From Silent to Sound

The article I read titled, “Movies Talk” was an interesting interpretation of how the film industry was changed when sound was included in movies. The author of the article, Scott Eyman, provided a great analysis of how sound changed movies.  He first talked of how sound, “Standardized movies, made them less malleable, less open to individual interpretation. Allusion and metaphor were the bedrocks of the silent medium, but dialogue literalized every moment, converted it from subjective to objective.” After I read this passage, I took away two interpretations.  One is that silent films did serve a valuable artistic quality in regards to letting its viewers interpret the film in their own way.  This is an important characteristic of all artistic expressions because just as if you were looking at a painting and interpreting it from your own perspective, viewers of silents movies were interpreting the movies in a similar fashion.  A second interpretation that I drew from this passage is that sound truly brought a new aspect of interpretation to the viewers of films. The scenes that viewers were seeing with sound for the first time gave them a chance to both hear a literal scene with the characters speaking and then they have the opportunity to individually interpret those scenes. Another interesting quote that I found in the article read: “Talkies were not an evolution; as a result, careers were extinguished.  Major directors were ruined, great stars plummeted.”  The elimination of silent films did cause people to loose jobs because the creation of movies with sound.  Silent films have been eliminated and thus a form of artistic expression has been eliminated, which is interesting to think about.  In result of sound films being established it eventually led to silent films being eliminated, leaving many in that industry out of a job.  The creation of movies with sound is an interesting medium progression to think about because it had such an effect on how people watch and think about movies.

 

 

The Evolution of The Phonograph and Early Motion Pictures

The evolution of the phonograph and the evolution of early motion pictures draw many interesting comparisons.  The first comparison that I noticed between the evolution of both mediums was the change of uses of the phonograph for the public and the increased availability of motion pictures to the public.  The phonograph shifted from being primarily entertainment in public places to being a domestic form of entertainment.  Motion pictures shifted from the kinetoscope that could handle only one customer at a time for a mere 15 seconds, to being incorporated into vaudeville performances, traveling shows, and penny arcades.  Motion pictures then progressed to be an incredibly large industry allowing people to go to movie theaters and see films.  Although the use of the phonograph shifted from public entertainment to domestic entertainment and motion pictures shifted from being a medium only allowing a single person to view them at a time to a public gathering to watch full length films, the two mediums draw a comparison because both of their evolutions gave the public the opportunity to utilize both mediums easily as they became more advanced.

A second and incredibly important comparison between the evolution of the phonograph and early motion pictures is how they changed in accordance to society changing.  Jonathan Sterne who wrote the chapter “The Making of the Phonograph” provides this terrific quote that links society to mediums: “Since a medium is a configuration of a variety of social forces, we would expect that, as the social field changes, the possibilities for the medium change as well.”  This both relates to the phonograph and early motion pictures in different ways.  During the time the phonograph was evolving, the middle class was changing in drastic ways.  Middle class citizens became more of consumers, which triggered inventors and marketers to produce and promote, “Phonographs as both machines with which a family could produce its own culture and mass-produced commodities that would put their users in touch with a larger public (Sterne, 159).” Early motion pictures also progressed and ultimately changed the public landscape.  In the chapter “Early Motion Pictures,” author Daniel Czitrom provides this passage saying that, “The mushrooming growth of movies and other commercial amusements thus signaled a weakness and perhaps a fundamental shift in the values of American civilization.  “Why has the love of spontaneous play,” wondered Reverend Richard H. Edwards, “given way so largely to the love of merely being amused?”  The evolution of motion pictures in terms of this interpretation can somewhat be attributed to the beginning of our society becoming obsessed with modern mediums of entertainment in some regards.  The public flocked to theaters and by 1914 there were, “about 18,000 theaters, with more than seven million daily admissions totaling about $300 million (Czitrom, 164).” Both the phonograph and early motion pictures shifted with and assisted in shifting the public landscape in some regards and we can certainly see that the evolution of these two mediums were foregrounds to the entertainment and technology obsessed society that we are currently living in.

You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

Both David Starkman’s article Confidence Game: The Limited Vision of  The News Gurus along with Clay Shirky’s response to Starkman’s article made great arguments criticizing each others opinions of how Journalism should evolve.  On one hand Starkman believes that it should be of great interest for, “Journalist thinkers to turn to the real task: how to re-empower reporters, the backbone of journalism, whoever they are, wherever they may work, in whatever medium, within institutions that can move the needle.”   I support Starkman with his claim because reporters are some of the most important people within the world of news and journalism because they are the ones out there that are collecting the news and providing it to the public.  With the formation of public forms of journalism, the traditional ways that reporters are operating is becoming adherently different.   Our lives have become consumed with social media and this is one thing that groups like FON believe to be important for the reporters of today to keep up with.  Starkman doesn’t want the hard work and service that reporters are performing to go unnoticed because they are important to the world of journalism and news.  But could it be possible that it is impossible for reporters to keep their old routines and tasks in this ever evolving world?  Clay Shirky does not believe so.  Shirky disagrees with Starkman’s claim by saying, “I don’t believe we must do this, because I don’t believe we can do this.  That, I think, is the core difference between our views.”  Shirky does not believe it is possible for reporters or newspapers in general to stick to their old ways because the public mind is changing and seeking the new forms of media that are readily available to them.   Personally I agree with Shirky in most regards.  It is incredibly difficult to rejuvenate old ways in regards to many aspects of life, and it is proving to be mostly true with journalism and news today it seems.  News has always been a commodity to the public and now it is a free commodity.  This is why reporters and journalists need to find ways to convey their news efficiently and effectively to the public.

Impersonal Interactions

The chapter I was assigned to read titled, “Aspects of the Printing Revolution” was incredibly interesting to me especially in its discussion of the invention of print making the public more individualistic thus becoming less likely to interact with others.  The author states that it is good to consider that, “The spread of the habits of silent scanning invariably diminished recourse to the spoken word.”  This proved to be true because after the public became more involved with reading print, silent scanning and personal reading clearly diminished social interactions because people were able to read on their own with print opposed to reading script.  After reading this chapter and especially the shift from script to print and its’ affect on society, I immediately thought about how print is slowly becoming more removed from our society today because of the ever progressing amount of technology that we have available to us.  It is certain that technology today is removing our society even farther away from social interactions with each other because of social network websites, texting, and other forms of technology that have caused us to have even less of a tendency to interact with others in person than ever.  The author states in the chapter that, “By its very nature, a reading public was not only more dispersed; it was also more atomistic and individualistic than a hearing one.”  After reading this statement, I interpreted it two different ways.  The first relates to the beginning of individual reading and how it was so beneficial for our society.  The public was finally able to interpret texts on their own, able to form their own opinions and then discuss them with others, rather than solely hearing it orally, which at many times can have an adherent bias depending on who is reading and interpreting a text.  The second way I interpreted this statement was in a somewhat more negative light because  of the implications of our society today becoming progressively more individualistic and sheltered because of technology.  We have so many different forms of communication available to us through smart phones and the internet, making us less likely to interact with  people face to face than ever before.  It can be argued that we are becoming too individualistic today because we are becoming obsessed with the different forms of technology we have available to us, which can at many times shelter us from others opinions.  Hearing others opinions, especially face to face, is an important component of forming our own opinions in my opinion because we are able to determine if the source is credible or not first hand instead of reading an opinion off of a source on the web.  It was interesting to read this chapter and to hear about the printing revolution especially because it draws so many comparisons on a smaller scale to the technology and internet revolution that we are experiencing now.

Impersonal Interactions

A Violin Filled With Concrete Will Not Sound Like a Normal Violin

Sound is an incredibly important sense to the human race for so many reasons.  Sound comes in so many different forms and can be manipulated differently more than any other sense the human body possesses, giving the interpretation and creation of sound an infinite amount of possibilities. The chapter provides fantastic forms and interpretations of sound, giving the reader in my opinion, a clear explanation of why sound is of such importance to us.  When the author delves into the comparison between vision and sound, I started to further ponder how important sound is.  This passage illustrates the importance of sound and its comparison to vision: “Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another.  When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once.”  This statement the author provides, resonated in me more than any other part of the chapter because it certainly relates to me on a personal level.  Music is certainly one of my biggest passions in life, and this passage of how sound comes from all different directions is something that I have always found to be so astounding about music.  When listening to music from a more thought oriented approach by listening to each component and each layer of a song is something I have started to do and that is something that I can relate to all sound in general.  Vision can be polar and one sided because  you can only focus on one thing at once, whereas sound allows you to hear different components and distinctions in it, making it a very special and important thing we have available to us.  An additional passage that stuck with me after reading the chapter was the following; “And above all, the human voice comes from inside the human organism which provides the voice’s resonances.”  We all have our own voice, no voice can be replicated twice in some respects in my opinion.  Your voice and what you project as sound for others to hear truly comes from inside a person, which is an additional aspect of sound that is of such importance to us as humans.  Sound is incredibly individualistic and unique, which is why sound has so many layers and forms.

Ushahidi: Collective Journalism

Ushahidi is a non-profit company that uses software in an incredibly purposeful and important fashion.  It utilizes the various software programs that it features to collect information and visuals to interactively inform people about certain disasters and crisis’ throughout the world.  This fascinating organization has strives to increase awareness and activism to the public so that there is action taken on issues throughout the world.  After I read the description of Ushahidi and how they utilize different technologies and mediums in order to collect information about stories surrounding major issues around the globe, I thought of the organization as somewhat of a collective form of journalism.  The website does not necessarily pinpoint individuals for their stories or information, but it instead combines and concentrates the information received through its’ various software programs to inform the public about conflicts, catastrophes, and issues that are happening in this world.

Ushahidi is the word in Swahili for “testimony” or “witness” which is a component of the company I found to be incredibly interesting because the meaning of the companies name reflects on the company itself in many ways.  A testimony is not a dry recitation of the truth, but a first hand experience from someone that has been directly involved with an event.  Testimonials are so interesting to me because they sometimes make you feel like you know an event from hearing a story from a person that was involved, but what you don’t feel is the physical and mental component of what they endured, which is the most important and impactful aspect.  There truly should be more companies like Ushahidi because there are so many issues in this world that the general public are not aware of that are plaguing countries and regions.  The Haiti earthquake is a perfect example.  The two-year anniversary of the earthquake was two days ago I believe and there is still not a body count on how many people have died because of the earthquake.  If there was notification and awareness of the earthquake and its magnitude right after it happened, then perhaps there would have been lives saved and aid given directly following the disaster.  I believe that activism springs from awareness.  Until people become more aware of issues globally and start becoming global citizens, then situations similar to the Haiti earthquake will continue to be left in the dark to the general public, which is a horrible realization.  But if we start becoming interested in groups such as Ushahidi and activist and awareness groups like it, I think we would see a much bigger front of people becoming involved.

Written In Stone: The Importance of Writing

Before reading the chapter, “The Origins of Writing”, the thought of how important writing is to the human race has rarely come to my mind.  Without writing the only way of knowing history would be from word of mouth which can of course become skewed by ones perception or ultimately lost over time.  In the beginning of the chapter the author states that writing has its benefits, “But there is also a dark side to the spread of writing that is present throughout its history, if somewhat less obvious.”  This is a tremendous point that the author brings to attention.  It is interesting to think about propaganda posters and how the writing on them easily manipulates and strikes fear into people.  But writings benefits obviously trump its downfalls.  The origin of writing is a peculiar subject to study because there is no concrete birth of writing, although many signs point to the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations.  The chapter has a section that focuses on the development of writing, which generated an interesting point about how different languages have progressed from other languages that came before them, such as the Japanese language using some Chinese characters.  Language truly defines a culture because even if it is the same language, it differs in some way, shape, or form depending on the country and at many times even the different regions within a country.  I found it to be amazing when I went to Argentina and could barely understand the dialect they spoke even though I have been speaking Spanish for most of my life.  It just shows that no matter what the language, the influences and the originality of the language differ sometimes a small amount and sometimes drastically.  The possible reason for the creation of writing that the author provides a quote from an expert on Sumerian tablets that states writing may have originated, “As a direct consequence of the compelling demands of an expanding economy.”  It is amazing to think that writing may have possibly been used initially as a way to make trading with other regions easier and to record trading more easily as well.  Writing has developed so drastically over its history throughout the world not only in its literal form but in its meaning and its uses, which the author certainly brings to attention throughout the chapter.

A Lack of Attention and Endless Distraction

The Article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, touched on some of the tendencies that I have when reading on the internet.  With the massive amount of distractions that are merely a click away and the overall difficulty to read off of a screen for an extended amount of time, has had an effect on our society in terms of how we learn and absorb information.  The amount of information that is available to us on the internet can be both beneficial and inefficient.  To utilize the internets plethora of information efficiently we must be conscious of what we are absorbing and what we are failing to absorb in my opinion.  The author of the article gives examples of reputable bloggers that he follows and how they find it hard to read longer articles on the computer. As I read this article, which was significantly longer than the other article we were assigned to read, I found my mind wandering and having to re-read sentences and sometimes paragraphs.  A great quote from the article was, “We are not only what we read, we are how we read.”  My interpretation of this quote relates to how the majority of the world reads off of a computer screen and how it does have an effect on our minds. Reading off of a screen is more difficult than reading off of paper for many and it ultimately has an effect on how we absorb what we are reading.  The tendency to skim rather than reading thoroughly on the internet creates bad habits and has an impact on our retention of the information we are reading.  This is why in my opinion, we need to be conscious of how we are reading and what information we are seeking because if we continue to mindlessly skim the page of an article rather than reading it in its entirety, our society will become even less likely to read as we already are today. The information available to us on the internet gives us an endless amount of tools to gain knowledge and seek various points of view on issues, but there are certainly an equal amount of distractions on the internet, which is an obvious flaw of exclusively receiving our information off of the internet and something our minds need to adapt to.