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