HIST 390 Blog

This week we talked about how each of us has two selves.  We have our public self and our private self.  This concept really blew my mind, because I do absolutely think it’s true that our public self and private self are not the same.  It is interesting to me how this separateness seems to be okay when around friends, and acquaintances, but the closer that people are to us, the more they see our private selves, and we expect to see theirs.  I never realized how this concept of our public selves verses our private selves explains how we see the differences between slavery, indentured servitude, and having a job.  With slavery and indentured servitude you are essentially buying the private and public self, which are both illegal now obviously.  However, now when we have jobs, it’s considered that we are only selling our public selves for the work, and not our private selves.

The discussion becomes increasingly interesting to me once we start relating it to our private versus public selves today.  As time has progressed, the amount of private self that we should in a public sphere has increased dramatically.  Compared to a time where the public self was almost exclusively shown in a public setting, now we are much more willing to show our private selves.  A major place where this is shown is on the internet.  It has become increasingly acceptable to show who we are privately, including our inner vulnerabilities and opinions, that we normally wouldn’t showcase to the world, or really even have a way to in the capacity that the internet spreads information.  The idea that we looked at in class concerning this was that if we make our private lives extremely public, do we start losing freedoms?    In my opinion, it absolutely makes people vulnerable, and already has.

For the first week of class, The Digital Past, we talked a lot about the change in music production-wise regarding compression.  From my understanding of compression, it is used to bring volumes, both loud and soft, to the middle ranges.  As a result the music tends to be all one volume, despite changes in dynamics with the voice or instruments.  When a singer sings a soft verse and moves to a chorus in which she is belting, although her volume and dynamics have changed drastically, the compression makes it so that the song plays at one constant volume.  The listener doesn’t have to change the volume in order to hear soft parts, and turn down the song once a loud part comes on.

In our class discussions we talked about why there has been a shift between using no compression, to using heavy compression in most modern music.  People in the class tended to agree of the hypothesis that heavy compression made it easier to listen to.  I would agree with this because you don’t have to worry about the volume, or trying to hear the lyrics.  Another reason that was brought up, was the music industry’s attempt to differentiate themselves in the digital age from competing sounds and advertisements.  I also thought this was a good point as well because I believe that music has evolved in a lot of ways to fit how “in-your-face” modern advertising has become.  I think that we are used to heavily compressed advertisements and lots of them, spaced in-between songs on the radio, Youtube, and Spotify.  To keep up with ads, it is in music’s favor to compress their production and keep up with the volume wars so that music is not drowned out or quite when next to other sounds sharing its airtime.

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