When reading How Music Got Free one of the things that struck me was just how easy it actually was to pirate songs, and how far we’ve come from the late nineties to now. The fact that the ipod itself, something that I would pay $1.29 per song for (or .99 if the song wasn’t popular at the time) could hold illegally downloaded music is something I never knew. The fact that the music industry was actively partnering with and selling a device that easily hold songs that were stolen from them, that they were basically giving people who illegally downloaded something that they made a lot of money off of is just really funny to me. Morris basically gave up, said “whatever” and decided to just sue kids instead of going after the leak, which again, is really funny, but also extremely unfortunate for the people who were prosecutes for it. Between this and the backlash from the Hubcap lawsuit, it’s no wonder to me that itunes and similar sites are simply dying out. Streaming services have risen up in their place as the source of most of my and my friends’ music listening, as well as audio off of youtube. I personally use Spotify, which I don’t have to pay a cent for as long as I have wifi and listen to ads every now and then, which I’m perfectly okay with as opposed to paying $1.29 per song I buy. If I don’t want to listen to ads or want to listen without wifi I can just pay for premium, which is $5 a month. I don’t think the file sharers of the nineties would have thought at the time this would be an actual service one day, but I’m glad it’s here and I hope they are too.

There wasn’t class today, but the articles posted for us to read were all about passwords, cybersecurity, and how easy it is for us to get hacked. The first article really did hit home for me because I use pretty much the same few passwords for every one of my accounts, so if I forget what it is for a specific account I can just rotate through the list and try them all, knowing it’s going to be one of them. The fact that there are sites and services that you can buy other people’s account information from for as little as $4 is absolutely terrifying to me. I’ve been “minorly” hacked a few times before, I fell victim to a facebook scam when I was in middle school where someone on my friends list messaged me a video asking if I was in it, and when I clicked on it I started sending out the same message to all of the people on my own friends list. I also got a call from my grandmother recently saying that she had received a fake email from me with a similar virused link attached, but she was smart enough not to open it. In both cases I simply changed my password and moved on, but the fact that it’s so easy for someone to get into your entire life, hack multiple “secure” accounts just because you clicked on a sketchy link is really scary. How often this has been happening on a national level with big banking corporations and  government agencies is also rather terrifying and especially frustrating. How are we supposed to trust the government with our safety and protection when they can’t even keep our data safe? They’re supposed to have the best systems in the world guarding our information and yet there have been an increasing number of data breaches, as shown by the wiki article and recent events, that put us at major risk. It’s not right.

The term that I chose to search was “screamo” music, which to be honest I know nothing about but I thought it would be interesting to see where it was first mentioned, because as far as I know it’s a fairly recent genre. I found the first use of the word in 1969, which I really wasn’t expecting, I thought I’d find the first mention at least a decade later, it then dips back down to 0% after 1976, has a resurgence from 1980 to 1994 with a peak in 1986, and then reemerges again in 1999, and shoots up until 2008, where it’s projected to keep rising. Although upon further investigation I found that the word itself wasn’t used to describe the actual music genre until around the late nineties, and previous uses of it meant anything from cigar brands, porcelain, and even a name of a pet in a novel. The quotes I found about the actual music were in articles without ebooks, so it was kind of hard to get better quotes, and they didn’t really give me much besides listing some band names with a brief description of the style of music, and the importance of fashion to the genre: (Although I did get a great description of traveler’s diarrhea from an infectious disease handbook referring to it as “the hot galloping screamos”)

“So last week the New York Times ran an article called “Summer of Screamo.” It was a poorly researched article that was mostly about bands that have had some mild level of mainstream success such as The Used and Thursday.”

“The angry planets have aligned so that three of screamo’s primo torchbearers have dropped major-label platters just in time to save the day from the nii-metal backlash.”

“Posters, banners, table tents and the ScreamO-Meter backbar piece encourage customers to compete in the most blood-curdling scream contest to win T-shirts, bandannas, eye patches, tattoos, pirate earrings, and mustaches and beards.”

This class we talked a lot about crowdsourcing, freedom of information, and started on the topic of copyrighting. Wikipedia was cited as one of the best, if not the best example we have today on the accuracy of information due to crowdsourcing, the pages are just out there and pretty much anyone can add to these pages, with more people looking at and checking it for accuracy whenever they please, editing it, and then adding their own information. There are so many people who know at least a little bit on so many different topics, that you can get highly accurate and detailed information on anything you want just from putting it out to a random group of people. That’s insane to me. We talked a little bit about encyclopedias, how they were created during the time of the French Revolution, which must have been hectic for the authors, and how it created a need for a new organizational structure which tried to list every known thing in the world under a few different categories. The “owning” of information has always been used as a mark of the upper class, historically, even really unintelligent members of the ruling classes had extensive libraries to show their rivals that they were “learned men”; and so up until fairly recently having a set of encyclopedias was something that you tried to discreetly display in your home as a status symbol. One of the figures we talked about was Richard Stalman and his four freedoms of software: Freedom to run it for any purpose, To study how the program works, Freedom to redistribute copies, and Freedom to improve the program and release improvements to the public. He believes that all information should be free and open to anyone who wishes to access it, and while I agree, I also don’t really think it’s entirely realistic in our current society. While a lot of our information is free, there are definitely many pieces of information that are not, and whoever has them either will not give them up, or will not give them up without a price.

The point of this class was to make us more informed consumers of technology, and this class we discussed how people both change and restore history, and whether they or anyone else has the right to do one or the other. One of the points made was that textbooks are seen as the ultimate authority on a subject that many of us don’t know much about, or don’t think we know very much about. Honestly I know many people who have become experts in certain subjects, history, math, and even carpentry and blacksmithing just from watching videos on the internet or researching online documents and articles. Textbooks make it seem like history or other academic subjects are in the hands of people we know nothing about, but trust simply because they’ve been chosen to write about the subject, which is weird. here’s a similar structure going on with museums, how they take pieces of history and lock it away where everyone can see but no one can touch or interact with it, which makes sense given people’s tendency to mess up artifacts, but then how much are we really getting out of seeing it? There question of whether or not we actually have the right to alter history in order to get a point across also came up, an example is when the smithsonian tried to put in a lunch counter sit-in exhibit to bring up the history of civil rights. People were just reminiscing about their own personal history with lunch counters when it was on ground level with them, with barely any mention of their significance in the fight for civil rights, and to combat this they moved the counter a few feet off the ground on a platform. This caused people to see it as more “significant” even though lunch counters weren’t actually that high, when the point of the exhibit in the first place was to make it realistic and have people be able to interact with it as people in the 50’s and 60’s could have. I think it’s sad that sometimes people don’t really get the message a symbol or an exhibit is trying to get across by just having it there in its natural state, and that sometimes alterations that don’t make it entirely accurate but get the point across are necessary