What did I learn this week? I don’t think I put together any complete thoughts this week, which is frustrating. I learned some things about the transformation of media, but for whatever reason, I don’t think things really came together this week.

Max Weber, Montgomery C. Meigs, Bell Labs, Vannevar Bush. I know these names, but I can’t talk about them together or really describe their contribution to the changing of digital media. The takeaway from this week’s classes that I did pick up, is that technological developments during the Cold War were created for military purposes and transformed the civilian world we live in.

I love discussing the Cold War because people think it ended. Maybe with the Cuban Missile Crisis, maybe with the interference in central African elections, maybe at some arbitrary point where they realized the entire world wasn’t going to be blown up over an ideological struggle. Sure, the US military is all over the world, the Berlin wall fell, the USSR crashed, missiles were not distributed to Cuba, etc. But honestly, there are still spheres of influence, and both Russia and the United States are still trying to interfere on impressionable governments. Obviously, methods have changed, but I think the heat is still on. Perhaps an unpopular opinion (because the unipolarity the United States holds cannot be understated), but I think there’s a point here.

So technology we use today was developed for military purposes during the Cold War. That’s the point, but I can’t really talk about it in detail. I hope to learn more about this in the future.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully there will be more next week.

-Jessi Russell