I am happy to announce that today, 9/19, I actually learned something in this class. I have learned about vacuum tubes, which are basically a tube of electrons that allows the passage of electrical currents. They were used to power the ENIAC which was basically one of the first number computation machines and computer. They also are used in amplifiers to increase the power of signals.
Almost a month into the semester, and to be honest I don’t really know what is going on. I’m really confused as to what the purpose of this class is. I do the readings and watch the videos, and I am yet to find the correlation between any of it. I feel like we focus more on criticizing the lack of variety in today’s music more than any other topic. I don’t know if that’s what the class is supposed to be focus on, or if I’m just not smart enough or have the mental capacity to grasp the bigger picture. I’m hoping that sooner rather than later I experience some type of revelation leading me to link between it all.
For this class’s purpose medium mean, “a means of communication.” In a communication class that I took a while back, the medium in which a message was sent directly affected the way that the message could be interpreted. In Hist 390 a medium is thought to be a number of different things such as electrical light and museums. I thought that was interesting to think about because I thought that mediums had to be things that we actually communicate through like text messages, phone calls, social media, email, etc. I never thought that a museum could be seen as a medium to convey a message, but when further thinking about it I realized that it is a very true concept. I find this to be true because a lot of museum exhibits are designed to evoke some type of emotion. For example if you go to the National African American Museum of History and Culture and if you visit the Emmett Till memorial you will notice that the mood is set to make you feel some type of way. The basic design of it is like a church, with a casket, melancholy music, and videos taken during that time ultimately coming together for the museum goer to feel what is was like during that time further conveying a message.
– The College Student That is Just Getting by One Procrastinated Assignment at a Time
So … I got super excited when I was buying books this semester because I didn’t think that I was going to have to buy any books for this class. Yeah, I was wrong. First day of class, Professor O’malley tells us that we have to read 5 books ! I was upset because first of all this year, I am defiantly the DEFINITION of a broke college student. Penny pinching out of coin jars just to eat, and now this man has told me that I need to get five more books on top of the other 8 books I had already gotten.
This isn’t a “woe is me” sob story though. This is going to be the first of a five book review series entitled “The Boring Book Reviews.” Today’s book of discussion is “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr. This book was written to attempt to tell me about myself, but in all reality it taught me about the “fake woke” people in this world. Carr’s writing of this book was very mundane and redundant. The book was supposed to be about the evils that come along with the internet, and how it has negatively affected the brains of the population as if it was something that seemed to be a new topic of discussion. During the time that he wrote this book, his argument may have been valid; however, he failed to highlight the positive aspects of the internets existence. in today’s society the internet has served as a medium to education as well as everyday life knowledge that people are now able to use to their advantage without subsequently damaging their mental capability. Nonetheless, the book was boring the tone of it was very monotone, and Carr used a bunch of big words that made him seem very pretentious and bias as an author.
I’m sure this post was extremely boring, and I probably don’t even really know what I’m talking about especially to people like Carr.
Today was the first class of HIST 390. It definitely wasn’t what I thought that it was going to be. I signed up for this class because I was told that it was an easy A in comparison to IT, but I think that I would be rather be coding stuff even though I could barely manage to use Alice and Java when I was taking a computer programming class. I guess that I’ll give this class a shot though. I kind of thought that this class would have something to do with digitally archiving history in some way, and from what I was told today I was wrong. Professor O’Malley said that I would have to compose some type of song, and I know absolutely nothing about that, so YOUTUBE here I come !