The Digital Past

I was brought up in a religious environment, therefore I am supposed to be an idealist. I would say in many aspects of my life I do have an idealist point of view. Such as the example we discussed in class about the sunset. I enjoy looking at sunsets because they are naturally beautiful and cannot be created by man. We argued in class that an individual cannot be both an idealist and a realist, however, I believe that someone can be both. I would say that I am more of an idealist, but my outlook on some things in life are more on the realist side because I compare many things to past experiences.

In today’s discussion, one thing that stuck with me was that it is more valuable to memorize information, rather than looking it up online or in a textbook. It is, in fact, more efficient to know things right off the top of your head also it proves that you have mastered a skill or concept. In class, an example used was a surgeon. Would you want a surgeon that knows the procedure inside and out or one who has to look up what the next step is? Personally, I would want the surgeon who was confident in what they were doing.

“The medium is the message.” was a phrase repeated numerous times. To me, this means how the message is delivered/everything that was done to get the point across. I believe that how a message is delivered makes a huge difference to how the message is interpreted.

After reading “The Annihilation of Space and Time” I was reminded of how much things have changed over the years in our country. The advances in technology have made our lives easier and more enjoyable. When I say technology some may think immediately cell phones or a laptop, but technology is pretty much anything created/invented to make the way of life easier. An example used in “The Annihilation of Space and Time”, was the refrigerated rail cars that came about in the early 1880’s allowed Americans to eat things they normally couldn’t due to their location, like fresh strawberries in the winter if you lived up north. Anywhere you look you can find a technological advance that we may take for granted, but back in the past was hard to come by, or was considered a luxury.

The trend in music nowadays is to compress it. Most of my generation had no idea that dynamic range in most of the music we listen to is non-existent, or barely there at all.  It seems the older generations aren’t fond of our taste in music because everything is “too loud” and the compression makes the song “bland”.

So is our taste in music bad? In our defense, this type of music is all we have ever known. The huge advances in technology have made it possible to alter the volume of a song, making it more convenient to listen to, and with so many distractions in everyday life, some people just like to tune everything out and listen to their music. The musician’s volume changes only slightly/not at all no matter how loud they are actually singing.

So why does our generation’s music have no dynamic range? I believe it’s because of how our generation listens to music. For example, we frequently listen to music through headphones, big speakers, or our cars. Constantly adjusting the volume would become annoying.

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