History 390 blog

Remember last week when I said that lesson had it’s dry spells, well this week definitely one upped it. Like the week prior, there is a lot of necessary information to understand for this course that we discussed, but that doesn’t take away the fact that this was a week of class that was tough to sit through. That doesn’t mean it didn’t have parts that I found interesting cause it did, and that’s what I’m going to go more in depth about.

One thing that was kind of interesting to me was the information theory that Claude Shannon brought to light. As was stated in class Shannon believed that if something was said over and over again it loses it’s meaning, and he also believed that everything can be reduced to information by stripping the meaning of it to fit whatever purpose it’s needed for. He has a point with what he said when I think about it. At first I was thinking this isn’t necessarily true because there are many thing I don’t believe lose it’s meaning after being said or done over, and over again if the correct action is put behind it. For example, if someone said they loved basketball, and they go out and ball almost everyday, that statement still means something years down the road just as it did when that person first picked up a ball. Then we did the example in class with garage band, and then my perspective changed a little bit. When professor showed how easy it was in the he could sample the gospel song in his beat that he made on the fly just to make a dope beat, I definitely saw what Shannon meant. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sampling because many songs that I listen to have samples throughout them from words to how the beat is done, and with that said depending on the song the sample doesn’t lose it’s initial meaning, but a good amount of times it does. You have many instances where a sample is just used to make a dope instrumental in which there is no meaning behind that. Overall I do agree with his statement to a point because I believe it depends on the subject matter, and how that information is used.

The other thing that peaked my interest was the information on hypertext, and browsing the internet. I never really just sat down to understand how all of this came about, and who was behind it. Tim Berners Lee was a lot more innovative than I thought he was, and if people don’t know who he is they should take the time to get to now because he had a lot to do with something we use daily. He came up with the web browser. I’m sure when he created it he knew it was going to be innovative, and life changing, but maybe not to the extent that it is today. That invention really took off in a major way as we now know. Even within the first few years it went from 130 websites to over 200,000 which is incredible in itself. I respect Berners Lee because he didn’t want the internet to turn out how it did turn out in being like TV with a bunch of ads, but rather a place where people can share information without worry, I can’t tell you enough how annoying it is that we have all of the ads that we have while browsing the internet. The fact that someone, or a system is tracking your moves as well is a little weird. I understand it’s done to make browsing easier so it can be more catered to the things that you are interested in, but to just have been on footlocker for example, and look at a shoe or two, then go over to ESPN, and see a ad about that same shoe on the side of the page is weird. There is no better word to describe it other than that. It’s even more annoying when you see ads you don’t want to see, and it seems impossible to click out of it, so it kind of sucks that web browsing couldn’t have stayed the way Berners Lee initially wanted it to be. Again, class for this week may have been pretty dry, but the great thing about this class is since we are talking about technology it doesn’t stay too dry for long especially with the videos and examples given.