Over the Weekend- Sofia Corelli

https://archive.org/details/Wonderfu1960

I chose to watch a commercial video for this assignment because I am really interested in marketing and advertising. I thought that seeing a commercial from the 1960s would show the major changes in advertising back then and advertising today. First off, the commercial was 3 minutes long, which these days is pretty much unheard of. Car commercials these days are 30 seconds long, maybe 1 minute tops. The commercial focused on futurology, which is what we also read about in this week’s articles. People of the time were obsessing over the future and the awesome technology that was expected to come. Ford played off of this by setting their new car commercial in a scene with space technology, shooting stars, and fancy gowns. Because they associated their cars with things as futuristic as these, it sent out the picture that their cars were, too, very futuristic. In an Age of Affluence, when people were focused on leisure and luxury, this was very appealing to them. Then, at the end of the commercial, it said “Get a new 1960 Ford at your dealership today.” This reflects the Information Society of the time because decentralization and transportation were taking over, and more efficient means of getting products were coming about. Cars could be bought anywhere, could get you anywhere, and could carry goods/services/information anywhere. What we can learn from this film about the information society is that corporate promotional films back then were very different, but still sent out the message of glamour and futurology that even people today still look for in their vehicles. Also, what we can learn, is that companies such as Ford are only products of consumer demands. The demand for speed of transportation and information needed a technology to make it happen, and cars were one of these technologies that came about as a result. 

Over the Weekend Assignment - Milwaukee Transit

Entering this assignment, I wanted to spend my time watching something interesting.  In the end, I picked the least interesting video of all time.  The video is called Milwaukee Transit and I picked this film because I’m from the Milwaukee area and thought it would be fascinating to look at a historical video of Milwaukee.  The entire eleven minutes was spent filming electrically wired trolleys, picking up and dropping people off at their stops.  Although the video was nowhere near appealing, it did give useful about past public transportation.  It showed that many people used the public transportation because of the availability in the city and to save money.  People that may not have known how Milwaukee citizens get from point A to point B without a car in 1957 can know understand how people went about that.  Public transportation is a result of information technology as mass transportation of goods became available at a more reasonable price for local government.  These goods being moved are people in this case, helps move production (labor) and consumption (consumer) to the places they needed to be.

https://archive.org/details/HMMilwaukeeTransport98203

Over the Weekend- Prelinger Archives

The Archived film I watched was “Using the Bank.” This movie is about how a typical bank would work before computers. The movie starts with Mr. Adams depositing money into his savings account. It was a very long process that started with him writing a deposit slip, and then he gave the money the teller who had many other processes to complete. It then shows the vault, and then Mr. Adams tries to get a loan from the bank. He had a meeting with the president and it was almost an interview. I think this film connects to the Information Society because after the information society all of these processes would happen instantaneously. First, when we go to the bank we just put our check/cash in the ATM and leave. Moreover, the interview that Mr. Adams had with the president regarding his loan would have been unnecessary if the president had a way to check his credit score online. We all use a bank someway or another every day. Whether its using an ATM, transferring money from our phones, or even using a debit card. These are all examples of processes that are now so easy as a result of the Information Society. https://archive.org/details/Usingthe1947

Article Report- A Postmortem on Daniel Bell's Postindustrialism

This week’s readings were about the postindustrial service economy, the article “A Postmortem on Daniel Bell’s Post Industrialism” written by Laurence Veysey, critically analyses the writings of Daniel Bell over the subject of the Post Industrialism Age. Laurence Veysey’s article was published in the spring of 1982 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. The article can be found in the American Quarterly, Vol. 34 No. 1, in pages 49-69. The intended audience for this article is scholars and researchers of the topic on the industrial era and how it transcended in American culture. In the scholarly article, Veysey critiques Daniel Bell’s major books The Coming of Post-Industrial Society which talks about the Postindustrial society as an era in which knowledge is central to the functioning of the entire society. Bell’s second major book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism discusses the idea that romanticism has taken over American culture.

According to Bell’s books which were written in the 1970’s, postindustrialism was just on the rise in our society, however, Veysey notes that authors such as David Riesman described an era of postindustrialism in the 1950’s; well before Bell himself. Veysey argues that the conflicts that Bell dwells on do not connect with the larger American social structure; instead these conflicts are fought out solely within the elites that Bell directs his attention to. Thus, Veysey argues that Bell is not a dependable guide and his notion of postindustrialism is unserviceable for social historians.

Contrary to Bell, Veysey argues that an “age of affluence” enables us to better grasp the meaning of American social history more easily than postindustrialism during the years of 1920-1970. However, Veysey noted that it is difficult to pinpoint when exactly this era of affluence began. Veysey suggests the 1920’s could have been the beginning of the age of affluence but the Great Depression of the 1930’s prevented this from happening. During this notion of an “age of affluence” the majority of the population seemed to enter a more comfortable lifestyle. The 1920’s greatly influenced and changed the way labor hours were distributed, the focus of life changed from a work-oriented lifestyle to a leisure-oriented direction.

Laurence Veysey received his undergraduate education from Yale. At Yale he won the 1953 Adrian Van Sedarin Book Collecting Award for his assembled documents dealing with American railroads. He also attended the prestigious University of California, Berkeley. He was a history professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Veysey is mainly known for his major works like The Emergence of the American University and The Communal Experience. Veysey has also received accolades from other scholars, John R. Thelin in an article in the History of Education Quarterly exclaimed, “The Emergence of the American University, published in 1965, is a monumental work which endures in its influence and as a model of historical interpretation (Thelin, 1987).” Veysey also received the award Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada along with a nomination for the National Book Award for Philosophy and Religion.

Work Cited:

 Thelin, J. R. (1987). Laurence Veysey's The Emergence of the American University. History of Education Quarterly , 517-523.

              Veysey, L. (1982). A Postmortem on Daniel Bell's Postindustrialism. American Quarterly 34:1 .

Week 2 Assignment: Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a digital currency that can currently be purchased online for $434.11. This certainly seems expensive for a piece of computer coding, right? Actually, the U.S. dollar per Bitcoin exchange rate is significantly cheaper than just a few months ago. Many people are unfamiliar with Bitcoin and how it relates to the current Information Society. To me, it resembles massification in the sense that currencies have been removed from the gold standard and put into printed paper for sometime, yet someone had the idea that paper is outdated and digital currency is the newest innovation. Essentially, Bitcoin was introduced and made relatively popular in 2009 as an open source software. Under this current system, people can "mine", or earn, Bitcoins by simply being literate in computer programming and auditing past Bitcoin transactions. The more time spent confirming a Bitcoin's legitimacy, the more Bitcoin's you can earn.

The idea of "Bitcoin" as it is known today can only date back to its invention, but tracking databases of newspapers provides a solid ground for reflection on the evolution of the phrase. The first use of the term in the New York Times, for example, can be traced to an article written in 1898 expressing the exchange rates between colonial bits, schillings, American dimes, and "half-dimes." This exemplifies the shift from antique metal money to paper money (made popular by the culture of print), and the following shift of paper money to digital money that we see in today's Information Society. It seems as if the power of information backing a currency now exceeds the power of metal: especially since the United States untied the dollar to gold in the 1970's.

I think the etymology of today's Bitcoin is highly relatable to our discussions in LIS 201. An interesting topic to consider is the disappearance of $480 million worth of Bitcoin's from Mt. Gox, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange which subsequently filed for bankruptcy. Is our Information Society mature enough to securely handle such a digital currency? I am skeptical.

Seowoo Park- Blog Assignment 2

It has been more than four years that logging in a Facebook, whenever I have the intermission, became one of my habits. For me, the Facebook is a very sensitive medium communicating with my friends and a society, because I mostly learn my friends’ lives and the news of the world such as popular TV shows, trendy clothes, and serious issues via the Facebook. I called it a ‘very sensitive medium’ because an aftereffect of posting words on the wall is immense; a video of a pretty girl singing and dancing made her an online star whom a hundred thousand of people loved, and a guy who posted a piece of writing about how uncivil bereaved families of Sewol sunken vessel’s victims was heavily criticized by thousands of people. Initially, however, the medium was not necessarily for every person in the world according to a piece of article I found in the New York Times in 2005, named “Facebook.com Goes to High School.” The Facebook, of which now everyone is user, was at very first a “fancy electronic version of the whiteboard that students often mount on their doors to leave and receive messages.” Mark Zuckerberg, who was the founder of the Facebook, got an idea to transform ubiquitous college directories of incoming freshmen into interactive sites. His site allowed any student with a university e-mail address to register, create an online profile and invite friends to communicate through the profile. It was an interesting piece of information because it showed a choppy origin of the Facebook.

Although users of the Facebook temporarily were only limited to college students, now it is very spread-out communication in the world. I even found an article from Project Muse, called “Facebook of the Dead,” described as “Facebook now exists as the capital city of the Internet Age.” The Facebook’s effect was more enormous than I used to think because it was “significantly more than the time given to Google sites, which include YouTube, and more than double all the hours spent on Amazon, eBay, Tumblr, ESPN, Wikipedia and Twitter combined.” Another article from ProQuest called “Facebook Flagged on Privacy Issue” issued in 2010 dealt with with troubles due to various and numerous users of the Facebook, saying that, “Facebook had neglected to include several crucial privacy features.” As the Facebook nowadays has risen up as a main communicating source in the world, it also has to face the most common online issue.

Modern Information Society: "Google"

             In today’s modern information society, the term “Google” is most known for the extremely large company that began as a popular search engine.  Knowing the Internet is a somewhat recent development, I was interested to see if and how the word Google had been used before the launch of the leading search engine.  The earliest results I could find containing the word google were written in 1854, 1859, and 1870 in each of the three Proquest newspaper databases.  The first articles I could find in The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune were both written around 1860s and used the word in a slang-like, babbling fashion (i.e. “google-te-goo”).  I also found two articles written in the very early 1900s that both used the word as a descriptor for eyes: “google-eyed goldfish” and “had the Giants google-eyed”.   Scrolling down, I found slightly more recent articles featuring a popular comic strip character of the age named Barney Google.  I then decided to try searching the word “googol” because it is the mathematical term for which the company Google was named after.  The first article I found this particular spelling of the word was in the mid-1960s probably because the mathematical term was not introduced until the 1950s.  When spelled like googol, the word was usually referred to as a term to mean an extremely large or limitless amount.  I also found an article about the man who first defined googol as the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.  Some believe it was the famous character Barney Google that inspired the mathematician to choose the expression “googol” for that enormous number.

            When I look up “google” now, the dictionary defines it as the brand name of a leading Internet search engine, founded in 1998.  It also provides its alternative definition which is the action of searching the Internet for information about a certain topic, event, or person.  Although the company is relatively new, its immense popularity has expanded the term’s uses and people’s knowledge of it everywhere.  The company is one of the leading corporations in the world and creates new technologies and ideas every day.  Since 1998, people everywhere have utilized the website as their go-to place to start researching topics, asking questions, or making connections.   The company has branched into specializing in all different types of web-based fields like online shopping, maps, eBooks, and more.  The general public tends to perceive Google as a good, innovative company that tries to create a relaxed, creativity-inducing environment for their employees.  There are also many people who dislike the company due to their reputation of invading individuals’ privacy, over-advertising, or killing smaller companies.  Whether you have positive or negative feelings toward Google or you simply don’t care, you probably have a Gmail account or have used Google maps or have watched videos on YouTube, which is now owned by Google.  It is fascinating to recognize how the word Google has taken on so many different meanings before it became the multinational company that we know so well today.  Comparing articles from different time periods shows the immense lifestyle changes that have occurred between the early 1900s and 2000s and how rapidly the modern technological society has developed in just the past twenty years.