Gloucester Street Spring Break Journals (Day One, Part Two)

I've been working on a song lately. I've about finished the computer work. I'm going to call it "Born a Ghost," a reference to a conversation I had recently. My intent this week is to finish it, as well as collect a few things for the music video I want to make. It's going to require visits to a few thrift shops. Basically, I'm looking for used televisions. Small ones that no one wants any more.

It seems that over the last little while I've become fascinated with technology in a whole new way. I still don't know the basics of how electronics work, but I find it interesting how technology becomes obsolete. Especially on my radar right now is the fact that analog television will soon be completely a thing of the past. June 12th is the cut-off date for people to switch to digital. Analog transmissions will no longer be sent by stations. There are small rural communities all across the country that don't have digital service in their areas. Signals will cease hurling through the air.

What will happen to the snow on televisions? Fun fact: when an analog television is not receiving a signal, the snow that appears on the screen is a combination of internal thermal noise caused by agitated electrons in the television itself, electromagnetic fields generated by nearby electronic devices, and microwaves from the cosmic microwave background radiation that runs throughout the universe. That last one, CMB, was discovered in the 1960's by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, winning them the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978. The only model of universal operation that effectively explains CMB is the Big Bang theory.

I'm planning to read a bit of Marshall McLuhan this week. I've had a copy of "The Medium is the Massage" for years now, which is the book he produced in collaboration with graphic artist Quentin Fiore. While it looks very neat I've never actually sat down and read the thing. I did leaf through it last night and read McLuhan's observations on how the human being finds technological extensions into his/her natural environment. The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book an extension of the eye and so on. Most notable, however, is McLuhan's observation that the circuit is an extension of the central nervous system. The other week I was reading a Wired article about these students at MIT who have created what they call a "sixth human sense":



McLuhan was writing about this more than forty years ago. It is quite literally coming to fruition. I'm always interested in seeing how technology will develop in my lifetime. When I was a kid, I was always excited to see the arrival of the year 2000. It felt so significant to be alive at the turn of a millennium, as though we would immediately see a change. And there have been pretty drastic changes to how the world works, even in my own lifetime. I think it's the speed with which we handle information nowadays that makes it feel as though technology is dragging. When will we be wearing computers? When will life not be what we encounter but what we construct? And would that be better?

I'm pondering these ideas in front of a computer screen. In three years time I will have spent half my life with ready access to a wide internal world at my disposal. Without it, I would have been entirely different. With it, I will continue to change, hopefully into someone that won't go obsolete anytime soon.