The Internet Archives, recently launched their newest section on recorded television broadcasts from news organizations such as NBC, CBS, CNN, ABC, including Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Report.”

The Internet Archives Organization is a  “501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.”

As part of a class exercise, I went onto evaluate the ethics of TV news section where they have over 356, 000 videos to view.  On the surface, this is most likely violating copyright law. However, the purposes of the TV archives reaches far beyond any means of reproducing a product.

What the TV archives aims to do is make audiences critical about the television they are watching. Instead of hearing about how FOX Cable News Network has decided to make every program about the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s birth in the United States, viewers can actually view it for themselves.

New York University Professor and Journalist, Farai Chideya sees the project as something to be applauded,

At some level the Television Archives will really will allow people to not only rely on gatekeepers, people like me who are trained journalists, but to also be gatekeepers and to free themselves in terms of information.

What I searched for was Invisible Children. Back in March of this year, this film “Kony 2012” sky rocketed into internet fame for a small thirty minute video discussing the horrors occurring in Central Africa under the Lord’s Resistance Army. I had previously know about the conflict and had been working with Invisible Children for more than a year when the film was discussed on every television screen.

Now, I can look back and see what people were discussing. For someone how is doing a documentary, these video clips are valuable to knowing what was actually being reported on at the time of the videos release.

Despite the  legality question of this content, I strongly support the project. Like C-SPAN, the viewer is able to judge for themselves what they see in comparison with all other sources. Otherwise, researching on one topic would take forever. This a very effective and useful tool in learning about the way media operates in the U.S. and finding trends for evaluating months, and even years after an original event has occurred.

What is best known as the Amen Break, was originally played by the Winsten’s from their album, “Amen Brother,” is almost irreplaceable. I did not know what I was expecting, but as soon as I saw the 20 minute movie  about the drum roll (see below), it was easily recognizable.

What is called a sampler, the amen drum roll was one of the first segments of music to be repeatedly used in other genres of music. National Public Radio defines sampling as, “re purposing a snippet of another artist’s music.” Sampling is a part of our pop culture. In the case of Imogen Heap’s popular song “Hide and Seek,” which was used for Jason Derulo’s “Whatcha Say.”

However, Imogen Heap’s original song was used a sampler for Derulo’s song:

National Public Radio’s Science Friday, delved into this concept. What sampling involves is taking something and make the sound your own. However, if you are not careful sampling can get you into some legal trouble. Artists whose work is sampled aren’t often compensated, even if it is for just a six second clip.

Professor McLeod of Iowa State University, whose a professor of Communications noted on NPR that sampling  is, ”

basically the central part of popular culture if you think about social networking and the way that people interact with each other across great distances. And they get to collaborate with each other, you think about open-source software, the way that people collaboratively create stuff, they’re essentially taking samples of computer code and remixing them.

And the same is true with music. I mean, I know a 12-year-old who make mash-up videos on YouTube and upload them. It’s just – it’s almost part of the DNA of – not just youth culture but just popular culture more generally.

What he says is true. We are so confused by our everyday culture that we are constantly surrounded by un-authenticity. It brings about, as discussed in last week’s blog post and this week’s lecture, of what is truly authentic. Is it OK for people to place other items into their work, whether it be music or digitized photography? What are loosing and gaining from a world of sampled music? We are now skeptical of everything. We are even skeptical of humans, as in the case with lip singing. We always wonder if an artist is actually producing the sound that they are making. Sampling is just part of that.

In viewing the video History of the Internet I began to think about how much our world has changed since the age of typewriters to laptops that are smaller than typewriters of the past; and can do more.

The image above, with the caption, is from the first episode of the hit television show Mad Men. Head secretary Joanne shows Peggy the ropes of working at a Madison Avenue ad agency, where in the 1960’s a simple typewriter was considered an advance in technology.

In the past you needed these three items to do a separate task. To call someone, you needed a rotary phone, to tell someone that there was someone to see them you had to use an intercom, and to type out information to distribute you had to use a typewriter. Needless to say, things have sure changed.

Now computers, and even cellphones, can do all of these tasks in the palm of your hand. When the computer was invented, it didn’t change the future right away. Computers according to the History of the Internet, could only do one function at a time. Plus, they were huge. Pictures below is a scientist from the RAND corporation next to one of the first computers ever built:

It’s pretty easy to see why the computer, when it was first built, didn’t get a lot of traction. It was not economically possible for an average home to hold. In order to have a computer, one had to have a separate cooling room for it. All of these components pictures above, and we haven’t even discussed the internet. Simply being able to access one site that does multiple things, is impressive enough particularly when one considers how large our former computers were.

Now, I can sit comfortably on my bed with a computer that only takes up a small fraction of what used to be a computer. Not only can I use a word processes, but I’m able to type these words and access a blog. What I continue to learn through this class from my own thoughts, is how remarkable the mere access to the internet actually is, and even the technology of a laptop has changed so much over the past. This, despite a computer and internet access being a constant presence in my life while I grew up.

With the multitude of data available on the web and in data storage facilities,

The rapidly dropping price of data storage has led computer scientists like Michael Lesk (a cyber-enthusiast to be sure) to claim that in the future, ‘there will be enough disk space and tape storage in the world to store everything people write, say, perform, or photograph.’ In other words, why delete anything from the current historical record if it costs so little save it? How might our history writing be different if all historical evidence were available?

In reading the Introduction to Digital Past: A Guide to Gathering and Preserving the Past on the Web, this portion was the most thought provoking.

If there is so much information, and none of it is being deleted, there is a potential for history and archives to get lost. Even when one searches through their own hard drive with a computer they have had for a number of years, finding that one photo from three years ago can take hours. If one doesn’t remember what they titled something or where they filed it under, the task of finding just a simple picture from a party is daunting.

The same can be said for storing history data. With so much information and data available in various locations, here is a potential for history to get lost within the digital data. If it is not adequately preserved and able to be found, regardless of how much information we can store if we cannot find it the data we are looking for, the data becomes useless. Not to sound too pessimistic about the woes of the internet and data land, we have the capacity to find and know just about everything about who we were in our history. However, there should be a means of finding our history amid the endless strings of data.

Another potential problems occurs when all of our data is lost. What can we do prevent our history from getting lost? Symantec, the computer virus preventing program, provides users with a way to store their data so nothing gets lost: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvIJuHectBY

It can be argued that the same process can be taken to protect our historical archives to not get lost.

Therefore, I have the following questions:

1. Is there a means that historians all store data? Is there a systematic way that historians know how to save a file of a certain type of document so it is easily accessible?

2. How can a historian find something adequately across borders and the internet? With so much data, doesn’t it become difficult to discover exactly what you want?