Sponsored by KitchenAid™

This ad was done in the style of radio drama’s of the 1940s for a KitchenAid™ stand mixer.
Credits
Abigail Fuller – Virginia
Desk – Foley
Kaine Beaumont – Advertiser, Betty Joyce, Thomas

Citations.

Image:
Morra, Frank. Retro Kitchen Mixers. Accessed February 26, 2025. http://www.jitterbuzz.com/indmix.html.

Music:
The Ice Cream Booth (Live) Ziv Grinberg from Artlist: Through canva pro (Unsure on how to cite this, will edit.)

Advertisement inspiration:
Whelan, John. YouTube. Accessed February 26, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=typsfISQI0Q.

“Radio Commercials Shows : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive. Accessed February 26, 2025. https://archive.org/details/RadioCommercialsShows.

When making these pictographs I had more trouble finding a 70s invention. I made one for a Taser and another for the Magic 8 ball but the sharp jagged edges of the lightning bolt didn’t feel right when designing the Taser. I couldn’t figure out a way to give a sense of foresight or prophecy for the magic 8 ball, So I pivoted and settled on a refrigerator and a Rubix cube. I wanted to make something that would appeal to someone during these times but quickly found myself trying to rely on the symbols and words that we use today. There are so many symbols that make for shorthanded ways of communicating that we don’t think about, A lightning bolt for electricity, a heart for love, and a skull for death. Each of these symbols has a meaning because of the culture and context we grew up in and when you are making an ad for someone outside that framework it makes you reimagine how you present different concepts.

I have been really enjoying the class, this is my first 400 level history course and I love the collaborative style and ability to pick where we want to focus our research and studies. Designing the projects having input on what kinds of tools we will be using and learning new technical skills. These blog posts and the timeline for example are two tools I have never used and would never think to use. However, moving forward in my career as a teacher, having these skills is extremely valuable to me. These are projects but also a way to display our different skills that can be marketable and I think that is one of the biggest takeaways from this course. I’m very excited to get into dissuasions and the meat of the “Information Age.”.

https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1Ip_k3NczEBqB1S8AEcb-ESjFx3VwutkSUIDU-Dm6JbA&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650

1/26/2025 Blog post
Downey’s view of technology and advancement is very broad spanning from the rise of agricultural practices to the modern day, seeing technology as a tool for communication but also the possible downfall of it. He breaks down the American information age into four technological-based periods, Print communication and transportation, Network and Interpersonal communication, broadcast mass communication, and Computer-mediated communication however he states that these are not static periods and the end of one is not an instant transfer into the other. We have held over from one medium to another, the File systems of our computer made to look like that of a filing cabinet, the recycling bin Icon and how web pages mimic print newspapers, this is know as Skeuomorphs and a prime example of the blurring of the lines between these periods of technological advancement.
Downey speaks of the establishment of large communication infrastructure projects and the advancement of technology as reliance of  private business on public support to build and maintain the required construction to advance a technology which will soon become obsolete and newly replaced.

Downey also has a unique perspective compared to the other authors that we have read looking at the role that capitalism , consumerism and cost has played in our communication. In the last 200 the rise in the amount of energy that is produced and the reduction of the cost to send a message from east coast to west is staggeringly low. The greatest challenge to communication that humans had faced through most of their history (distance) has been vanquished and replaced by new obstacles.

Reading through the three intro’s of Broad Band, The Information & The Cybernetics Moment It sparked a lot of thoughts in my mind. Firstly when I thought about radio and early computers in our discussion about “what is the information age” I did not think about the enomorse amount of labor it took to run and uphold these systems. It has also got me thinking about how much public funds were put into these developments. In both Broad Band and The Information, they speak about how the second world war was crucial in the development and expansion of these new technologies. “In 1891, eight thousand women worked as telephone operators; by 1946 nearly a quarter million.” (Evans 2018, 22)

There was so much more unseen labor in the information age that was done by women whose labor was being exploited.  All of them link in the great game of telephone called global communication and that was necessary in winning the second world war, shaping our understanding of the cosmos and shaping the terms that we use.  “The computer as we know it today is named for the people it replaced, and long before we came to understand the network as an extension of ourselves, our great grandmothers were performing the functions that brought about its existence.”(Evans 2018, 25)

For assignments that this course could focus on, maybe we could look at the utilization of technology in different wars compared to their later domestic utilization and  commodification, similar to the time assignment. I think an assignment where we try to all relay the same message across campus using the different methods of communication we will study in this course.  

Jean Bartik and the ENIAC Women

Evans, Claire L. Broad Bands. Penguin Publishing Group, 2018. 

“Jean Bartik and the ENIAC Women.” n.d. Www.youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPweFhhXFvY.

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Hi! As you may have gathered by the domain name, my name is Kaine Beaumont. I am a History and Education major getting my certification to teach History at the middle and high school levels. I am initially a transfer student from Germanna Community College.
I love to bake, watch movies, and yap, preferably in that order.

The History of the Information Age excited me because it explores more contemporary history and discusses the most life-altering change in our everyday lives: the spread of mass instantaneous information. We are a generation raised on the internet and it has been a part of our lives for as long as I can remember and it sparks many questions in me. How has the Information Age affected education? How have large tech companies gained so much control within our government and our lives? How have the profit motives of different tech companies worked to shape the American experience we all live? And how have people fought back against it?

This course is new waters for me, I was struggling between picking this course and Local history but The Information Age has so much to offer about how we live our lives today compared to countless generations of our ancestors and I’m personally excited to get into it.

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