In the third week of class the primary focus was advancements in technology as a result of modern warfare. Someone mentioned during the discussion was Max Weber who stated that modern life in the Industrial Age had become rationalized. The following question was raised: does technology produce outcomes we expect or prefer? This question relates back to the discussion regarding the degradation of taste amongst the modern era. Are companies such as wonder bread successful since they mass produce a product that is familiar, and consistent? This may be the case since they are producing the outcome we expect and prefer.

The conversation shifted to information management, how it has evolved over time, and how it allows individuals to be tracked. These identifiers can vary, such as fingerprints. This process developed in the US during major global conflict events including World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Metrics such as uniform size or assigned set of numbers could be used to identify and track soldiers within the conflicts. As this system continued to be used for all US citizens, such as collecting fingerprints at birth and the concept of social security numbers, has it evolved into a stronger system of population management? In the short story “The Enormous Radio,” by John Cheever, the mental stability of a couple begins to unravel when they purchase a new radio which they believe allows them to listen in on the events in other apartments in their building. This story was written as a reflection of the “Red-Scare” era, as the US sought out to mitigate communism, through the Cold War, Vietnam War, and Korean War. It also led to the thorough examination and tracking of American citizens in attempt to “contain” this ideology. Is this gradual intensification of citizen tracking and data management truly with the intention to protect the American people? Or is it another attempt to track populations of “undesirable ideologies”? Relatively recently the current administration suggested the registration of the American Muslim population with the misguided (and, frankly, ignorant) intention to mitigate terrorism within the US. This was met with an uproar considering the core concept of religion is based in a private relationship between God and an individual, and should not be infiltrated by the government. Additionally this contributed to the negative and primarily western association between Islam and terrorist attacks, as well as violating privacy of the individual and their right to freedom of religion.

This modern warfare events also contributed to various other technological developments such as Bell Labs telephone enterprise, the military industry, computing, and various others which have all influenced the ability to manage and organize data.

In the following class we further discussed the Cold War and the Vannevar Bush essay “As We May Think”. While the US and USSR continued to fight for world domination the military-industrial complex continued to develop, as did the increase in information management. This led to not only government price controls but also the initiation of several government funded projects, leading to the development of: rockets, jet engines, sonar, radar, and many more technological advances. Vannevar Bush, who organized the scientific information being produced to help the war efforts, argued that we couldn’t make use of how much information we have because the system by which this info was organized was inefficient. I believe this may still be true, but not because we are ineffectively storing data but because there is too much data to store. Companies and sites such as facebook and instagram track our web history in order to identify which advertisements we would prefer. Devices such as “Alexa” record our daily lives, and these recordings can be legally used. The government has so much easily accessible data about its population through social media alone, is all of this tracked and stored, or just respectfully unmonitored?