I forgot to do this blog post last weekend. Whoops.

In the last week of class we reviewed the major themes of the course to get us thinking about our final project and paper. How might we think about the process of making a song within the topics covered in this course?

I think I’ll write out the major themes here to solidify them in my own head and once I’ve finished I’ll probably have a clear idea of which I’d like to talk about in my final paper. Here they are:

1. The problem of attention – does digital media undermine or redirect our attention? In what ways does it do so? How does the medium influence the message? Use The Shallows mostly.
2. Displacement – think about migrants and how migration influences digital media. This is a powerful creative force. Think about displacement of people in place and time or displacement of meaning like the patterns of language we don’t even see when we do a google search.
3. Racial categories – are they reinforced or undermined in music? Or both? Does music break down barriers or put more up?
4. Enclosure vs. openness – “information wants to be free” vs. “siloing” of information and access. Think about the Cold War origins of computing. Copyrighting, piracy, sampling debates can all be used here. Think Linux or Wikipedia. Is the room for creativity becoming smaller when, say, your favorite childhood song is copyrighted and you need to pay money to use it. Use Witt, Bush, and Miller.
5. Individual vs. Social – can go back to beginning of course with music compression. Music was social for most of human history. Recordings made it personal and individual. What were the effects? Are they good or bad?
6. Restructuring of authority – taking away from the monopoly on information by scholars and giving it to the people. Crowd-sourcing for information. Think T.V. and radio being a limited resource, or books before the internet.

Professor O’Malley said something interesting about pop music regarding repetition. Repetition of certain chords or choruses or whatever. I realized that a lot of the music I find most interesting has the least repetition. Is this against the ways of my millennial peers? Even when songs don’t include a lot of repetition, they still hold my attention because they’re excellent pieces of music. I do, however, assume that I seek out more good music than my peers. I listen to more obscure artists (who are often better – no offense) and want music that is slightly disturbing, depressing, and just really good.

Okay, I think I’ll use the first theme about attention because that was my favorite book of the semester and I think it applies to me very well. I’m going to do a little experiment regarding distraction while I create my song this weekend. I have to think about it a little more, but I want to quantify my distraction.

Happy last blog post!

-Jessi Russell

This week was very entertaining. It was fun to learn about the restrictions placed on radio and TV, but first, Mr. O’Malley reiterated what he wants us to understand from this course – music travels and it becomes political and historical. It’s our responsibility as a citizen of a multi-cultural society to understand this and look into it. The added bonus is that you will appreciate the music even more once you know more about it.

Something about the song “Watermelon Man.” I don’t know…he just kinda played lots of renditions of the tune without really saying anything.

Next, democratizing information. This is great because it breaks the monopoly that scholars had on information and allows for more eyes on a subject which will make it better. However, this also means that garbage can circulate as well. In this way, we have more of a responsibility to filter information than our parents did. My parents never had to have lessons on how to determine a credible source from an incredible one…all sources were credible because they were books. Now anyone can create a website for any incorrect piece of information they have. It’s a new type of responsibility. Should these things be regulated? It’s a valid question. At what point are we censoring? America is not about that life, but what happens when things like the Jade Helm 15 conspiracy spread like wildfire on the internet? Or Pizza-gate?

Speaking of regulation, radio was, and still is, regulated. Radio works like a recording. You speak into a microphone and a vibration of a diaphragm is transformed into voltage which is amplified via vacuum tubes. I think this is right. However, there is a limited range of frequency that radio stations can get a hold of. In that way, it’s a scarce resource, which means it is regulated by the FCC. The FCC was actually created in 1934 to do this very thing. Radio became a public resource because of its scarcity and value. A radio station needed a license to broadcast and had to comply with certain guidelines to attain that license. No obscene material, maintain fairness in political programming, provide public benefit, etc.

When TV really took off, the same type of thing happened. Nothing obscene, contrasting views regarding controversial matters of public interest, etc. The National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (NARTB) even had a seal which shows would put in with the credits in the beginning of a program to show that it was morally upstanding. The most hilarious thing to me is the married couple in separate beds. I mean, c’mon. It’s a bed for sleeping in this context. It’s two people talking as they’re about to fall asleep. Are you serious? They’re MARRIED.

Then on Wednesday we talked about the evolution of the mass market in America. I hate everything about this. Millenials hate everything about this. Thank god. It’s terrible. An example is the bread industry. Wasn’t it lovely when each town had a bakery and the products were really good and you bought a good loaf of bread when you needed it and a pastry on a Sunday morning walk? Welp, not anymore. Now we have Wonderbread and nation-wide shipping of certain big-name bakeries.

Nabisco contributed to this idea of a mass market with the Uneeda Biscuit. It became a national food. A gross, processed national food. Why do people eat this stuff? Go to a butcher for a cut of meat, the market for fruits and vegetables and spices, and a bakery for bread. Boom. Meal is done. I like good things, and I don’t understand why others don’t. I know – they like cheap things. And if they can pay 20 cents less for a crappy loaf of bread, they’re going to do it. These baby-boomers…I’ll tell ya what. They have such bad taste and their capitalist mindset is overtaking their lives.

Anyway, ranting aside, the biscuit became a national food and was associated with nationhood. People have taken that sort of thing to other industries like art. Researchers have identified the most wanted painting in every country. This is so funny to me, but I get it.

Crowd sourcing in digital media is key. It’s behind Wikipedia and Google. It breaks the structure of the mass market. Google creates something called “collaborative filtering.” This is based on not the frequency of which a certain term is used on a web page, but rather how many times that web page has been linked or cited elsewhere. This creates a ranking structure that is far superior to other search engines because it top-rated pages that were useful to others.

This type of thing contributes to the ways in which we are becoming even more like ourselves. This is a fascinating topic to me and I wholeheartedly agree. It’s becoming easier and easier to be who we already are because of the amount of data people can collect on our habits. It’s been like this for a while, but the internet exacerbates it. I think it deepens the divide between “us” and “them.” It pushes you even more toward “your people.” The zip code breakdown was very interesting to me. Although I’m the black sheep of the family, the information was very accurate for the region I grew up in. It’s definitely not me, that’s for sure. I am now way more associated with the characteristics of Fairfax, rather than Mohrsville, Pennsylvania.

One more thing – in the context of the last thing I mentioned, we talked a bit about what is more important to us as people, our citizenship as Americans or our interests/hobbies/lifestyle choices? In most contexts, it’s our interests that define us and create a better picture of who we are, because most of the people we associate ourselves with are American citizens. However, I spent one month abroad this summer and in that case, what was more important to me was my American citizenship. So I think it is contextual or geographical. Just an interesting thought.

Okay, last week of classes coming up. Looking forward to getting started on the final project and it hopefully not kicking my butt.

-Jessi Russell