This class we discussed the book The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, I wasn’t in class for the discussion as I was sick, but I was intrigued by his thoughts and analysis of our media culture. He states that our consumption of technology and our access to vast amounts of knowledge through our connection to the internet is changing the way we think, how our brains work. As a nursing student, what I found most interesting about the book is his connection to synapses, part of the neural tissue and how our neurons communicate with one another. As we grow, so do our number of synapses, usually until some point during puberty when they are ‘pruned’, or in other words, the ones we don’t use are destroyed. Carr’s argument that we are becoming hyperactive and unable to give our full attention to one thing at a time is connected to synapses and this pruning process. He states that since we are no longer working as hard for the information we are getting, it is affecting the number of synapses that are formed and then pruned, we are literally killing our brain cells by looking at a screen.

This class we focused on the technological advances of the late 18th-early 19th centuries, and how they affected the perception of man’s place in time and space. There were more technological advances in the West during that time than in any other period of history before or since, so much so that people were afraid of the ‘annihilation of time and space’ through new inventions such as the telegraph and railroad. People could now communicate with technology over vast distances, and no longer were bound by the confines of horses, they could travel incredible distances in just one day. Where you lived no longer constrained you. This was the beginning of the change in man’s perception of the world, distance was becoming irrelevant, and with the first photograph in 1834, time was also changed. Photographs were different from portraits and anything else that had ever come before it; with a photograph the exact moment in time that is was taken was forever preserved, like a message from the past and that scared people. People’s sense of Time was also displaced through inventions such as the electric light and the standardization of American time, when before everyone had gone by the sun and every town had their own variation of when the day started, this was no longer feasible when people began to be able to travel longer distances in a shorter amount of time. This also worried people, because since they told time by their specific place in relation to the sun they were following the “natural” order of things, or “God’s” order, and by Man declaring their own time zones and standardization they were disrupting that order and placing themselves above God. it’s odd to think about how so many of the technologies and viewpoints we take advantage of today were so mindblowing less than 200 years ago. While I knew that the inventions themselves were revolutionary and scared some of the population, I had never thought of how they could affect people’s views of the world and their own place in it.

Today in class we focused on differences in perspective between modern day and in the late  1800’s – early 1900’s. We watched a short film in class that was made in 1903 I believe, called ‘Life of a Fireman”? “A Fireman’s Life”? Something about a Fireman. We analyzed how filming and storytelling style in the movie differs from our modern-day styles, and what this reveals about our differing cultural perspectives with the advent of technology. In the Fireman movie, the scenes are long, continuous, and extremely focused on narrative action, while the camera doesn’t pan around at all during or between the scenes. It stays completely still and in one perspective during each long scene of action. Why film this way? Why don’t we film professional movies this way anymore? And what does this tell us about differing mindsets between now and the time the film was shot? We contrasted this movie with a scene from a famously realistic movie, “Saving Private Ryan”, and found that the way in which the perspective in “Saving Private Ryan” jumps from flying in the air like a bird, to being Tom Hanks, to being Tom Hank’s friend, to being in the water itself is not actually as “realistic” as it claims to be. It does give a sense of realism, we have at least a few different shots from the view of the characters, but no real person who was watching the historical event the scene was based on could’ve jumped from all those different perspectives, and especially not in the span of a minute. While in the Fireman movie, our perspective was consistently that of a bystander to the action, an actually realistic perspective. So why do modern viewers see “Saving Private Ryan” as the more realistic movie, and the other one as dated and fake-looking? This illustrates one of Carr’s main points in The Shallows, have we simply adapted our minds to be more familiarized and used to the technology we’ve been exposed to? And what does that say about us as a society, that we view the impossible scenario as more realistic than the natural scenario? What does that say about the influence of technology?

Today in class we discussed the differences between modern music and music from previous decades, and how that fits into aesthetics and the difference between idealism and realism. Modern music is extremely compressed, especially in comparison with songs from the 30’s-50’s, no matter how many new instruments are added to the song, no matter how the singer changes their voice, whether they belt or start to sing more softly, the volume of the song really doesn’t change that much. Which is weird and unnatural when you think about it, but I realized when comparing songs like Havana, Firework, and Fight Song, that it’s what I’ve gotten used to, and my mind automatically classifies anything as not having that quality as dated and older. Older music is more dynamic in volume, you can really tell that singers back then had to rely on more talent than a lot of popular singers today, but I also realized I can’t understand them very well, their voices and the clarity of the lyrics are drowned out by the instruments and the noise that comes from recording in a lot of older songs. So even though the argument could be made that the lyrics from older songs ‘mean’ more than newer lyrics, it doesn’t really make much of a difference to me if I can’t understand them. The argument could be made that this change in music could be associated with a change in demand for attention by people; as our lives become busier music is no longer an activity that takes our full attention, we’d much rather be able to complete other tasks while also listening to our favorite songs. I really think this trend of more compressed music is due to what I read in the readings for this class, that it comes from musicians trying to make their tracks louder and louder until they couldn’t make it any louder and so they had to compress the whole thing. I think people of my younger generation generally like modern music more than older music because it’s what we’ve grown up with, and is familiar to us.

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