Cue Family Guy Song (warning, not FCC approved)

The Family Communications Commission, protecting the innocent little children that sit glued to the TV all day because there’s nothing else to entertain them.

Although the FCC still exists, prime time television has been getting more risque as time goes on. Does the FCC just not care anymore? Or maybe this is a sign that times are changing. Media is everywhere these days, it’s unavoidable. TVs, computers, laptops, smart phones, tablets, etc. contain the world behind the glass of their screens. Kids are getting access to technology like this at earlier and earlier ages now too. I didn’t have my first flip phone until I was at least 12, but I see 6 year olds with their own iPhones now and they can do just about whatever they want on them.

Society always spouts things like “we must protect the children from explicit content!” and I always chuckle at that and ask, how? What can we even do to stop kids from seeing things we don’t want them to see? Not much, in my opinion. Kids will see explicit things. They’ll ask their parents about it and probably get looks of horror. But you can’t take back what’s been seen, the child knows about it now. And what were we really doing in the first place hiding it from them?

The idea that children are pure, fragile little creatures that will crumble at the slightest touch of impurity is absurd. If your kid asks you about what sex is, and you act horrified at the question, what kind of imprint will that put on the child? Also, how do you choose when they’re old enough to know about this “forbidden biological concept”? It all seems kind of idiotic to me.

Let’s try giving free reign to media producers, give them a chance to do whatever they want with their content no matter the time slot. Kids are so much more likely to see explicit content from their devices than from a TV, so why spend so much money keeping things from the screen that everyone has already seen? It’s a bit redundant.

To put this all together, I don’t think we need the FCC anymore because we have media around us at all times uncensored for all ages. So instead of funding something like the FCC to give us protection we don’t need, let’s put that money into education so we can actually teach kids about the new things they see on TV and not shove it behind the curtain of adulthood. Gradual education is key, keeping them innocent until one undecided point in their lives and then pulling the curtain away to reveal the true cruelty in the world is far more messed up than seeing sex on TV.

Note: This is just all my opinion, I’m not a big fan of kids in the first place so I don’t really understand the whole “we must protect our children” notion

Well, I’m not going to sugar coat it. The MP3 format is more promiscuous than hooker in the Red Light districts of Luxembourg. I’d bet money on the fact that if you spin a bottle in a busy square, every single person you land on will have downloaded an MP3 at least once in their life.

I’ll admit that I’ve done it. A lot. I’m a broke college student I can’t afford to pay a dollar for every song that I want are you kidding me?! I digress.

The MP3 format has become so common in our day and age. It used to be all about the cassettes. Waiting by the radio and just waiting for that ONE song to come on and having to press record at just the right moment and pray it comes out okay. Then the CD was able to handle a lot more than the tape in a cassette and frankly, CDs are a lot easier to store. The age of computers introduced digital files of music, and the birth of the MP3 Player turned the format into one of the most common ones on earth. Not to mention it brought pirating music to a peak.

And by the way, I am not going to talk about the poor cats in the experiments. Not with my fluffy kitty, Angel, sitting next to me. I shall always attempt to get the words you said about the poor kitties out of my head.

To be honest, I could barely understand a word of this book. But I do get some general concepts from it. The MP3 was created by industry to distribute their music and to make profit, but now industries have taken a back seat. The format is now the #1 type for pirates to use. Yes I will say that I have quite a few MP3s on my computer and phone, and I may or may not have downloaded them during class while we were talking about copyright… but that’s besides the point. I’m getting really off topic in this blog post.

To summarize what I want to say, Sterne is right when he says that the MP3 is a promiscuous format in our modern times. They’re on every computer all over the world and by the second millions and millions more of these files are being shared and created. Whether this will be a problem in the future or not, we’ll just have to see.

Okay so I wrote my last blog post on the importance of digital property, and it might seem like I’m going back on my word here but… I think that sampling is okay. To a degree.

Now taking small bits and pieces isn’t an issue, or using something as a reference to create your own thing. It’s the same thing I do as an artist. You can never really create anything from scratch, it’s almost always inspired. So, when applying this to music it means that taking small samples from songs isn’t too big of a deal. As long as you admit to using it and give credit to the original creator of the sample I don’t see anything wrong with it.

Also, depending on where you’re getting the sample it might be a good idea to ask the creator if it’s okay to sample. An up-and-coming artist might like to be credited when their bits are used, and it’ll help them put their names out to gain popularity. More successful artists like Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, etc. don’t really need to concern themselves with people sampling their stuff. They’re already millionaires and have nothing to lose by letting someone use a bit of their song in a mix.

To pull it back to my example of art, it’s like someone copying from Disney vs. copying me. Disney has all the resources in the world to create content and somebody heavily referencing their material for art isn’t a big deal. But when someone copies my art, it impacts me a lot more severely. It’s copying my hard work that I am providing for free with no compensation.

To summarize, sampling from big labels isn’t that bad because they have endless resources and money to compensate for it. But sampling from new, unknown artists is where the line must be drawn to protect them and keep their passion for music alight instead of discouraging them by disrespecting their work.

You might pirate a song, but you’d never steal a CD. Are you being a hypocrite? In the end you get the same result, the song you want for free. But which is worse, or even which is better? Stealing online or stealing a physical object? I’m going to talk about that here with my own perspective.

I am a digital artist, most of my art has been created and uploaded via computer. Here’s an example:

A piece I drew for a new Netflix show, Voltron Legendary Defenders. I create a lot of art like this to cater to fans.

To me, my digital pieces are just as important (if not even more so) than my traditional pieces on paper. In the digital format I can truly show the full extent of my talents.

But what would happen if someone steals it? Deletes my artist comment, saves it, reuploads it under their name, and either claims they drew it or simple write “credit to the artist” without any real credit at all. I upload my art for the enjoyment of others, and I have quite the fan base because of it and they make it all worth it. But when that one person decides to be an a$$, it makes me doubt my choices in sharing my creations.

The point I’m trying to make is that digital property and physical property are both equally important and depending on the content, digital can be even more so. It’s so much easier to steal digital property, it’s just a few clicks and no internet police are going to chase you for it. And when content creators such as myself do report our property being stolen, people brush it off and say “This is the internet, what did you expect?”

Just imagine if you were holding an art show, and somebody just walks out with one of the pieces. When you try to make a scene and call the cops to catch them, everyone just shakes their heads and says you’re overreacting. “This is reality, what did you expect?”

And digital content can contain so much more than anything physical. A single file folder in a desk drawer might contain a single report. A single folder on a computer’s desktop can contain hundreds, if not thousands of pages of reports. One folder is stolen, but the digital one has a much bigger impact on the person owning it.

Digital property is just as important as physical property, and in some cases is even more important. It’s time we realize the damage digital theft causes.

From a young age I was raised listening to country music, and one of my favorite music artists was Toby Keith. He always mentioned Honky Tonks in his songs and what a great deal of fun they were, so the term “Honky Tonk” has always been associated with a place for a good time.

The history of Honky Tonk is rather interesting to me because it turned the name of a specific place into the name of music born from that place. While searching for the first usage of the word on Google Ngram, I found that Honky Tonk originated around 1917. But upon searching for the first use of the word through Proquest I could only find an article from Bits of New York Life published on May 18, 1921. It is used in the sentence “The strains have vigor, the indelible impress of dare devil honky tonk improvisation.” The article was written about a strike against Tin Pan Alley (an old music publisher) because the singers believed they weren’t being paid enough for their work. Some of the wording is old for me so I don’t understand completely, but I believe the writer meant that the songs produced by the musicians during the strike were like that of songs from a Honk Tonk, which at the time was a rougher kind of bar with lots of drinking, dancing, music, gambling, and some prostitution.

A lot of the music played in these Honky Tonks were African American genres like the Blues or Jazz, which eventually evolved over time to become a new genre of bar music.

I really think it’s amazing how music can evolve by just being played in a certain place. There was no corporate interference, it was the people that made this music. The rough-n-tough guys that frequented the rowdy Honky Tonk bars and enjoyed a good beat made this music that has lasted to the present day. In a way I think that Honky Tonk is a bit ‘purer’ than most music genres that were artifically created by business from the start, even Folk music has forced origins.

To summarize, Honky Tonks were originally a type of bar known to be rougher than most. In these bars, musicians played their songs and other patrons were drinking and dancing the night away. Over time, the musicians began to change their songs to better fit their crowd, give it move of a beat to dance to, and sing with words and feelings everyone there would understand. T

Their efforts made the truly American genre of Honky Tonk last for just about a century. And I’m forever grateful to be able to listen to it.

The music of the past shapes the music of the future. Music is constantly changing and evolving and inspiring others to go further and create their own unique style. Today, the most popular genres of music would probably be rap, pop, hip-hop, and rock. But what came before these genres? How were they created? What was the catalyst for our modern music revolution?

Race.

Now, a lot of people like to say race had nothing to do with it, that music is a race-free industry. They couldn’t be more wrong. Karl Hagstrom Miller published the book Segregating Sound in 2010, here he discusses the influence of past racialized genres in music. In an attempt to create a single genre to represent the Southern identity, the music industry made the Folk genre. They wanted a genre that was pure and untouched by modern society and in their search for the perfect source, the talents of marginal Black singers came to light.

As we discussed in class, the music industry was looking for a group on the outer edges of society. The community that fit the bill was rural African Americans in small towns or sharecrop workers. After the discovery of their target group, many weren’t happy. Racial discrimination was still rampant at the time and giving a Black person a chance to become famous could be seen as dangerous. But some record companies still went through with their plans, and thus the folk genre was born.

Not only was the folk genre initially owned by African Americans, the blues were too. Many Black artists had their work categorized into one of these two genres because it was the only place that they ‘belonged.’ As the popularity of Black music rose, white artists became inspired to create their own music based off of the African American genres.

On the music news site, Digital Music News, Paul Resnikoff published an article about how the music industry is still dominated by white men even though most of modern music was born from Black artists. Rock n’ Roll, rap, and pop were all developed from the African American blues, and the country genre came from the folk genre. Now, there are plenty of artists of color in the music industry producing songs of whichever genre they choose.

But the issue comes in when you look at the owners of the music industry. Resnikoff comments that he “can’t name one Black executive from Pandora, Live Nation, Apple, Spotify, AEG, or SXSW” – all major music producers. There might be a few African Americans leading the industry here and there, but they are nowhere near as well known and influential as the white people that create the face of the company. If African Americans have had such a huge influence on modern music culture, why are Black executives being erased from the public view?

The only answer that I can personally come up with to this question is deep, internalized racism in the music industry. White people still feel like they are the ones to own and control genres that they had no business in creating in the first place. It’s like someone on earth taking credit for Neil Armstrong’s moon landing. I can only hope that I can see the diversity in the music industry grow so we can hopefully see some awesome new content produced to inspire a new generation of artists.

In my short life, I’ve witnessed a rapid evolution of technology. We went from large, clunky mobile phones with antenna about as long as the main body of the phone was to slim, compact cell phones with hundreds of apps and features for us to use to interact with our world. Everyone has a computer, a camera, a game console, and a phone in their pocket nowadays. The world is at our fingertips, nothing is out of reach.

I believe that I have a unique view in regards to experiencing my own rapid change in perceiving time and space. When I lived in Alaska, it was on a small island called Kodiak, at the time there were about 6,000 residents (the majority being either Coast Guard, fisherman, or military).

Due to being in such a secluded part of the world, we were late in receiving new technology. I was born in 1997, cell phones were already in use around the globe by then as well as CDs and personal computers. But we had none of that. I had never even heard of a cell phone before I moved to the Lower 48. We were still using tapes to play and record music, watched movies on VHS, and my favorite pastime was playing in the mud and climbing trees.

So basically, we were living at least a decade or two in the past. And boy did I learn that quickly when we moved to Massachusetts in 2006. My entire concept of space and time was based off of that island, I don’t remember ever leaving it so I thought it was the entire world. My family left on a ferry to the mainland, and I sat on the deck watching the only place I had ever known disappear.

Then we went by car cross-country from Anchorage, Alaska all the way to Massachusetts. I had never seen a road with more than two lanes, I had never seen an 18-wheeler, flashing billboards and shiny CDs and automatic doors… it was all new. So I pretty much had a two week crash course on the truths of the mainland and the vast amounts of new technology I had to wrap my head around.

My sense of time and space was warped at an alarming rate. My concept space had the most prominent change. I had considered ‘space’ to be the island and the ocean around it. Then my sense of time became scrambled as I was faced with what I saw as a ‘future world.’ I felt like we had jumped through time to the future, but in reality my concept of time had been severely limited on the island. It took time, but I was able to accept a new view on space and time around me.

Artificial Intelligence used to be fiction and fantasy, but today we are moving closer and closer to creating robots with the capacity to think like a human. But… if they think like a human, does that mean they’re one too? Can a machine be called intelligent if humans are the ones that have given them that information through programming in the first place?

I’m just going to express my own thoughts on the issue in this blog post.

The main argument that robots are not ‘really’ intelligent is that the information is programmed into them and not ideas of their own. But think about human children, are they not intelligent because we give them the tools they need to learn? Are students intelligent if the information is taught to them by a teacher? No. We call them intelligent. Now how are machines different?

I will admit that I have a severe lack of empathy for humans and I tend to connect emotionally with non-human beings, like animals. Even though my computer can’t talk to me and respond to me like my cat does, I still feel it has its own kind of sentience. He’s moody, he likes to play pranks, and finds he jump-scares hilarious. Those are all things he does to me on a regular basis. People who don’t connect with their technology would see it as a malfunctioning computer that needs to be fixed, but I see it as a personality. Yea, I have a very odd way of thinking.

I found an interesting article from Wired about robots with emotions. A Japanese company created an emotional robot named Pepper that has “more emotional intelligence than your average toddler.” Pepper can read facial expressions and analyze voices to determine the person’s emotion and decide how to respond correctly. Many people who have encountered Pepper say that the robot seemed to actually have a will to help and make people happy. How much more intelligent can you get? Pepper is even learning about American behaviors and how different the culture is from Japan. They need to learn how to respond to an entirely new audience, which is amazing!

Some robots have even been given the capacity to form their own opinions based on information they are given. Now, if a robot can synthesize their own thoughts, are they intelligent? Heck, IBM’s supercomputer Watson learned how to swear. Scientists were trying to help it learn modern speech patterns, so they gave Watson access to Urban Dictionary. After going through the site, Watson learned about swearing and how to use each one correctly in conversation or as a response. A researcher asked Watson a question at one point, and Watson responded “bullshit.” An absolutely hilarious example, but it helps solidify my belief that machines are intelligent.

The way our brains process thought is probably very unique to our species, and the best way to describe it is through Vannevar Bush’s Raytheon project. He crafted the plans for what could be called the world’s first computer database, the Memex.

While researching one topic, let’s use World War II as an example of research, a person can look for basic and obvious information on the topic like summarizing articles and history textbooks. Then they could be interested in the events leading up to the war, so they search for the history of Germany in the early 20th century.

From there, they look at the economy and the economic depression Germany was in at the time. The depression coincided with an election, so delve into information on that specific election. See how the multitude of political parties and candidates divided the country so badly that there was no real majority in the vote so someone with only a fraction of the vote was elected, Hitler.

The research can go on and on from that to look into concentration camps, D-Day, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, or the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. From the previous research on German economy and politics, they can analyze how the crisis in Germany led to each atrocity during World War II.

Humans tend to jump around from one subject to another that the previous subject reminded them of, like I described above, and then circle back to the main topic and connect the dots. We don’t think linearly, like Carr tried to suggest with his rigid system of organization. When do people ever do things in logical order? Look at pictures of people putting together IKEA furniture and you’ll understand. But I digress, the point I’m trying to make is that humans have very spontaneous thoughts that lead us to new ideas and possibly new inventions. An ant probably has a linear thought process like what Carr described. If humans were like that, we would have never progressed this far without our ability to think of almost anything, even if it doesn’t exist.

Now this isn’t going to be ask analytical as all my previous blog posts, I’m going to talk about my beliefs and whether or not I feel like I fit into the ideology of Idealism or Realism.

By no means am I a religious person, my parents grew up with religion but chose not to pass it on to my sister and I so we could form our own beliefs. So Idealism is immediately off the table. But with Realists they are searching for logical reason behind actions and behavior. Like how we mentioned a Realist talking about a sunset, they liked it because it reminded them of another sunset they saw in another place. They’re always making connections and boxing in their world from anything that isn’t scientifically legitimate or explainable.

So, I conclude, that I am neither.

Now I know it was said in class that you have to be one or the other, but hear me out. I believe in nothing. Sounds strange, huh? Allow me to elaborate. I don’t care about whether or not something exists in the world. There could be a god. There could not. There could be aliens. There could not. Both are equally plausible because neither have been proven and most likely won’t be. I don’t search for reasons behind everything, if I was sitting with the Realist and Idealist watching the sunset I would just be thinking about it, right there, in front of me. This is a unique sunset on this one day, in one place, and in one mind.

I usually describe my system of beliefs as Apatheist. I don’t care about the existence or nonexistence of something for it doesn’t affect my life. I don’t care for more meaning in everyday things other than it exists. If I happen upon a fight between an Idealist and a Realist, I would simply say they are both right. And they are both wrong. You cannot prove the legitimacy of either belief because that is what it is, a belief.

Some may think that my life must be sad and dull because I don’t care about anything. But that’s far from the truth. I find more joy in life than most people, I find, because I don’t question the world. I’m not going to get an answer, so I will just let it be. The world exists, I exist, and I’m experiencing the world. That is all.