The class discussion today was mildly disturbing. To a degree I know I’m constantly under surveillance of some kind. Every website wants to link my social media and all my ads are tailored to things I have searched before. My computer also knows what I have googled on my phone and vice versa. But to know that individuality is specifically linked to state control is a bit unsettling. Especially the fact that grid based cities were specifically designed with surveillance and government access in mind. That being said I would be interested to see if there is a correlation between city planning and crime rates, specifically if grid cities had lower crime rate or higher arrest rates.

I tried out the Nielsen Segmentation site and looked up my zip code and I personally didn’t see the similarities between my family and the results but I did see some similarities with some of the people from my area. It’s a bit funny that software originally designed to predict where riots would occur is now used for marketing.

The readings for this class about Pandora radio and music genome were… confusing. I felt like I was jumping into a conversation with no idea what it was about and I had to use context clues to figure out what was going on. That being said the idea of linking different songs and genres together as well as using other people’s music choices to generate recommendations is pretty cool. I’ve got to say though Pandora does have its faults. I hardly use it anymore partly because of the ads and partly because it does tend to replay a lot of songs and I often don’t like the recommendations.

It’s very strange to try and imagine how highly regulated television and radio was. You can find just about anything on the Internet or on TV regardless of how “obscene or objectionable” it is. What is even stranger to me is that all of those regulations were self imposed, that there was no law enforcing it. Not to mention what was considered inappropriate to show on television was pretty broad, couples couldn’t even be shown together in bed because it imply that they had sex. Couples that already had a child together couldn’t be shown in bed together. I suppose that because there were so few channels television broadcasters really had to have all of their bases covered. It’s funny, older generations are very quick to make fun of how easily offended millennials are and yet… separate beds.

I’m also a bit surprised that the fairness doctrine wasn’t abandoned until the 1980’s. I would have figured that it would have been abandoned in the 1970’s when cable TV was developed and marketed.

In a way a lot of what was being shown during the time of the FCC licensing agreement seems a bit like propaganda. Criminality could not be presented as sympathetic, certain morals had to be portrayed as positive, and law enforcement had to be shown as the good guys. Media may be more “obscene and objectionable” today but at least people are provided with different points of view and different stories.

I appreciate the thoroughness of the history of the MP3 that Sterne provides in his book, however in my opinion it took far too long to actually tell the reader what an MP3 is. The book itself was actually rather difficult for me to understand; there were quotes throughout the book that were just dropped in with little context and I honestly couldn’t even discern his thesis. There were some points that I understood though. For instance, the value of efficiency vs. quality, as well as how the MP3 format has changed the act of listening to music and how it has affected human behavior in general.

In regards to the history of the MP3 I suppose it makes sense that it begins with telephones rather than with recorded sound. The invention and the improvement of telephones has had an impact on recorded sound because it deals with the transmission of sound, something that is necessary in recording and playing back. I have to say though the use of the cats in the Bell Lab experiments is incredibly creepy; it feels very unethical as well, however without it would technology be what it is today?

Sterne does argue that the MP3 has been bad for the music industry yet good for consumerism. The fact that MP3’s are cheaper and more convenient seems to out weigh the fact that the song has been greatly reduced. There is also the effect it has on people. Listening to music used to be a shared experience and it has gotten progressively more private. The MP3 allows people to listen to music via headphones on their phone and they don’t have to interact with others. In a way this can also limit peoples personal growth; they are not exposed to other types of music nor the people who listen to it. It is very isolating

The Rolling Stones cover of “I hate to see you go” is almost identical to Little Walter’s original version of it. He was an inspiration of theirs so it is unsurprising that they would want to do a cover of one of his songs. I suppose they had to pay to do the cover of the song and so they were well within their right to do it legally but I am a bit torn on the ethics of it. They added no real personal touches to the song, was it meant to be exactly the same as an homage? It was more popular than the original too, is that because the Rolling Stones are very famous and because the internet makes music more accessible or because they are white? I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that I agree that it is a continuation of the minstrel show tradition but it does make me somewhat uncomfortable. Should white musicians have to be more thoughtful about what songs they cover and consider their popularity? Something about popular white musicians performing covers of songs by black musicians makes me a bit uncomfortable and it always seems as though it is a continuation of white people appropriating African American culture.

Learning about sound waves required less uncomfortable thinking although I admit I am still a bit fuzzy on some of the details. I understand pitch and frequency fine but I start to get a bit lost with the overtones. I do find the theory that music can be translated into architecture fascinating though. I don’t fully understand how that translation works but I am drawn to the idea that different kinds of art are connected to each other. I am still a realist and that seems to be more of an idealist view but it is still interesting.

The final point that industrialization lowers the quality of product was different. I have heard that before but not in relation to digital media; I had always assumed that as technology improved the quality of digital media would too but I suppose people will cut corners everywhere. It is nice to know that products are beginning to be enriched again though.

I was unfortunately unable to make it to class today but luckily there are multiple readings to reflect on.

I found the articles a bit unsettling. I am not tech-savvy nor do I have the best memory so I tend not to regularly change my passwords or willingly make them very complex. It’s unnerving, to say the least how easy it is for hackers to gain access to my accounts. I guess I always had this image in my mind of hackers targeting a specific person; that’s not to say I wasn’t aware of the fact that companies are often targeted and thousands of people’s information is then stolen or leaked though. In fact I technically had a lot of my personal information compromised some years back; my stepfather works for the military and he was required to provide family members information to gain certain security clearances and that database was hacked (It may have actually been the Office of Personnel Management data breach we were linked to but I’m not sure). Nothing really happened though, at least not that I’m aware of, so it’s just one of those things that I push to the back of my mind.

Although I suppose this is also somewhat relevant given that it was recently released that the Russian’s did in fact hack the U.S. voting system (I didn’t procrastinate this bad on all of my blog posts, I swear; just this one because I didn’t make it to class this day). I don’t know if they were using the same kind of password hacking algorithms but it really does show how formidable hackers have become.

I’ve gone off on a tangent though, so back to the point. The Wired article gives an interesting, brief, history of passwords, followed by a statement that they are pretty much moot now. According to Honan, the author of the article, the idea of “strong passwords” is false; unless it is unimaginably long and random it really isn’t safe. He does provide some tips for better passwords though; for example, don’t reuse passwords, don’t fall for phishing scams, and don’t make your password something that’s easy to guess. None of those guarantee protection a hacker though. Goodin’s article for arsTechnica goes more into depth in regards to the process of hacking, or at the very least the technology used. I find it particularly discomforting that, with every batch of leaked passwords, the hacking algorithms are improved and refined. Especially given how much hacking has increased in recent years.

Technology is great. I’m the first to say how much I love my iPhone and Netflix. However it really has its downside. Before the internet there was no real plausible way to gather peoples information to this degree, to violate so many peoples privacy at once.

I knew that people manipulated records and turntables to create a new sort of music but I never though of it as sampling. The sampling I’m used to is, of course, all done digitally and often times includes samples of sounds from pop culture; for example audio from a commercial or TV show or bits and pieces of theme songs. From the video’s I watched of sampling that used actual records it looks pretty difficult, it certainly takes a lot of speed to be able to do it as a performance rather than just as a recording.

The origins of sampling definitely make sense and I’m not surprised that it developed; it seems as if it were almost inevitable. People who wanted to make music but didn’t have the money for instruments or a band found a very creative way to do so. Of course as it caught on technology developed to make it easier and more versatile.

It really is a shame that sampling was ruled illegal. I personally think that it is unjust. It doesn’t seem to me that musicians are really stealing other people’s works, they’re using it and building on it; they’re creating something else with it. It is not illegal for artists to use magazines and other media in collages. It reminds me a bit of the way software is treated; people copyright it and no one is allowed to try and improve it and share those improvements, even if they are not for profit.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really understand the reading for this class. It felt very information heavy and I am really not well versed in technological language. I also do not really understand what it had to with sampling. The best connection I could make is that they were developing software that searches and categorizes bits of information and sampling also extracts bits and pieces from a whole.

I understand that credit should be given where credit is due and that people should be compensated for their work but at some point a line has to be drawn. I mean Disney is out of control. Not to mention the legal case surrounding “Happy Birthday”. The fact that people have been sued for singing it at birthday parties is outrageous, some present! In a way it’s satisfying that Warner/Chappell has lost the suit and the song is going to be made public domain. It’s not that I care much about the song but it’s just ridiculous for a person or corporation to have a monopoly on something for so long.

Copyrights have been getting gradually extended since their creation. I agree that they should have been longer than their original 14 years but a life time plus 70 years is definitely a bit much. Not to mention the fact that copyrights can be purchased and that corporations can own them for 100 years. The fact that it does not matter who made it but rather who owns it proves that copyrights no longer just protect intellectual property. They protect financial interests.

Since the creation of the Internet the freedom of knowledge has been a hot topic. Diderot created the first modern encyclopedia, a compilation of the world’s knowledge. People could purchase sets of encyclopedias for their homes or go to the library to read it there. The encyclopedia was limited though, it was only updated every ten years and it could only hold so much information. Fast forward to the digital age, the age of the Internet and specifically Wikipedia, and people now have access to far more information and it is often easier to obtain. Traditional encyclopedias obviously have the advantage of being more authoritative, only experts are allowed to write for them; anybody can post things on the Internet after all. However because sites like Wikipedia are viewed and edited by so many people the majority of users make sure the information is correct and keep the jokers in check. There is still the risk of false information though. That being said it is very obviously on the side of free information; Wikipedia is a great example of the Internet striving to keep information free.

Many sites (especially academic ones) make an effort to limit access to information, making people pay to see it. This is also true for programs. People create programs and then copyright them and do not allow other people to edit them. Obviously people should be given credit for their work and should not be expected to work for free however this restricts the growth and improvement of programs and the Internet as a whole. Apple is infamous for this. Richard Stallman, the author of the “The Four Freedoms of Software” and the creator GNU/Linux, firmly believes in the open source software movement. Open source software allows users to constantly improve and share improvements of software. It is typically not as user friendly though.

I chose to investigate the web for the origins of funk, or at least the first mention of it in a primary source i.e. not Wikipedia. Although admittedly I did read up on it on Wikipedia for some context after I was done playing digital detective. I can’t resist a good, distracting, Wikipedia article.

So I began my search on Google Ngram Viewer to help narrow down what dates I should be looking at. I first searched the word “funk”, this did not however, yield very helpful results. The word “funk” was very popular in 1800 and declined in usage between 1800 and 1820; it then rose in popularity again in 1920 and then again in 2000 with little usage in the years between. This did not match up with my limited knowledge of funk music so I wrote those results off as unrelated; I assume all of those hits were related to the noun funk rather than the music genre. I searched “funk music” next and the results were much more in line with what I expected. According to Google Ngram Viewer the term “funk music” first came into use in the very early 1970’s, possibly the late 60’s. With this information I turned to Google Books next. The earliest mentions of actual funk music I found in Google Books were from 1970. All earlier mentions appeared to be similar words that the software had misread or different usages of the word funk. As a side note it turns out “Funk” is a pretty common last name. The mentions of funk music from 1970 came from Living Blue, Issues 1-18 and Stereo Review Volume 25. Neither outright says “funk music” but it is clear that they are talking about it, or at least a very early version of it. In Stereo Review the writer is discussing a musicians new work; they describe it as such: “Lou and ensemble create funky music, but it’s funk with legato, and delightful to hear.” Here they refer to it as “funky music” and “funk” rather than as “funk music” but it’s not hard to make the connection. Funk is mentioned twice in Living Blues; the first reference to funk is: “but the funky rock/soul/blues arrangement comes as a surprise”. The second mention is: “The Last Hooker vocal is on ‘Conversion Blues’, and his guitar work is fine, even if this take isn’t as funky as the Age single”. The references to funk music, or the beginnings of funk music, are all relatively positive. Stereo Review in particular seems to be enchanted by this emerging new genre.

Unfortunately Chronically America’s sources were all too early to have anything on funk music. I did do a quick search just to be sure and the only results that came up were again misread words, people’s names, or different uses of the word. My ProQuest search proved fruitful, a bit too fruitful actually. After narrowing the results down significantly, the earliest relevant source I could find was an article written in 1973, from a women’s news journal, “Off Our Backs”. The article, entitled La Salamandre, was a review of a movie. It only mentions funk music once; apparently it was used in the sound track of the film. The quote reads, “around and around wile sado-funk music reminiscent of Velvet Underground rides overhead.” The author, Frederica Green, didn’t have much to say about the music but was very complimentary of the scene in which it was used so I can only assume she enjoyed it as well. Though this mention is three years later than the previous mentions I spoke about above it does illustrate that, if funk was still emerging in 1970, by 1973 it was a well-established genre.

According to Wikipedia Funk did in fact originate in the late 1960’s. It was developed by African American musicians from soul, jazz, and R&B, which explains why one of the earliest references to it was in a blues magazine

Sites Used:

https://books.google.com/books?id=te0OAQAAMAAJ&dq=funk+music&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=funk

https://books.google.com/books?id=qQDaAAAAMAAJ&dq=funk+music&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=funky

http://search.proquest.com.mutex.gmu.edu/news/docview/197150609/240C928F4214DA6PQ/2?accountid=14541

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk

There were many elements involved in the start of the Civil War; slavery however was, without question, the biggest factor. The participation of black men in the confederacy has been debated though. There is evidence to support both sides of the argument and much of it is contradictory. For instance Dr. Steiner’s 1862 report states that there were integrated confederate troops led by a confederate named Cobb, however there are quotes from Cobb only three years later that say he would never even consider integrating his troops. Dr. Steiner himself may have only reported that there were integrated troops to humiliate the confederates. Photos of black men in confederate uniforms are also used as evidence of the integration of southern troops however it has been proven that the union uniforms were not standardized and they may have in fact been union troops.

Some evidence in favor of the African American participation in the confederate troops has yet to be disproved though. There is a photo of a man named Andrew Martin Chandler and his African American servant Silas Chandler in confederate uniforms. However there is little context to the photo; there exists no explanation as to why Silas Chandler decided to serve nor is there description of what he did. In addition to that, Fredrick Douglass wrote that there were black confederate soldiers at Manassas. However Douglass may have had an ulterior motive because he desperately wanted the union to accept African American soldiers.

Historians have yet to come to consensus on this issue and it is still hotly debated by some. It does give insight into the unreliability into sources though; it is important for people to consider where their evidence comes from, who wrote it, what their reasoning was, and even trying to find other sources to corroborate it.