November 14th class

Today’s class was really interesting. I love looking at media history because it directly relates to how media works nowadays. We all know the phrase “history repeats itself” so knowing what happened in the past can help us understand what these forms of medium may do. The printing press gave a whole new meaning to writing. People could now reproduce what they write in mass amounts without a scrivener, even though they were still used up to the point when a copy machine was invented. Speech, language, writing, alphabets, all these things completely changed the way societies and cultures functioned. Nowadays computers, the Internet and televisions are the driving factor in our cultures shift from a print culture to an individualized culture where your opinion can be voiced in places where people will listen. This coming century seems to me will be the largest dissenting population the world has ever experienced. Although in some countries blogging is censored, it can still be used to get inside opinions on places where newscasters cannot go. The Internet has provided us with a way of telling others what is going on, something that wasn’t easily done in the past.
When I was in Iraq during the war being on the Internet was amazing. If you used ICQ people could find people through where they lived and message them, so people went through the lists and it stated that I was from Iraq. So every time I logged onto ICQ hundreds upon hundreds of messages from people all over the world would flood my screen asking questions about what was happening there. My usual response was: well I’m sitting on the Internet so obviously I’m not running from anything. Peoples perspective on the place was minimized to what they saw on TV, so my opinion was completely different from those people messaging me and it would sometimes turn into an argument.
What was amazing here though was that these conversations were possible. It was probably one of the first wars out there where people inside the country could voice there opinions through the Internet. Obviously they weren’t voicing opinions down South before the war because of Saddam’s censorship of every form of medium. After the war though, the Internet became widely available and nowadays we can see blogs from many different Iraqi’s giving us many different perspectives on the place. So the Internet has created a hub where people can converse and share opinions and learn about other places.