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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