futureofyou

[futureofyou]

Course Post: 6 Noise “Pollution”

"The right to silence is a kind of aesthetic moralism, tied up with appeals to public well-being, justice, democracy, and, more recently, sustainability." -Wagner, The Struggle For The Urban Soundscape

In my sound studies classes in the past, noise pollution was something I could never wrap my head around until it finally clicked that our hearing is the one sense that never gets a break. We can control what we see in the media, what shows we watch, where we go and what we see, but we can’t really control what we hear, which is where people start to have problems. I am more interested in the role economic class plays in the idea of noise pollution. Those who have the money to live away from urban areas seem to have the most to say when it comes to noise pollution that arises from public transportation, larger living areas like apartment complexes, and overall street noise. To me, it is very difficult to see the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sound. 

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Course Post: 5 Soundscapes

"For Japan, the introduction of the train system was iconic of the nation's entry into global modernity: the shinkansen (bullet train), in particular, became a marker of Japan's post-war economic ascendance. The cultural symbolism of the train system also reflects dark anxieties about the precariousness of millennial Japanese society." -Novak, The Acoustic City

Soundscapes is one aspect of sound studies that has always interested me. Sounds, in particular, urban sounds are often ignored. Possibly because they are sounds we live with every day so we get so used to them we don’t register them anymore. While Novak identifies Japan’s bullet train sound as a marker of the city’s industrial modernization, some urban soundscapes exist to hold onto the history of the city. San Francisco is one of my favorite places, so the sounds of the cable cars immediately came to mind. While this urban sound was once a revolutionary transportation technology, it now exists mainly as a tourist attraction, keeping the history of San Francisco alive. I think soundscapes are a really interesting way to understand the history, and possibly the future of a city. 

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Course Post: 4 Computerized Cities

“Our current paradigm, the city as computer, appeals because it frames the messiness of urban life as programmable and subject to rational order.” -Mattern, A City Is Not A Computer

Mattern’s idea of city as a computer is one I had personally never thought about before. Even though technology is so woven into our society, there are so many aspects of urban society that cannot be explained or remedied by technology. In terms of gathering information about cities, it is up to the city developers to understand and interpret that information, which takes an understanding of the emotional, economic, and civil sides of the information. To see a city as a computer, would be to ignore the messy, mistake-ridden, human aspects of urban life. 

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Course Post: 3 Technological Inequalities

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity” -Albert Einstein

Ben Green’s article Cities Are Not Technology Problems: What Smart Cities Companies Get Wrong really opened my eyes to the importance we as a society place on technological improvement. Because we have the technology, we find problems, and possibly create them on purpose, in order to utilize the newfound technology. Smart cities are constantly introducing wifi hubs, completely automated public transportation, and “smart/digital citizens” like the picture above mentions, but disregard the problems that technology “can’t” solve, like homelessness. How as a society can we say we live in “smart cities” when we still have barbaric anti-homeless architecture? This is what Ben Green leans into in his article. I think there are a lot of possible solutions to issues like homelessness that could utilize technology, if the municipal governments want to put their money toward those solutions is a different story. 

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“They are potentials for change, growth, or decay, but they have not fully expressed themselves or done all that they can do.” -Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit

Like Amanda, I immediately thought of Wall-E when reading through the chapters from Shaviro. I think this film does a really great job at highlighting the consequences of capitalism and corporations like Walmart and Amazon.This “impending doom” situation does seem a bit terrifying, but Shaviro goes on to say, “the present moment contains elements of futurity, but the unfolding of these elements as actual future events is contingent and not guaranteed.” 

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Course Post: 1 The Living Dead

“start in the middle – from the entanglement of past and present, and accept the complexity this decision brings with it to any analysis of modern media culture.” Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology?

I found Parikka’s work on media archaeology to be especially intriguing. As someone who feels nostalgia more often than not, I found that Parikka’s meshing of the past and the future opened a new way of thinking for me. I think we have a tendency to approach the future (of culture, technology, etc.) in a cautious manner, and look back on the past as something that is long gone. However, the past and the future are entangled and interacting. Like the photo and gif above, the past is always influencing the present, and even the future of technology. With the increase in popularity of “retro” media, we are also seeing an increase of that retro media meshing with our current media, film slides being uploaded to Tumblr, 45 year old vinyls being played on a Victrola made in 2020. I had always thought of the past and future as completely separate, untouchable ideas, but now I can see and feel the connection between the two.