Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

Reflection

As a teacher, I originally thought that this task would be easy as I often write by hand to write jot notes, provide feedback on student assignments and state directions or notes on the classroom whiteboard. However, once I got started on the task, I almost immediately found it to be arduous and was surprised to find that my hand was cramping up not even 50 words into my writing. 

After comparing the experience of writing by hand, and typing this reflection, I can definitely conclude that typography is my preferred method of written communication. This is likely because I type for a good portion of my working days as a result of the technological world we operate in. A large portion of professional and personal communication happens largely through emails and various forms of social media. 

The primary reason that I prefer typing is that it is significantly faster. For example, I have written 200 words of this 300-word reflection in a fraction of the time it took me to manually write the same amount of words. Secondly, it leaves significantly more space for modifications and corrections.  I actually made a lot more mistakes while composing this reflection than I did while writing by hand, but was able to fix them a lot more easily. Perhaps because of this, my thoughts seem to flow more smoothly on a keyboard than with a pen in my hand. 

With that said, I would not say that writing by hand is completely without its benefits; it does provide a more personal and unique experience, it caused me to reflect more deeply about my words before I wrote them, and ultimately feels more like what I wrote ‘belongs’ to me.

References

Hitler, A., 1974. Mein Kampf; with an introduction by D.C. Watt, tr. by Ralph Manheim. London: Hutchinson.

Lamb, R., & McCormick, J. (Hosts). (2020, May 26). From the vault: Invention of the book, part 1  [Audio podcast episode]. In Stuff to blow your mind. iHeart Radio.

The Story

“When I first graduated from University I took my first teaching job in Cairo Egypt it was really awesome experience because Egypt is so centrally located that we got to go on lots of trips within an outside of Egypt today I’m going to tell the story of one time when we got in a little bit of a dangerous situation when we were traveling around and seeing what you just had to offer so a couple people that I worked with at the international school and I decided we were going to go on a desert tour this was basically a 3-day trip through that What’s called the Pharaoh Oasis is where we started and then we are going sand boarding and dune bugging in the white and black deserts and at night sleeping under the stars having meals with bed winds very cool experience so the first thing we get there is really excellent or going around we’re seeing the desert or in these four by fours very cool we have dinner by the fire we sleep under the stars in the desert really cool experience the next day we are going sandboarding in the white desert now the sand dunes are super deep with really soft kind of sand and these vehicles are ripping around we had three different Vehicles each holding about 10 people I was in the first car and we are going up really steep Sand Dune and then down and I turn around to see that the car behind us had actually flipped coming down one of these sand dunes at first it was pretty surreal I couldn’t believe it really what was happening but the tables and all of the things I have been strapped to the top of the vehicle are now left right and center the car is on its roof when we get to the vehicle we see that the person who was in the front seat was now in the back many people had kind of some gas is some cut some injuries there was both foreigners and bedwins in this vehicle so some of the injuries were harder for us to assess from the bed wins in particular who only spoke Arabic so I’ve been trained in first aid since I was about 13 years old and they always say you know if something happens you’ll know what to do your first aid training will kick in however that was not the case for me and I kind of froze I didn’t really quite know what to do but luckily there were some people on the trip who were very well versed in kind of started delegating tasks you deal with this you deal with this in the end there was some a bit of like head injuries but nothing too serious gashes but there were broken collarbones broken ribs it was a whole kind of first aid operation because we were so far out in the desert that when essentially one of the bed ones who was not injured said he was calling for help what help actually was was another group of bedwings to come out with a new vehicle so that took about 2 hours for the new vehicle to arrive at which point the people who are injured were in the new vehicle and they were driving another 2 hours back to the closest Village that had a doctor now that said this doctor would have been someone working out of their home and it was another about 5-Hour Drive pyro so in the end most of the people on the trip ended up leaving either to go seek medical help or to be with those seeking medical help on the other hand didn’t actually know anyone who was in the second vehicle so we ended up staying and continuing on for another day of sand boarding but it was certainly a story that I will remember from my time in Egypt.”

Reflection

The first thing that is noticeable upon reading the output of the speech to text story that I recorded using  Speechnotes, is that it is almost completely lacking any sort of punctuation or organization. This particular program does not recognize pauses as opportunities to insert commas, periods, or breaks in text. This lack of punctuation also led to some really funky choices in capitalization, making it more difficult to interpret nouns, and placing emphasis where it shouldn’t be. I feel that reading back to this text to speech story makes it obvious why we have conventions in written english; because it makes text easier to interpret and understand. I would consider the lack of punctuation throughout the story to be ‘mistakes’, because their lack of presence in the story makes it significantly more difficult to read and understand the cadence and sequence of the events in the story. This makes the experience of reading the story back to be quite jarring and led me at points not to understanding what was happening in my own story. 

With that said, the speech to text did actually give me some grace, in that it did not relay the long pauses in my story where I stopped to gather my thoughts and remember details from the story. This could perhaps be something that could be considered ‘right’ within the text, along with general spelling conventions that lapse only occasionally. The spelling in the text is mostly ‘right’ except for when it comes to names of places that are not English. For example, “Baharaya Oasis” was changed to “Pharaoh Oasis” (noticeably still not an English word, but perhaps one more commonly used in English), and “bedouins” was changed to “bed wins”. It makes sense that the speechnotes program would recognize English being spoken and try to interpret all speech sounds in the same language, this may actually be something considered to be ‘right’, although in the context of the story it is ‘wrong’. In telling this story, my speaking style is very casual, especially considering the ad-libbed nature of the story. It is one that I have not told in many years so it felt quite off the cuff. This casual speaking style is really reflected in the written output. If I were to edit this written output and make it “right”, or if it had been scripted, I would make it sound more formal – as writing typically is. I do however understand that what is considered ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ for me are largely directed by cultural ideas of how writing should be. 

Oral storytelling is very important in many Indigenous groups because it connects people and communities in a way that written storytelling does not. Oral storytelling is a group activity, where as written storytelling is primarily an individual activity. As Gnanadesikan (2011), Ong (2002) and Haas (2013) all explain, the first form of storytelling was oral, and limited to the immediate audience. Writing technology then revolutionized the communication of stories and made them more permanent and therefore available to much broader audiences. This is perhaps why I felt the urge to edit the output of my oral story and make it more formal and edit the writing conventions. When telling a story, I am not worried about little mistakes or perhaps lapses in accuracy because the story feels like it ends as soon as it is told. When we write a story on the other hand, the feeling of permanence that comes with composing writing, makes following conventions feel more necessary. 

Schmandt-Besserat and Erard (2007) argued that oral storytelling is ephemeral and relies on the audience’s memory. I thought this was interesting and it caused me to reflect on the story and how much of what I remember may have changed since the events occurred. I feel that if I had written down the story, the specifics would be more accurate and detailed, where the reality of not having written down the events after they happened, parts of this story have likely been elaborated, diminished or changed as the story relies on my memory alone. These mistakes or changes in the story make it ‘wrong’, but this is also perhaps part of the beauty of oral storytelling, that it evolves over time through various tellings of the story. 

References

Gnanadesikan, A.E. (2011). The first IT revolution. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet (pp. 1-12). John Wiley & Sons.

Haas, C. (2013). The technology question. In Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy (pp. 3-23). Routledge.

Ong, W.J. (2002). Chapter 1: The orality of language. In Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word (pp. 5-16). Routledge. 

Schmandt-Besserat, D., & Erard, M. (2007). Origins and forms of writing. In C. Bazerman (Ed.), Handbook of research on writing: History, society, school, individual, text (pp. 7-26). Routledge.

Speechnotes.com