Amy Stiff 540 Reflections

Prompt

Describe or narrate a scenario about a concert found a generation into a future in which society as we know it has come apart. Your description should address issues related to communication and elicit feelings of cheer.

• Collapse – one generation (30 years) 
• Communication  
• Cheer 

Scenario

The year is 2053, society has become so divided that there is no longer any sense of shared experience or camaraderie between Americans. Political, ideological and religious divisions have left people feeling cynical, hostile and divided. Attempts to mend fences have come to a screeching fault at every level and people are now generally living solitary lives. 

For the first time in 30 years, a concert is taking place in Central Park, New York. Grassroots organizers have been planning the event for months, in hopes that this concert will be an opportunity where music will transcend the issues of the day.  This concert is meant to be a symbol of hope and unity where the power of music will help heal the deep-seated wounds of a divided society. And bring people together who have been fractured for decades.  

As the sun sets over Manhattan, the first notes of music ring out into the night. The crowd fills with cautious excitement as the first band takes the stage, and for the next several hours, sounds of nostalgia fill the park. As the night wears on, the energy in the park grows more and more electric. People from all walks of life are singing, dancing, and hugging each other, and it became impossible not to feel caught up in the nostalgia and connection to what used to be. Where words had failed, the music was speaking. For just a few hours, it seemed like anything was possible, and that maybe the world could be put back together again.

As the final band ended their last song and people began to make their way out of the park, there was a sense of renewed hope and optimism in the air. Maybe, just maybe, music can change the world. 

Reflection

I found our class network database from the Golden Record curation to be very interesting, though very challenging to interpret. It is compelling to see the common connections and to ponder why those connections exist without expressly seeing the reasoning behind each choice as it was made by each individual within the group. It would be possible to extrapolate reasoning for each choice by visiting the blogs of each of my classmates, reading their thought processes for curation and drawing conclusions from there, though this would be a slow and arduous process. Alternatively, I could scroll through the entire contents of each of my classmates’ blogs to interpret their ages, races, genders, cultures, orientations etc. in order to understand more about who they are as people in order to gain some understanding as to why they made the connections they did. This would be similar to what a search engine does, linking individuals in a demographic group together in the understanding that their behaviours will be similar; i.e. they may have selected the same songs. This would, of course only lead to results that assume the reasons by which groups of people selected similar results. It might also lead to misinterpretations for why they chose similar results.

The more complex question is considering what information we can infer about what is missing from the network database, i.e. reasons that certain pieces were not selected by the collective, or by individuals or groups. In the Palladio graph, what stood out to me most were the songs that people had not chosen, and I was left wondering how that might be that out of the whole group, either no one had chosen them, or only one or two people. In order to figure out why this might be, I could go through the same process as above, inferring why people did NOT make selections by analyzing choices for the songs that were included. But again, this would be speculatory. I think that ultimately it is certainly more difficult to create links and conclusions as to what is missing from the bigger picture, than to analyze what has been included.

This has ultimately led me to reflect upon the power of network connections. Much of what we come across on the web or in our personal lives, is a reflection of degrees of connectivity. We see or hear information that is ‘more connected’, and this has a high potential of impacting the way we think about the world around us. This connects to the idea from last week that information that is selected to be digitized can and has taken precedence over other content. This is ultimately why search engines like page rank are so influential; it cannot be ignored that companies like Google are influenced by wealthy and powerful corporations to prioritize certain information, giving certain kinds of information a higher degree of connectivity while leaving less connected perspectives behind.

The information that is obvious to us in the class network database is a result of the question that has been asked by the man in charge. There is plenty of other information also included in the resulting graph, but it is up to us to ask and interpret what is missing. This applies equally to all of the information that we come across on the web and in our personal lives. We need to ask what the information is telling us, but also what it is not

References

Palladio. (n.d.). Retrieved March 11, 2023, from https://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio-app/#/upload

Systems Innovation. (2015, April 19). Network connections [Video]. YouTube.

Curated 10 

• China, ch’in, “Flowing Streams,” performed by Kuan P’ing-hu. 7:37
• India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30
• Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
• Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20 
• Bulgaria, “Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin,” sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59
• Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14
• “Johnny B. Goode” written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
• Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
• Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52
• Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26

Reflection

When curating the tracks on the Golden Record down to only 10 songs, the first two factors I considered were along the same lines as those considered by Carl Sagan and the committee of the original record; place and time. First and foremost, I began by classifying songs into continents, then regions of origin as I thought it was important to represent as many different cultural groups on earth as possible in a limited number of tracks. Next, I thought that it would be important to include songs that ranged in time of composition, as well as include a mix of both traditional or Indigenous and contemporary music to demonstrate the evolution of music through decades and centuries across the planet. 

The last step of my process, which I am not sure that the original curators considered, was to include songs that, rather than showing the differences between groups on earth, demonstrated the range of emotions that unite us. This was the more complicated part of the  process, but when narrowing down my final selections I considered including songs about a whole range of human experience;  love, joy, sadness, war, peace, good, evil etc. so that any extraterrestrial life that might come across the record in the next billion years might be able to have a small taste of the complexity of what it means to be human. 

References

NASA. (n.d.). Voyager – music on the Golden Record. NASA. Retrieved March 4, 2023, from https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/music/

Taylor, D. (Host). (2019, April). Voyager golden record [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty thousand hertz. Defacto Sound.