We read A Mind at Play by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman for this week. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but this was the most boring book I’ve ever read. I started off reading it and then I listened to the rest because I spent 17 hours in a car this weekend going to Tennessee and back. I thought I would fall asleep at the wheel. When in the passenger seat, I was going in and out of consciousness.

I got much more from the lectures this week than I did from the book, and I don’t think the book supplemented my learning in a meaningful way. The lectures were very interesting and I learned a lot about a subject that for a long time seemed very untouchable for me. I could never begin to wrap my brain around how the internet worked until viewing the videos and listening to the lectures this week.

Signal to noise ratio. The obvious explanation is trying to get a radio signal and there being static (noise) that makes the signal to noise ratio less desirable. The everyday example might be the signal to noise ration from a professor. We want to know how to get an A in the class, but the professor does all this beating around the bush, which to us is noise (not me though…I love hearing about the learning process for the class).

We learned about Bell Labs. In the book we heard about a very interesting and ahead-of-its-time concept used at Bell Labs while Shannon worked there. Management was not concerned with what would be useful in the next year or five. They wanted big ideas and radically advanced thinking or experimentation. Things that maybe wouldn’t be possible for another 10 years. This is so fascinating to me. I love this idea and it makes me so happy to think about Bell Labs doing this so many years ago. I am going to New York in three weeks and I’ll definitely walk the High Line to see the old Bell Labs building.

Boolean Algebra. Using “if/then” questions to break up information into answerable questions using ones and zeros. This was mentioned in the book too. Something about left-handed people and/or blonde-haired people. This is the idea of applying philosophy to math. This Boolean Algebra can be applied to electrical circuits to make things happen. This is revolutionary.

We watched a video of Claude Shannon debuting his mouse in a labyrinth, “Thesus.” This is super cool because the mouse goes one way and it either works or doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it flips around and tries again until it can go forward. What’s especially cool about it is it will remember what to do and can get to the end no matter where you place it in the labyrinth. If you change part of the maze, the mouse adapts and corrects, then continues with what it knows. It rewrites the plan based on what worked last. Super cool.

Later in the week we discussed the stages of amplification and eventually packet switching, ARPANET, Hypercard, WWW, HTTP, HTML, Mosaic, and Yahoo. Even if I don’t understand these topics deeply, I am glad I at least have some sense of how the internet came to be what it is today. I am mostly interested in the Hypercard revelation and how this made the direction of browsing information up to the consumer.

I was thinking about mentioning Wikipedia, but someone beat me to it. I thought about how I can click different words and go to a site that is not necessarily the most linear progression from the previous page. It’s not like I go to Wikipedia and then go to “Animals” and then “Birds” and then have to flip through every bird in alphabetical order until I get to sparrow. Then if I want to know more about the digestive system of a sparrow, I can just use links within that page and I don’t first have to learn about other things that I’m not interested in just because someone formatted the information in that way. It’s non-linear and totally in your control.

I don’t understand how the world wide web is a subset of the internet and not another term for it. I’ll look into it. I thought they were synonymous.

I like learning about HTML and I think it would be cool to play with. Now we have templates set up to make our own websites, but someone has to code for that. I think it would be cool to learn about it, but it might not be worth my time. I have lots of other things to learn about. I guess I’ll leave that to the computer scientists.

This week’s lectures were really cool and interesting. I also love the videos explaining how information is broken into bits and given instructions on how to be put back into place by the receiver. I also never thought about how if one path of info is down for some reason, your message will be sent through another route. Amazing.

That’s a brief description of this week’s topics, but there’s a lot more that I’m thinking about. I’m excited to get started on our music project and see what I can do!

-Jessi Russell

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

Continued from previous post.

Monday was all about The Shallows. Wednesday we discussed the differences between idealism and realism. My initial thoughts were the thoughts I think many people have when they think about idealism and realism: idealism is synonymous with optimism and a realist is pessimistic.

I learned on Wednesday that an idealist is always looking to optimize their choice by getting it as close to the ideal that is possible. There is an ideal world, an ideal pair of jeans, an ideal candle. Their decisions are framed in the context of an ideal situation or thing. This may align with monotheistic religions too. A religious person typically believes that all things are right in heaven. It is the perfect and ideal place. There is an ideal world, and the decisions he/she makes are based on that idea.

A realist believes there is not an ideal world or product. They frame their likes and dislikes on how that thing is similar or different from another version of that thing they previously encountered. This can be known as mimesis. Why do I like this candle? Because it’s like that other candle I had or because it’s not like this candle which I hate the smell of.

I am 100% a realist. I think about this kind of thing quite a bit and I know this for a fact. I’m also quite the optimist – almost to the point that it’s annoying. A realist isn’t cynical and an optimist isn’t ignorantly blissful. It is important to take the optimist vs. pessimist idea out of the conversation when discussing the fundamentals of idealism vs. realism because it just gets confusing. Once the initial concept is grasped, it can be useful to think about when trying to understand yourself better.

I like this discussion, I think it’s good. It’s really frustrating when I can’t accurately explain why I like something, but I definitely know it’s not because I’m trying to get closer to the ideal version of something. I’m looking forward to digging into this topic deeper.

-Jessi Russell

Nicholas Carr. The Shallows. I have many thoughts.

I loved reading this book because it’s exactly the type of book I would choose to read for pleasure. So as I’m going about my reading and writing for my major, reading a book like The Shallows feels like reading for pleasure, which is like a fun vacation from my field research.

I finished the book just in time for class discussion, but the discussion was not what I expected it to be. I had marked all the important parts of his argument and statistics to back up his claims. I thought I had a hold on it, but I guess I did not.

We ended up talking a lot about the medium being the message, which I thought was a facet of his argument that he didn’t spend a lot of time on. I was surprised by the amount of time we spent talking about this in class and how little information I got about this topic in the book. I think “the medium is the message” would have been a great main argument in his book and he could have kept coming back to that after every introduction of a new story about how technology has changed the way our brains work. I would have liked to see him come back to this idea at the end of every chapter or new idea. I think that would have made the book very strong.

Someone in class mentioned that the book was redundant. I totally disagree. I think he brought up new ideas and then never actually tied them in to his main argument. A book needs to drill in your brain its main point, and I think the book failed in that respect. Also, every book of this genre that I’ve read has had a great call to action or some concrete steps to take that will help you cope with the problems presented in the book. I didn’t get that, thus the book felt incomplete. It ended and I was just sitting there like…huh? He did mention that for many people these changes are completely inevitable and maybe he really did just want to talk about the changes in the brain, but the book still felt like an incomplete thought to me.

Do I agree or disagree? I agree. I have to! Do you want to know how many times I stopped reading this book to check my phone? I should have kept track, but it was easily 50 times. That would be a good exercise for someone new reading this book. Have them keep a post-it note on the inside of the back cover to tally every time they check their phone while reading the book.

Here are the parts of the book that I marked while reading and what I thought about them:

1. p. 18-19: First (and only, I think) mention of the medium being the message after analyzing the difference in writing style when using different media. “‘You are right,’ Nietzsche replied. ‘Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts'” (19).
2. p. 31: Plasticity. This idea comes up many times because it’s critical to establish how pliable our brains are when trying to argue that technology is changing our brains. Part of this point, too, plays on nature vs. nurture. I like this quote in particular: “The genius of our brain’s construction is not that it contains a lot of hardwiring but that it doesn’t” (31). I also like the point Carr makes about the taxi drivers and the hippocampus.
3. p. 44: The four categories of technology. How does a technology “supplement or amplify our native capacities” (44)? In this book, the focus is on the fourth category.
   1. Amplifies physical strength (e.g. plow)
   2. Extends the senses (e.g. microscope)
   3. Amplifies nature to serve us better (e.g. GMO crops)
   4. Extends our intellectual capacity (e.g. clock)
4.  p. 46: The debate. Do we use technology, or does technology use us? Is it a tool to enhance that intellectual capacity or is it a crutch which is making us dumber?
5. p. 86: Internet usage statistics.
6. p. 116-117: The power the internet has over our brains given the plasticity of them. “With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use” (116). Carr goes on to describe the effects on our senses and our psyche, as the Net delivers constant positive reinforcements. When we click, something new appears. When we message, we get a response (117).
7. p. 134-135: Eye tracking. This may have been the most interesting part to me because it was a very clear example of the effects of the internet backed up by a fascinating study. Saccades are normal while reading, but when we read on a computer screen, our eyes move in a way that resembles the letter “F.” Additionally, we aren’t really reading longer if there are more words on the site. I am definitely a victim of this trait and I will consciously try to end this habit.
8. p. 160: Google. The entire middle paragraph of this page blew my mind. I have often wondered how search engines make money. Now I know!
9. Chapter 9: Memory. This entire chapter was fascinating to me. I have long been interested in memory, so applying my everyday habit of browsing the web to my memory was amazing to read about. I marked p. 192 in particular because it shot down one of my go-to arguments which is: it’s not important to learn silly facts because we should use that “brain space” for more important things. Focus on big ideas and think big. Learn a fact and place it in a larger context. Those are skills I’ve always worked on. Now I know that “evidence suggests, moreover, that as we build up our personal store of memories, our minds become sharper” (192). And, “‘the brain cannot be full'” (192). We actually strengthen our brain as we store memories and learn new skills.
10. p. 207: The “summing up.” I put that in quotations marks because I find this part of the book extremely weak. I like that he ends with what makes us human and the social connections that cannot be replaced by the internet. He addresses the “irreversible commitment” to this intellectual technology.

Now that I went through all those points that I marked and re-read about 3 dozen pages of the book, I’m realizing that the idea that “the medium is the message” does run deep. However, I don’t think he ties his points in clearly enough to observe that idea in the first read. I wished for a phrase that articulated his thesis (“the medium is the message” would do just fine) in a concise way that he would include at the end of each point he makes.

My favorite type of literature has to do with what we do in our daily lives and how to control those things to make them work for us. I love happiness research, non-scientific psychological phenomenons, habit making or breaking strategies, personality frameworks affecting decision making, etc. Thanks to Carr, I am now very interested in the role the internet plays in our lives and its effect on our brain.

To be continued.

-Jessi Russell

Welcome to my brain. Or at least the part of my brain which deals with HIST 390: The Digital Past in the Fall of 2018 at George Mason University.

I’m not sure what to think of this class yet. Hopefully I’ll get a feel for it in the coming weeks and find it valuable to my education.

This week’s topics of conversation were the “loudness war,” compression of music to make it all the same volume, the changes in how and why we listen to music, and whether technology enriches or impoverishes our lives.

I understand the concept of compression, but I don’t understand why it is happening in modern music. Who began compressing music? What was the though process behind making music more “processed” and less “natural?” If a singer is singing low to moderate in their range, the volume should be rather soft. If they are singing with great emotion or very high in their range, the volume rises. If more instruments join the piece, the volume should increase. These sound changes are natural in the making of music. So who decided to take this element away from music?

Professor O’Malley credited an author for using the example of bread to explain the process of compression. Real bread is amazing. Creating a starter using ground wheat and water begins the fermentation process. You feed the starter everyday to keep the process going. Then you create your dough and do bulk fermentation. Then you shape your loaves, make cuts, let them rise one last time, and bake. You have a perfect loaf of nutritionally dense, fermented, delicious bread. So, why does Wonder Bread exist? Its flour is bleached and stripped of nutritional value to create a longer shelf life. The nutrients are pumped back in artificially, there are a bunch of weird sweeteners in it (why is bread sweet?), and it just tastes bad. People buy it and they don’t make their own bread. Why?

We can relate this to compression of music. Why is this new (and bad sounding) way of listening to music taking over the music scene when the original method was far better? We buy it, we listen to it, we like it.

I have one idea as to why this is happening to music. I’m not saying it’s accurate or is the entire explanation, but I think it may be part of the explanation.

Consider Wonder Bread again. When Wonder Bread first hit the shelves, people weren’t necessarily making their own bread all the time. Slowly, Americans became busy enough and wealthy enough to outsource this labor-intensive task to a company who sells it to the grocery store. A delicious (but not really) loaf of bread could end up in the houses of American families for a small sum. What happened to the small companies that made bread once Wonder Bread popped up in stores? Their sales probably plummeted. There is a cheaper bread on the market that lasts longer and is advertised heavily using amazing marketing techniques. Wonder Bread set the new standard: cheap, fluffy, long-lasting, decent enough to eat, and oddly enough, American. What do the others do? Either attempt to make a case for why their product is better or more natural, or change to the new way of making bread and probably make a lot more money.

This system sucks, but it’s something we see all the time in America and the world. The question becomes: why do we accept the bad thing in the first place? If people had tried Wonder Bread and decided that it tastes awful and never bought another loaf, they would have gone out of business a long time ago. But for a long time we thought we were ahead of the world by making things cheaper, less environmentally-friendly, and worse in quality. The middle class of post-WWII America created this trend.

I am pleased to see that trend reversing. Millennials in particular are finding ways to return the the more natural way of doing things, and realizing that it is better most of the time. Of course I’m not suggesting an extremely “natural” lifestyle is a good idea (I’m talking to you, antivaxxers), and sometimes these people may come off as annoying “hipsters.” But I think we’re on to something, or at least I’m hopeful. I will add that consumers are very powerful creatures. If something needs to be changed and you mobilize enough people to not buy it till it’s fixed, those trends are scary to companies (think rBST in milk products – it’s essentially gone because enough people stopped buying milk). If music compression is protested enough, it’ll be gone soon.

Music is a huge industry and everyone in it wants to keep making money. If the idea of music compression hits the headlines and permeates social media, I think it’s all over for that compressed garbage we currently listen to.

-Jessi Russell