History of the Information Age

I enjoyed working on communicating ideas through cave paintings. I don’t have much experience with drawing, but cave paintings are a format where more simplistic drawings fit in. I tried to replicate the style of other cave paintings, using humans, bulls, and birds as references for parts of the advertisements. The first advertisement I made was for Red Bull. The picture showed a can with a bull on it, and a person with wings holding the can, referring to the slogan “Red Bull gives you wings”. My second advertisement was for some sort of cleaning product. It included two spray bottles, one with a dirty surface beneath it, and the other with a clean surface beneath it.

Trying to communicate an idea with only pictures can be difficult, since there is more left open to the audience’s interpretation. I think people were able to guess my advertisements quickly because they both rely on tropes that we are familiar with. However, if someone wasn’t familiar with commercials for Red Bull or cleaning supplies, there isn’t much information that they could use to figure out what I was trying to communicate. By itself, a winged person holding an object doesn’t give any indication that an energy drink is being advertised, and lines pointing around an object don’t show that it is shiny. Pictographs seem useful for basic concepts that a culture is familiar with, but it would be more challenging to communicate a new idea or to try to teach something using pictures. Working on this assignment also made me realize how effective simple logos or slogans that are often used in advertising can be, people were pretty quickly able to guess advertisements for companies like State Farm, M&Ms, and Red Bull.

I created a timeline focusing on the Raid on Mers el-Kebir, which I researched for History 299 last semester.

There have been a series of communications advancements in the past couple hundred years, from new roads, to steam power and the telegraph, to automobiles and telephones, to the internet. Downey examines the technological progression from one innovation to another, and how they have affected society. He marks the printing press and transportation networks as the first period, followed by interpersonal communication such as telegraphs and telephones, then broadcast mass communication such as radio and television, and finally communication utilizing computers.

Although it isn’t relevant to his periodization of the information age, I think it is interesting that Downey mentions that technology is not always useful when it is created. Sometimes it is simply novelty or curiosity that drives the development of a technology, rather than necessity or profits.

Hi, I’m Nate! I’m a junior, and I’m majoring in history and minoring in computer science. This class seems interesting since it’s not a topic that’s been covered much in other classes I’ve taken, and because it might overlap a bit with my minor. Out of the assignments from previous years, creating propaganda or memes about fake news both sound interesting to me.