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:
- 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.
- 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.
- Racial categories – are they reinforced or undermined in music? Or both? Does music break down barriers or put more up?
- 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.
- 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?
- 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