This week there were no readings so I was not sure what to expect coming into class because all I knew was that we were going to be introduced to american music which I was not sure what that was going to entail and boy did I get an interesting surprise haha.

This week we talked about the minstrel show, and wow did this class make me very uncomfortable not because of what we learned about necessarily but the reactions of some of the students in the class. Of course sometimes in the class the way the professor talks makes me uncomfortable but I think honestly thats the point of this class. I mean the professor said in the beginning of the class – most of the time he would always play the devils advocate, which is what makes the class interesting because if everyone just agreed with everything being said then whats the point? you’re not going to learn anything. So despite this topic or this class making me uncomfortable sometimes I feel like its good, it pushes you past your comfort zone or pushes you out of your own head. I appreciate the moderate discomfort from this professor.

On Wednesday we kind of went further into this topic, we talked about minstrel shows once again but then we also discussed the steel guitar craze that involved the hawaiians. I really enjoyed listening to that specific music in class today it was super cool and really different I ended up showing my roommates when I got home.

This week we had to read Soni’s “A mind at play” and I hate to be this person but I did not really like this book either, I thought it was extremely informative, I think that Soni and Goodman do this information justice in the way it is written but all of the technological talk mixed in with the information about this informational age I can see where they would get the recognition for this book since it was so well written and organized it really is so informative but I just feel like if you do not have an affinity towards technology you will spend most of your time reading this book just going “ok but why”, as I did.

So basically this week we talked about the idea of information, we spoke how information was conveyed – basically talking about breaking down something to just simply information. As a class we looked into garageband using gospel music or things from different cultures. Is it offensive? Is it not? Is it inappropriate that I, as a caucasian woman, can just take a beautiful gospel segment from garage band and put it in my own song with no credit to the person who’s voice that is or does no one actually care since they recorded that segment and placed it on a website like that to be used.

Next we talked about a lot of stuff that kind of went over my head just because it was lots of technological terms and I just sat there like hmmmm. But basically we talked about HTTP which means hyper text transfer protocol which I had no idea about until this very moment. We learned about Berners Lee who created a web browser break through in 1993 which was the first graphical web browser!! I was not even born yet, that is so weird honestly I cannot remember the first time I used a computer but I do not think ever thought about or even knew when the browser came out let alone a computer. So i guess i can thank this class for bringing these thoughts and different things to my attention. A cool fact that stuck out the most to me was that in June 1993 there was only 130 sites but literally two years later there was almost 25,000?? Thats actually insane. I wonder what it is now.

As per the videos that we watched on how the internet worked I think they were helpful to me at least because sometimes depending on the topic I am a visual learner so watching videos of the explanations on how the internet works and everything that comes with it was helpful to me after class to tie in everything we spoke about that day about sites and HTTP and etc.