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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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