Author: Brieya Walker

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Brieya Walker 10/9 WEEK 7 Brian Winston, The Coming of The Microcomputer

    For this week’s blog post I’m reflecting on The Coming of the Microcomputer by Brian Winston. This reading discusses the evolution of computers and their parts, along with the evolution of the companies that produced them. Brian Winston raises the question “What is the real impact  of the machine on the society?” which can have a variety of answers. Technology impacts our everyday lives because now almost everything is ran on some type of technology. I remember I went to the doctor a couple months ago and to sign in I had to use a tablet. I was so shocked because usually at a lot of doctors offices you still have to sign in with a pen and paper. In addition, he compares it to the invention of the automobile in relation to how fast the invention blew up and how they both had an enormous success remaking the entire environment around them. At the very end of the reading he states. “For fifty years, technisits have constantly told us the machine will revolutionise our lives.” (Brian, 240) I believe that this statement remains accurate regardless if it was written fifteen years ago or even today because even now, technology is constantly improving.  There is always some new gadget that becomes relevant to our day to day life.

Winston, Brian. “The Coming of the Microcomputer.” Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. Routledge, 1998.

 

 

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Brieya Walker 9/24/2018 WEEK 5 Elizabeth Einstein, Defining the Initial Shift

For this blog post I decided to reflect on Elizabeth Einstein’s Defining the Initial Shift. In this reading she discusses the shift from scribal culture to printing culture. She also explained how the printing press gave access to more books, created an easier spread of information, and how learning was assisted with reading. I learned about the birth of printing in previous history classes and remembered that the birth of printing sparked revolutions as well. This reading made me think of the connection it has to our class which has to do with how the world went from orality to literacy. In addition, it just made me think of how far we’ve come with technology. We can print out any paper as many times as we want by only pressing a button, we can make as many copies as we want, and even have the option to print out our papers in black and white or color. It’s honestly even shocking to read how hard it was for some people to make a profit off of printing when now there are companies who make profit off of just ink alone, printers, and paper. For example, there are places like Staples who sell the necessary supplies to make it all happen.

 

 

Eisenstein, E. (2005). Defining the Initial Shift. In The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (pp. 13-45). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511819230.005

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Brieya Walker 9/20/2018 NYPL Oral History Assignment

For my NYPL Oral History project I chose to transcribe the story of Brittany Myaa who was interviewed by Alex Kelly. When I seen the title “Visible Lives” above her name I had a feeling she had a disability which I found interesting because I’m interested in learning about people’s disabilities and how they overcome them. I also enjoy seeing how they maneuver through their lives and navigate through everyday challenges. The process was more hard than easy for me because even after watching the tutorial I still wasn’t exactly sure of what I was doing. Once I figured it out, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Because the interviewee had a disability, many of her answers went off on a tangent and weren’t as easy to transcribe like the answers of interviewer. I often had to click between windows, pause it, and rewind to re listen to some of her answers. I personally believe the interviewer asked her many questions that would be difficult for her to answer which is why her some of her answers came out the way they did. Overall, I think the process of transcribing is interesting and I connected it to tv shows where I’ve seen court scenes and there’s the person who has to literally type every word exchanged between everyone. One thing I’ve learned about it is that it definitely takes a lot of focus and dedication.

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Brieya Walker 9/4/2018 WEEK 2 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word

This week’s blog is a reflection on Walter Ong’s ORALITY AND LITERACY Writing restructures consciousness. In the passage he states, “Secondly, Plato’s Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.” (page 135) This statement caught my attention because I feel the complete opposite about writing and I think many others do as well. I believe writing something down instills anything I need to learn in into my brain more efficiently than just memorizing what I was verbally told. Writing is me making the conscious decision to write down the information I want my brain to retain. Furthermore, he makes the comparison of parents feeling the same way about calculators. They make the argument that calculators weaken the mind and dismisses it of the work that keeps it strong. I agree with this statement because of my personal experiences. Growing up, in elementary school I learned how to do everything with a pen and paper and had to show my work doing math problems. As I graduated to middle school, calculators took over and having to show full work for these same math problems were not mandatory and all I had to do was use the calculator for my answers. In the long run, this resulted in me not remembering how to manually do the process of long division, fractions, etc., second guessing how to do the same functions of what I was taught. Therefore, I do agree that tools like calculators can weaken the mind, but the process of writing does not.

 

Ong, Walter. ·Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media….. In David Crowley and Paul Heyer, Communication in History: Technology Culture, Society. Third Edition. New York: Longman, 1999, pp. 135.

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Brieya Walker 8/30/2018 WEEK 1 Cybernetics and Ghosts Calvino, Italo.

For this week’s blog I chose to reflect on Italo Calvino’s Cybernetics and Ghosts. There was one part that caught my attention because it made me think about how this statement can be seen in everyday life. Italo Calvino states, “The immobile world that surrounded tribal man, strewn with signs of the fleeting correspondences between words and things, came to life in the voice of the storyteller, spun out into the flow of a spoken narrative within which each word acquired new values and transmitted them to the ideas and images they defined. ” (page 5) This statement stuck out to me because it made me think of what we do in society everyday like create slang where one word can have one hundred different meanings.  Also one phrase here in New York can mean something totally different in another country. In Addition, this is interesting to me because there’s no formally written guide with these new meanings and values of these words that we create, but they’re passed on through verbal communication and different platforms such as television, radio, social media, etc. To me personally it shows that this world is more connected than some may believe or think and that we share interests in similar things that we may not even notice.