop to our lives, the way it was in the past. One example of how tightly-knit this TV community was in the 1960s and 1970s can be found in the planning of the Mary Tyler Moore Show that started airing in 1970. The producers refused to let Mary’s character on the MTM show be a divorcee, because they believed that people would think that Laura and Rob Petrie from the Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960s had gotten divorced, and that this would have a very negative impact on the MTM Show. This is how closely people identified with TV characters and lives during that time. Another example, which happened just this past week, illustrates how deeply ingrained this culture still is after decades. Florence Henderson, the beloved Brady Bunch mother, passed away at age 82. While there were many comments about how people felt like she was their mom, one especially caught my attention – “Great. Now 2016 has killed our mom.” People like me who lived through that time and have now lived through such tremendous technological and cultural changes are lucky in some ways, but not in others. I still feel the comfort of that TV community, and I believe many others do as well, since there seems to be a market still for reruns of the old shows, and they are certainly available on DVD. However, the loss of that community is felt as well, and it makes it a little harder to cope with the overwhelming nature of today’s culture. Professor O’Malley mentioned that his family hasn’t had a TV set in their house for over a decade, and I can well understand that. I don’t watch TV that much anymore. The news is intolerable after just a few headlines and stories. When I do want to watch something, I watch documentaries or science shows or history shows. And sometimes I can’t resist putting in an old movie or occasionally an old sitcom. I can’t help reaching back to my old TV community from time to time. It’s a connection that just can’t be recreated these days, at least not in the same way. TV certainly doesn’t rule my life and it never did. But it was an important piece of culture that had a solid and lasting impact.

Throughout our class, we have seen numerous ways in which people’s attention has been managed by others, and how people seem to lose some their own authority and control over the choices they make, and the habits they form. We face this on one level by the constant advertising barrage we encounter wherever we turn. Ads are an obvious attempt to catch people’s attention (at least briefly) and persuade them to buy something or do something they ordinarily might not think of buying or doing. Through Carr’s The Shallows, Miller’s Segregating Sound, and Sterne’s MP3, we see more insidious ways of controlling people’s attention and gaining authority over them on a long-term basis. One example is through the advances made in sound and sound recording. The people who controlled the distribution of recorded music shifted at least some of the authority and control away from people wanting to listen to music. Miller describes how the talking machine companies recorded certain types of artists from certain parts of the United States and around the world. They therefore were picking and choosing for people what music they would listen to. They had the authority. As Miller points out, “phonograph company scouts imagined they were introducing modern technology to isolated, primitive people around the world” (Miller, p. 177). In the United States, the South had been pretty much ignored as a market for talking machines and the music being distributed. For example, in the trade journal Talking Machine World “previous attention to the South…had been intermittent and usually consisted of anecdotal depictions…” (Miller, p. 199). The phonograph companies were driving what people heard and by whom it was recorded. Carr describes how the internet began to “take over the work of our traditional sound-processing equipment” (Carr, p. 84), and how “it’s the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people’s behavior and shape their perceptions” (Carr, p. 89).  Once again there is a shift in authority, and a dependency on what could be created and distributed through the internet is created. Another example by Carr is the Kindle, on which people can download and read almost any type of publication, including MP3s. It kind of takes away our need to think about how we’re listening to music, once again weakening our own authority. Miller goes even further to analyze how with MP3 music, “new technologies are no longer confined to a single application, to a single sector; they are disseminating and interpenetrating the whole economy” (Sterne, p. 203). However, Sterne’s book also seems to suggest how the MP3 is giving authority back to the people, in the form of massive file-sharing. This seems like a good example of the “information wants to be free” phenomenon. So do people have much of their authority back? I’m not so sure. It still seems as though we are being driven by our devices such as cell phones, MP3 players, Kindles, computers, etc., and I’m not sure how much of that is of our own free-will. We seem to have lost our desire or ability to have “quiet time” and to think for ourselves. As Sterne points out, “other musical ideals – portability, modularity, malleability, access – have replaced contemplation” (Sterne, p. 239). His words echo much of Carr’s book, in that we are losing our ability to control our own attention and part of our own lives – so much of this is being done for us by the digital world. As happy as I am to have our digital devices, it makes me sad to think that we might be losing our ability to stop, listen to music in our own quiet space, and really think about what we are listening to instead of having it as a frequent backdrop.

Garage Band reminds me of digital painting- it is the same breaking down of music or art and recontextualizing it. Imagery and music are the same at the data level. Once again Shannon’s “just information” comes into play. Music is broken down into bits of tone and volume, while imagery is broken down into bits of color and intensity. Either way, these are just tiny pieces of information (0’s and 1’s) without any meaning until they are put back together into something that is created outside its original context. This seems so curious and odd when juxtaposed with traditional ways of creating music and art. I do believe there is a place for digital painting – graphics are used everywhere nowadays, and graphic artists need the efficiency provided by the wealth of tools that are available. The job of creating graphics is a typical deadline-hanging-over-you kind of occupation, so graphic artists have to be efficient. But a painter creates in a different way. They usually can set their own schedule, even though most of them want or need to paint within a certain time-frame depending on their need for money. Graphic artists and traditional artists approach their canvas in different ways. Traditional painters have a more direct tactile contact with the canvas and the pigments and the brushes with which they create a painting. The thought behind each brushstroke travels from their brain, down their arm, into their hand, and the fingers holding the brush, letting it flow onto the canvas. Making mistakes and having to fix them is more difficult in traditional painting, but I believe that is an important part of the creative process. And this is the key. To me, a piece of music or a work of art is more than the object. Within that composition or painting, there is a sense of the artist who created it, a feeling of direct physical and mental connection, of deliberate intention in placing musical notes or pigments together, of authenticity and control over the creative process. They own it, they are the authority. I can’t help feeling that the computer program or graphics tablet or whatever digital device is used steals some of this authority away from the artist. We have so many contrasts nowadays between traditional forms and digital forms, in music, in art, in literature and language, and in so many other things. The similarities of the traditional and digital forms set against their differences might not be a new phenomenon, but it seems more glaring and harsh now, as though some of the heart and mind are being digitally replaced. Just as I hope that digital music tools such as Garage Band won’t ever completely replace traditional composition of music, so I hope that digital painting won’t replace the magic of artists personally and intentionally placing pigments directly on a canvas.

We have talked a lot in class about racial politics in music, and what strange forms this can take, such as the minstrel show, remnants of which can still be found now. When we talked in class about the Rolling Stones and their version of Little Walter’s rendition of “I Hate to See You Go,” I wasn’t sure what I thought about it. Was this a way of paying homage to Little Walter, or were the Rolling Stones (even subconsciously) showing a bit of that derogatory minstrelsy attitude? A while back, I listened to a video on YouTube showing Muddy Waters performing at some kind of night club, and the Rolling Stones came in partway through and sat down. It was a very informal type of club, and when Muddy saw them, he called them up to the stage. MIck Jagger, Keith Richards, and one other went up and sang a song with him. I remember thinking how Mick Jagger seemed to be trying to sound just like Muddy, but at the time I thought he was doing this as some kind of tribute. Now, after hearing them do the Little Walter song, I wonder. The impression I’ve been getting throughout class, as we’ve explored the themes of racial politics and boundary transgression, is that there is no straight-forward categorizing of these phenomena. Humans are so complicated, with emotions and attitudes that go all over the place. I believe there is a very complex and strange mix of homage and racial contempt in portrayals such as the Rolling Stones of Muddy Waters and Little Walter. I believe they truly love the Blues style, and respect the great artists of such music, but at the same time, it’s hard to believe that they weren’t in any way influenced by the past, which was filled with racial politics – segregation, minstrelsy, boundaries, etc. The Rolling Stones got their start in the 1960’s, when the world was framed by racial politics. I think this can’t be separated by their appreciation for the music that came out of the African-American tradition.

Why do major musical chords resonate with humans? This was another one of those great loaded questions that Professor O’Malley posed to us in class. I completely understand the feeling of the chord resonating, especially when it’s “coming home” in a piece of music. But I hadn’t really asked myself why it was so pleasing, why it gives a sense of completeness. I started to play around with this idea and it led me in all kinds of directions, mainly way, way out into the universe. From what little astronomy I’ve had, I know that we “hear sounds” from the universe – from galaxies and stars and other celestial objects. What is this “music of the universe?” Are these patterns of vibrations from the universe resonating with the electrical impulses or vibrations in our human bodies, down to the sub-atomic level, in such a way that they feel naturally harmonious to us? I can’t help feeling that there is an elegant order to the universe that covers everything in it, including humans. I think we only get glimpses of this elegance and its meanings, but we keep searching. Music, light, everything goes back to Shannon’s idea of “just information” in its fundamental form. We use all kinds of tools to collect and analyze and “portray” this information from all around us. For example, we use radio telescopes to “see and hear” information – we can choose to hear it as a sound, or see it as a picture. I’m straying away from the idea of musical chords, but that’s what happens when you play with ideas. I guess what I’m thinking is that musical chords are one of the more elegant types of information that humans crave. Dissonance, as well, has it’s own place in the universe and in human lives. We always have opposites existing, and dissonance is what helps make consonance so pleasing. What is interesting to me is how we can acquire a liking for dissonance – some cultures even prefer this. Perhaps for them the sounds are not discordant as they might be for others. What does that mean about how they see the universe? Whew – I’ve just gotten my brain tied into knots. I guess what I’m saying from all of this is that there must be some kind of underlying order based on certain patterns of wavelengths that we perceive as sounds or sights, and that please us because of some kind of harmony they generate within us. I’ve just talked in a big circle, but it’s fun to think about!

I wanted to connect two themes we’ve talked about recently into one post – the question of accuracy in historical accounts, and the question of whether open access to information (such as on Wikipedia) can work, in the sense that it portrays accurate information. I remember my husband telling me a story from his time in the Air Force during Desert Storm, back around 1990. He worked in intel, and after a certain battle he was part of a group that interviewed several people who had been involved in the battle, who were all within the same area. The purpose of this was to have an accurate depiction of what actually happened during the battle. The interviews took place within about 48 hours after the battle had ended, so there wasn’t a problem with faded memories. There were two accounts that especially stood out. The first man answered the questions in a calm way, saying it had been a clear, sunny day, and there wasn’t any smoke from artillery. As a matter of fact, according to him there wasn’t much resistance at all. The U.S. had done a little firing and the other side had run away. The second man, who was interviewed in a separate room, was more animated. He said all heck had broken loose (not his exact words), and there was mass chaos, with smoke so thick you couldn’t see next to you. People were getting sick from the toxic fumes. A third man’s account fell somewhere in between these two. This is the kind of situation that people see all the time – we each have our own “filter” on our experiences, our own way of processing the information in our minds. This must drive historians nuts! What really did happen in that battle? Do we ever really know the truth about historical events?

If there was a Wikipedia page written on this battle, what would it look like? Maybe Interviewee #1 would write his version, then interviewee #2 would read it and say, wait, that’s not at all what happened, and he could edit the page to give his version. This could go on and on with people continuing to change the story. Anybody researching the battle could get a different version on a different day. Suppose one researcher used one version and another researcher used another version. Who would be right? How could they agree? And what if a politician with a political agenda wanted to justify the battle, and added information on chemical weapons being used during the battle. Who is to say whether or not this was true? Various versions of this battle would be disseminated through research. Maybe I’m getting a little facetious, but it illustrated the point of yet another very important theme of our class – we have an obligation to weigh and measure information!

Maybe I’m too open-minded, but I see the point about how the more free information is, the better it gets. But I also see the other side of it. There will always have to be some control over information, whether it’s for our nation’s security, or to avoid log-jams like too many people simultaneously editing a Wiki page, or to simply respect people’s This goes back to a theme we have seen come up in class many times – human tension. The dichotomy of having to control some of what we know wants to be free creates constant underlying tension – who should control what information and when and how and where? What if we mess up and the wrong information accidentally gets out? What if we can’t find the appropriate way to store and manage the tremendous constant barrage of information? And since information changes constantly, this tension won’t ever go away. From the tension created by the Cold War and all of the new computer technology that came out of this era, to Carr’s current-day description of the tension created by having to divide our reading attention between the internet and regular books, humans will continue to have to learn to think in different ways. It’s overwhelming at times, and is both a blessing and a curse. As a bit of an aside, I find myself wondering whether Claude Shannon would understand Richard Stallman. To Shannon everything, EVERYTHING, was just bits of information, just “yes’s” and “no’s”. They both seem to have been thinking in terms of separating information from meaning. Would Shannon have agreed with Stallman that the continuous flow of bits and pieces should be available to everyone so that it could continue to grow and theoretically improve? Or perhaps to Stallman there was no separation, and it was the meaning that he felt was so important to belong to everyone?

Today’s class provided more fodder for the old brain, which is always a good thing. As a ditsy teenager, I loved music but never thought that deeply about it. I can see more and more why Professor O’Malley speaks of music being “politicized,” back to our discussions about Miller’s Segregating Sound and up to our class today in which we talked about disco, rumba, and other types of music. I didn’t realize that disco had been “coded” as African-American and gay. And in all the times I heard Desi Arnaz sing “Babaloo” I never realized that this referred to a deity. We’ve seen numerous examples now of how music has been used to promote social agendas, some of which are pretty disturbing, such as the minstrel shows and the cake walk. How interesting that we still have vestiges of these, such as the cake walk. But at some point the original intent or use of such traditions becomes separated from current use. For example, the modern “cake walk” doesn’t bear much resemblance to the original spectacle of watching slaves dance for prizes. Now it is a fun carnival game for anyone, and how many people know where it came from? Another example is the way Garage Band “appropriates” many musical forms so that anybody can use them whenever they want. This is similar to the minstrel show appropriation of African-American sounds. I doubt people who use Garage Band are aware of this kind of connection. Garage Band is also another interesting example of displacement of space and time, When we add various loops to our own piece of music, we don’t know who created it, or when, or in what context. It becomes a strange kind of entity made up of pieces that can span decades or geographical boundaries or multiple races and cultures. So how is something like this “categorized,” which is what humans like to do? What is its meaning? Who “owns” it? We’ve talked a lot about the freedom of information, and as more and more of it becomes “free” or appropriated, there will be more and more questions and issues about how to handle it.