Medium = Massage ?

The medium is the massage

After reading this book, two main ideas are dancing in my mind, the first is Woody Allen movie “midnight in Paris” and the second is my mother.

I’ll begin with the second. I think of my mother because she always told me that my generation is completely different from hers, she was born in 1956, she tells me about how wonderful was to grow up in this time because you can go all the afternoon to play with other kids in the block, you could play soccer and other games we have in Mexico (I don’t know the translations for this games but we have quemados (like dodge ball), la traes (a game with no sense in which you have to run from the person “who has it” if he/she touch you no “you have it” and you have to touch somebody else to get rid of it). What does this has to do with the book? That this book was written in 1967, when my mother was 9 years old, and in its pages is written that the generation growing up in that time was being completely different from the previous one due to constant impact to the media, the author of the book is saying the exact same thing that my mother told me 10 years ago when I was a kid, and this argument takes me straight to the relation with “Midnight in Paris” because in this film [SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE STOP, GO AND WATCH IT, THEN COME BACK] people have this nostalgia for the past in which they always want to live in a different era than the one in which they live, this happens with media; because Media, as mentioned in the book, is constantly changing and with this it affects the audience making it different, there will always be this nostalgia of a better time in which media was not has advanced as in the present day and when media was not as influential in people lives. I’m sure someday when I’m a father (hopefully in many years) I’ll complain about the same thing as my mother and the author, because I’ll think my kids are overexposed to media and this may change the way in which they grow up.

Media does affect life. And affects life because affect your environment, the way you think, the way the person sitting next to you in a restaurant thinks. These changes are everywhere, television, radio books, art and not mention internet which is already a huge change from my generation to my parents.

Technology is making the world a better, smaller and in equitative place to live, because life is easier we just have to push a couple of buttons to make some things that would have required much more time and effort to do. I come from Mexico, my family, my friends are two thousand miles away, but I can talk with them every day. My home is physically in another country, but I can communicate with them as if we were in the same city, just in two different places, that is the effect of a global village.

Personally, media is no longer a massage, Media is the spa, in 50 years has grown to be a pillar for our lives and our societies. Thinking as media a massage in 1967 as something you need to relax, to get loose for a moment and forget about other concerning is no longer valid.

Simulating a birthday

Before to dig deep into the reading, let me tell you it was awful to read it in a birthday weekend, but this does not mean I did not enjoy reading it.

Jean Baudrillard writes about simulacra and simulations. While reading the firsts examples about the patients who pretend to be sick and the one who pretends to be sick and develop the symptoms, realized that I did not totally understanding what I was reading, I called my personal doctor, friend and who is also my father, to ask him about this, he gave me the example of Placebos, but I'll explain this later. These firsts examples got me in a lot of trouble with my girlfriend, because I was telling her about the reading and the examples, but all she was telling me was that examples did not make any sense, so I had to come with the same example of the placebo effect.

After this small intro, I have not mention anything about the reading, so here it comes. Primarily is necessary to understand what is a simulation and what is feigning, and once more I'll come to placebo example. If you don't know what this is, here is a link that will explain briefly about it:  PLACEBO ; so what a placebo does is that it simulates the effect of medicine, but it is your own body the one which is taking care of curing itself, that is a simulation. On the other hand a feign needs would be a fake medicine that tries to cure some symptoms, but it wont work because it has no ingredients to do it.

Ok, but if my class is about digital media, what do I have to do with simulations? As I understood, everyday we see images in the Internet, in newspapers, magazines or you have photography or paintings, but these images are not the real images, these images that you see are mere simulations of an original image that the creator of the image had in his/her mind, and tried to record in canvas that may be called paper, notepad or camera.

As the lecture keeps going more examples come to explain simulations, Disney example is quite accurate, but I wont talk about it because I’ve never been there and makes me sad to write about it. 

When the author mentions the simulation of power and government, make me think about ideologies and revolutions, because they are all simulations of a feeling of being more powerful than the other, and for me this is bullshit and useless, but this how the world is been working since society begun.

By the end of the reading I got completely lost, the part in which is mention that we may be living a simulation of another reality made the paper go down, but still, I really like this and hopefully my conclusions about simulations and media is right.

U.C  

Gitelman

Where is the word Internet from? Who was the first person to mention it? When was the first time that somebody spoke about Internet? These and few other questions are answered in Lisa Gitelmans text, "always already new", in which small story about what is Internet is narrated. In the first part of this text Gitelman makes reference to a investigation of a website about the search for the word internet in previous editions of the new york times, editions that go more than one hundred years ago, you may be wondering what the word internet was doing in those newspapers so long ago? Sorry to disappoint you, but that was an orthographic mistake, the firsts references to the word internet date about twenty years ago, in 1990, when the first web page was edited in the CERN. (Curiosity: currently the CERN is trying to prove the existence of "Gods Particle" which is supposed to be a force that holds atoms together.)

The following part is focused in the history of websites; about the duration theses sites may have in the World Wide Web. There is also a fun fact in the paper, because the author mentions a brief story about the annoying and hateful error 404, which may happen when one of 404 principal functions of a web site is not working properly and the code 404 comes automatic.

Another point, which is important in this brief introduction to the history of Internet, is the apparition of bibliographic and citation styles, which had to be initiated from scratch and must be constantly actualized due to the constant changes in the web.

For someone who had never been in touch with digital media academically speaking, like me, this text may turn tedious and difficult to read, but after a few tries the text flows again.

Once done with the reading, I had to check again the main ideas of the text, to be sure I did understand what I reading due to the image what was not very clear.

It is so amazing learning where does the internet come from, because we are so used to it that we barely stop to think about it and how it works. 

My first K-day

Good news I heard the day before Friday: “school will over by noon”, but why? Well the reason may not sound as fancy as it should be, in order to cancel classes after midday, but Friday September 9^th was K-day.

For you, my kind reader, if you don’t know what is K-day here is a short explanation: K-day is  day in which we celebrate our home, the Keweenaw peninsula, which is a small portion of land surrounded by the majesty of the Superior Lake; so in this day we celebrate every activity that yoopers do up here, (Yooper: a native from the Keweenaw peninsula, careful when first interact with this specie, they lover beer, food and snow, but most of all, they love their hometown.) these activities go from hockey played with brooms, to the competition of tossing bags of sand to a small hole located 20 ft. away from you, Frisbee golf  and food, everything that may make a yooper happy (beer is not allowed in the park in which the K-day festivities takes place, but later in KBC a massive tribute to beer is held).

For reasons of time I can’t get in details of what K-day makes me fell, but the only thing I’m sure of is that lifestyle in the Keweenaw is one of the things I’m so happy that have come to my life, I’ll enjoy this way of living for the next  two years, and hopefully , someday, I’ll share this lifestyle with my family and when I say my family I mean my wife and my kids, at least for a few days, but in the mean time I’ll spend K-day with the family  I found in Keweenaw, a family that makes me feel like I never left San Luis, Rancho de las Tunas, Minas del Potosi. 

Bugs?

When I came to study in MTU, so many things were in my mind: the beach, the snow, KBC, DT, pizza studio, pasties and all other stuff, but certainly I can assure you that the last thing going in my mind was bugs. And you may wonder, what do bugs have to do with Houghton and MTU? I will try to be brief, but this does not mean I will be:It's been a week since the family left their home, a small city in a country  famous for its way of partying, its food, its drink, the warmth of the people, the beach, the arqueological sites, but not for the place in which the family lived. Driving through day and night, with wind, sun, rain, even a moose on the road, and over two thousand miles they finally reached their destination. This is the story of my driving from Mexico to Houghton.Unable to live in the dorms (for whatever the reason may be) I found a place a few blocks from campus, the pictures seemed pretty nice, the landlord was so kind, we exchanged emails for a couple of months and when he sent me pictures of the one which would be my room I felt like that place would be my home someday.  
When the family got into the house, especially in the room, their faces showed nothing but fear…but fear of what? This house seems nice, even though it is dirty now (the previous inquiline was not as neat as I would have liked) but after a few hours cleaning with a vacuum cleaner and some spray to eliminate the bad smell that is in the air, the room seems nice. Once the cleaning is done, photos all over my wall remind me my dreams, my past, my future and my love, I think I will able to live here.  Still wondering about the bugs? You'll have to wait a little bit longer....

This is a project for my first class in MTU, I'm excited about this opportunity that life and my parents are giving me, hopefully in this brief space I’ll share my experiences, thoughts and funny stories to tell, welcome