Crib Notes courtesy Jessica Fabrizio

NOTE: Our Classmate Jessica Fabrizio has been very kind and gracious to allow his class notes to be posted on the blog for the benefit of the class. Please feel free to contribute to our mutual learning by sending along your notes if you choose to do so.

Chapter1 –

Cro Magnon- sex, rank, age, images were made to be used—they had cultural purpose

* hunting magic—not a depiction or one thing it’s a depiction of the act of killing

Chapter 2-

Paleolithic came before Neolithic

Symbols – special meanings and allows us to conceive ideas (black – death, darkness – different for different culture—when a culture dies the symbol dies- meanings are arbitrary and cannot be conceived alone)

Sign- sub category of a symbol and conveys a meaning—no secondary meaning

* notches in bones or tools



Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic (VERY FIRST)

* notches were first seen here
* lunar calendars
* signs of accumulating knowledge with a specific goal
* functional use other than symbolic use
* allows the separation of knowledge from the knower
* issue of this—it was only known to the one who did the tallies



Neolithic:

* came out of the agricultural practice – clay token
* man made- in distinctive shapes—in different data sets
* created an actual Open- system

Advantages:

* simple system
* enhanced data manipulation
* tokens conveyed quantitative information
* one-for-one correspondence
* counting became quicker

Chapter 3

Stone to Papyrus

* shift from stone in Egypt to papyrus coincided with the shift from Democracy
* stone was difficult to do
* papyrus simplier
* writing from Hierloglphics to Heretic
* secularization of writing
* new religions that were less political—magic based
* army of scribes who could write – very respected—jumped social latter
* Egyptian culture became weakened due to social organization
* SUMER—fertile crescent – cradle of civilization
o Tigris and Uphertes Valley
o Many suggest writing was invented here
o Outgrowth of mathematics
o Cuneiform (stype of writing that was linear)—shift from a pictoral representation to a symbolic one – represented syllables so you could get a word out of it—it became uniform
o It was Slavic—but it was idiographic

Chapter 6

Alphabet – single letter represents a single sound

* Mesopotamia by the Simitic People
* The Phoenicians stablilizaed and spread it
* Not all is phoenetic:
o Phonetic
o Syllabic
o Logographic or ideographic

Chapter 7

* Greek alphabet thought they had something that everyone else can use
* It spread slowly and created two dialects- Eastern and Western
* Invented literacy for the people
* With literacy came a different way a thinking—democracy- everyone could share information
* Education became intense for teaching children
* Created a vernacular
* The fluency of recognition was key
* Primary purpose—the transcription of their oral history (Plato and Socrates)

Chapter 9

Primary Orality- sound exists when it is going out of existence

Pimary cultures—speech and language is so important that they see magic in it

Recalling was important in primary orality – mneumonic patterns—formulas to work through patterns

Secondary Orality—like primary it still promotes a group sense—people are hearing what you are saying

Primary orality is spontaneous and secondary is self-conscious because you can hear it again

Chapter 11

* controversy over paper
* the Chinese invented it
* T’ang Dynasty at the beginning of the Golden Age—the first emperors of China encouraged and supported literature
* Paper in Buddhist Monestaries—needed to transcribe religious texts
* All of this culminated to Block Printing and Paper invention—transcribing process took too long
* Stencil (or pounce) first kind of use of printing – favoured by the monestaries – do this on silk and paper
* Wood cut printing came thereafter – very complicated—entire picture on one stamp—images of Buddha was where you saw this most

Chapter 12

* important because printing would take human intervention out of the situation—process of printing was mechanized
* calligraphers were gone
* printing was uniformed-- unifying literacy
* hand writing took way too long – printing cut this time down
* books could not be spread as easily—very expensive
* printing took away personality from writing – the message itself is being delivered
* convey a message without any kind of interference

Chapter 15

* printing gave rise to periodical publication
* Pre Print
o Catholic Church-
o Political Authority- administration
o Commerical
o Towns

2 Key develpments that affected networks of communcation

1. postal service—expenseive and slow- one person to another person
2. printing – random- delivered on the street

Periodical Publications began to happen

* brought world to the people
* spread peoples horizons beyond where the originally live

By the end of it Free Press revolution occurred—government would tax free papers—made it difficult to send out periodicals

Chapter 16

Claude Chappe, invented in 1790- Optical Telegraph—different positions means different codes for different words or codes

* 2 main weaknesses—HUMAN—two diligent people who – NATURAL—too cloudy or fogging
* The war made it very useful



Chapter 17 Telegraphy, the Victorian Internet

* the telegraph exploded—very accepted
* expanded fasted in 1859 in the US
* used electricity
* Britian is was somewhat accepted—but very associated with the railroad—ran along the tracks
* Process of telegraphy- stations where people would wait on the line for a message—write it on paper—and a boy who would run it to the person it was sent to – long and tedious – needed to create abbreviations
* Caused a cultural shocoked—did not understand how one could get a message from a far distance
* Joined networks between countries
* Final frontier over water

Chapter 19 The Bell System

Alexander Graham Bell invented it 1876

* it took a long time to get this going—demonstrating it at conventions
* Making a business
* In 1877 – including Mr. Hubbard, an investor—seriously started to market the product under Bell Company
* 1978 – first switch board in New Haven, to make it possible for people to have a phone
* women got jobs because of this
* genius idea of Bell—because they could not manually control all the switchboards
* opened it up like a franchise—I pay a free to rent the switchboard and the phones and wires –
* in 1978- Western Union (telegraph company)– take a similar phone from Thomas Edison and tried to do what the Bell company was doing – they were sued—they settled – made a compromise
* phone had problems—crank-style—huge apparatus—1880—wanted to fix it all—wires tangled
* early 1990 rebuilds hardware ad fixes it all—revamps the product
* Theodore Vail – new GM of Bell—patent runs out and everyone can jump out—he was waiting for this so he needed to gain some future competitiion – technological and organization advances and long distance phones – upped the charges

Chapter 25

After civil war, cities exploded

reasons: EMPLOYMENT farmers and immigrants and CIVIL WAR

Reasons for Celebrity

1. leisure- money and time on their hands
1. Saloon Industry exploded , Vaudeville, baseball
2. shift in lifestyle
1. farm life—had a sense of identity
2. city life had a way of taking away identities—self-help books
3. must have a personality to set yourself a part
4. so Stars were called personalities—idea of what you wanted to be – romantic, energy, popular

Celebrity:

Stars: Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplan

Short, slight—supported fact that they were youthful, radiated energy, comedic

Movies would have happy endings – this is something people wanted to connect to

Technological advancements really supported this—photography image could be circulated, travel and be seen wherever they went, baseball players organized national terminates through communication, cinema close-up—connect to the mirror to their soul

Chapter 26 – Advertising and the Idea of Mass Society

Planned Obsolence- launching a ‘new model’ as a mode of ‘advertising bate’ – in clothes, typewriters, cars, etc—changes may be small—but the consumer will take an interest in it

Installment Buying—buying stuff in installments – not paying for the entire thing all at once

Consumer culture began to fall into place by both of these

* view of consumer sensibility – turn our thoughts into childish things—the business man wanted a BRIGHT RED AXE—impulse to guide ones actions
* market research began on comsumers to KNOW them
* admakers came out of a carnavalesque tradition: through persuasion, theatricality and trickery
* advertisers were concerned with the literary as opposed to the visionary arts

Chapter 27 Wireless World

* Titanic, expanded range, able to reach farther, radio waves transmitted through the air
* Create a global sense of grief—feel the pain of all those who died
* “global event” took a night to get around the world
* history: 1964 Maxwell acknowledged that radio waves could be used to communicate
* 1894 Marconi invented the transmitter and receiver was invented
* 1901- first message was sent across the Atlantic from a high powered transmitter in England
* News broadcasts by 1904



* Telephone had an even broader context
* Made it possible to be in two places in different times
* Sense of immediacy did not have to wait a long time to get a message
* No time to reflect—new sense of mediacy
* 1876—public broadcasts – subscribe to them
* entire city getting one experience – democratized



Chapter 28

Early Radio

* boys and men bringing it into the home
* only the wealthy had radio boxes
* the poor could make their own
* when it did explode there were not fixed stations or programming
* you actually had to work at the radio to find the stations
* exploratory listening- knew what was going on all over the place
* more difficult because for those who were transmitting – could not finance because there was no advertising
* was not until the 1920s when advertising became KEY
* new forms of masculinity
* technology produced secondary orality—reformulate their identities as individuals and as a part of a nation
* chain broadcasting came into play
* 3 Kinds of listeners
o DX – how far they could go with their box
o Music listerens
o Story teller listerens

Problems:

Amateurs were everywhere clogging up the airwaves—clogging up the navy

Too much traffic

After titanic issue—radio act of 1912—radio amateurs to be licensed only could use short wave – though they still grew

1914- grassroots coast to cast radio network – that allowed them to communicate amongst their peers

In WWI—they banned amateurs completely—but it didn’t work

DXers exploded as well as amateurs

Chapter 35

Thesis: WWII families were fucked but the television helped foster togetherness again—the way it was advertised—TV was the answer to these problems

Wives forced to go to work, kids had no one to come home to, television brought back that sense of togetherness because it replaced the emptiness

Media—advertised the TV as a way of replacing a piano, to fix the domestic situation after the war is why it was so successful

Chapter 39

Viewed Buraucracy as the most important Control Revolution

Occuring in US, England, France, Germany

Weber viewed it as a critical new machinery – for control of the societal forces unleashed from the industrial revolution

New information processing allowed for this social change—(i.e. microprocessor)

Before the industrial revolution control of governments and markets were face-to-face and personal interaction—BUT now it has been reestablished by means of bureaucratic organization – I.E. new infrastructures of transportation and telecommunication, system-wide communication via new mass media