This week in class confused me at first. I wasn’t sure if I was understanding the message.

(Get it!)

The quote,”A self created in Literacy is a lesser self” is interesting, because the idea that not being able to read makes you smarter because all the knowledge you need to know is memorized. Whereas, literate persons will look up said knowledge. I believe that literacy can limit our abilities, because we spend more time researching than discussing and discovering. However, just because someone is illiterate does not mean they are smarter. We discussed “The medium is the message”, and if the information or message you receive from the medium is only partially true, and you teach or argue off of those facts, one can still create a lesser self. Illiteracy can sometimes be based in ignorance or false information.

We also discussed the idea of writing created two selves, the “writing self” and the “reading self” and we posed the question:

“When you are reading to yourself, who are you reading to?”

When reading to yourself, you are not necessarily reading as much as comprehending and taking in information, compared to reading aloud where you are not really taking in information. If “the medium is the message” and the message is whatever knowledge you receive from literature, does literacy actually create a lesser self (as literacy is democratizing access to knowledge)?

I believe that the internet is an extremely powerful tool in the modern age. Having the internet available at our fingertips is convenient, but we memorize less. However, it gives us access to more information faster than before. Although, some argue that the internet is making everyone dumber, because we can look things up; we are actually getting smarter. Older people who grew up without the internet feel as though we are dumber because we don’t memorize as everyone’s birthdays and small facts. However, younger people feel as though the memorization of small facts is unimportant in the grand scheme of knowledge. The ideas and concepts that I learned in 2008 are much harder than they were in 1978 and the concepts in 2018 are harder than they were in 2008. The influence of the internet as made education more complex; meaning five-year-olds are more advanced now than I was at age 5. The internet is making the world more educated at a younger age and the rest of the older world is trying to catch up. When I was young, my father tried to teach me the Greek alphabet; it took me 25 minutes to memorize it. When he was young, it took him almost an hour. My nieces learned the Greek alphabet last year within 5 minutes, because of the videos available to make it easier to learn.

In class, the argument that the internet is destroying our brains doesn’t hold up for this reason. The technological world is all that some 20-year-olds and everyone younger know, but its not destroying our brains. It’s making everything harder now that knowledge is available at our fingertips.

During the first week of History 390, we talked about the idea of modern music being compressed. When music is compressed, it fails to be anything more than background noise. It was argued that music is compressed because we tend to spend a lot of time listening to music while doing other tasks, and we can’t be bothered with adjusting the volume. Professor O’Malley argued that we shouldn’t be listening to music while multitasking, as it prevents us from doing a thoroughly good job, because all of our focus is not whatever assignment or task we’re supposed to do. Also, he argued the fact that music today is practically sub-par when compared to music of the 60’s, 70’s, etc.

The song he used to make that argument was “Havana” by Camila Cabello which, in my mind, is a terrible example of music today. Pop music today is terrible in comparison to pop music of the 50’s and 60’s and so forth. Popular pop music today is very basic and only really popular because of how catchy it is, which is why it is played so often.

Genres such: R & B, Blues, and even Hip-Hop & Rap consist of some compressed music but not as much as pop music. Genres like these are less compressed and very dependent of the vocalist and or lyricist. Even though some could argue that newer rap or “trap music” in the 2010’s is compressed, which it is, I believe the majority is not.

I believe that compressed music exists in most popularized, highly marketed music and/or musicians. Pop music and artists like, Taylor Swift and sometimes Beyoncé have compressed music, in which their vocals will lack dynamics.