Students also contributed to discussions about connections between history and present-day communication technologies on this class blog. Additionally, each member of the class produced an entry for Wikipedia that they researched and then uploaded themselves. For some excellent examples, see:

Wikipedia

The course will be offered again in Winter 2011.

Although it can be said the in some respect, the two forms of dissident press were very different, the publications of the counterculture and the women’s right movement were very similar in the fact that they gave a voice to the voiceless.  Although the counterculture publications were a bit more radical and pushed boundaries to limits that were unheard of, it became an outlet, especially for college students, to share their thoughts and beliefs and to be who they truly were instead of the opposite; conforming to societies’ rigid standards.  The women’s rights publications, on the other hand, had a more direct agenda then that of the counterculture but were similar in that it was a place for ideas that were not accepted elsewhere.

The most interesting, compelling and disheartening information that I gained from both of the chapters about dissident press of the past was about the Secret War that was launched against the various dissident publications that were advocating counterculture and women’s rights.  Up until reading these chapters, I had never heard of this brutal assault carried out by mainly the FBI with help from the CIA here and there.  It is a very scary thought to think that the very organizations that were put in place to protect the citizens of this country were actually doing everything that they could to destroy citizen publications that were advocating unpopular ideas.  Although our country was founded on the basis of freedom and we are lead to believe that our expression is protected by the first amendment, this was a blatant example of a disregard for our constitutional rights by the government.  Furthermore, it is hard to believe that tragic and disgraceful events like this occurred only four, short decades ago.  The extent of the close-mindedness exhibited in these barbaric acts was still running rampant throughout our country during my mother’s adolescent years and still manifests itself in many other ways today, even through different issues that are at the forefront of social reform.  Despite this brutality, I found it very encouraging that at least one of the dissident publications spotlighted, off our backs, made it through this era of intense oppression and is still an up-an-running publication of today.

As Rodger Streitmatter states this, a widely seen concept in today’s college youth comes to mind. There seems to be a trend in our society that young people are very hooked on the 1960’s, including its music, ideologies, and drug use. However, this doesn’t really come into play until the time kids reach college, and this in itself is an interesting correlation to the fact that many of those newspaper published in the 1960’s were near or funded by colleges, and directly aimed at the youth culture.

Therefore, it seems apparent to me that even now, today’s youth is looking for a way to get back this type of personalized publication by referring back to the lifestyles and interest of a time period that distinctly had these type of publications.

These concepts are still held onto and cherished in the form of music. Streitmatter goes on to say that publications such as the Berkley Barb “treated rock ‘n’ roll as both music and an agent of change,” while mainstream publications simply mentioned the wave of music with “anthropological detachment.” I think this is something many mainstream publications still struggle with. They look at a youth’s trends, describe them and observe them, but otherwise regard them as temporary and a passing trend. This was not the case for the music of the 1960’s. Many of the songs mentioned by Streitmatter, including “Satisfaction,” “Lucy in the Skies with Diamonds,” and “Purple Haze,” would still be recognized young people today not only as music from past generation, but as having concepts they believe in to this day.

The music, the personalization, and the desire for social of young people is still a concept widely held among today’s youth and that are referring to an era there was monumental for stepping forward and moving towards gaining that justice. Today’s young people are looking for a publications, or rather anyone, to report on what they really care about, in the manner that they not be disregarded as insignificant due to their age as well as not be referred to as a passing trend.

A good example of the transformation that has taken place in society, involes the generation gap with the internet. I have been helping my mom with the computer since i have been about tweleve. She is a very intelligent women with many skills, but just didn’t grow up with a daily habit on the computer. She has much improved, but it is unusual to be teaching someone something that is much more knowledgeable in other fields. My younger sister is superior to me in her computer wizadry, with her combination of internet savvy and graphic design knowledge.

I would even venture to say that my internet use has become close to an addiction. Whenever I am bored, it is what i do. I either hop on a news website, espn.com, facebook or another sports webite. I can surf these pages for hours without really accomplishing much of anything. As useful as the internet is, it can be difficult to not abuse its holy power. It has so many capabiltiies, that only about half of them now are productive and useful. There is so much junk and addictive hogwash, that it can be hard to keep your eye on the prize when using your lap top in class. I know that it has been a discussed issue at DU. Overall, I value the internet a great amount, but hope to refine my use to more productive uses in the near future.

I also had never thought about the involvement in the government in trying to get rid of these movements.  I knew about the counterculture, feminist, and Black Panther movements before I read these articles and just assumed they eventually went by the wayside and didn’t even think about the movements against them that led to their dissolution.  It is interesting to me that the government felt so threatened by these movements they tried to infiltrate and ruin their support going after their advertisers and even their readers, and in many cases were successful.

I was also surprised at how outrageous some of these magazines were and their ability to maintain readership even with all the explicit content and claims that to get what you want you may have to kill cops, as in the case with the Black Panthers, or men, in the case of the feminist.  They also bring to light very controversial subjects like drug use, abortion and police brutality which could have turned away readership.  I have to assume this has something to do with the time in which they live because many of these papers had high enough circulation to reach a number of people and I cant imagine that many of those papers would have that type of circulation today, but maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe enough of the social issues these papers were established to bring attention to, are not as apparent today so maybe thats why they would not exist in our time, but it seems like they were needed at that time and in some cases produced positive results.

Before the internet, people had to receive their news from the sources designated, but now people have the opportunity to gather information on their own on any given subject that interests them or which they want to be informed about.  The ineternet has allowed for customization and with this customization their is the responsibility to educated oneself on social and political happenings, to stay current with domestic and foreign events.

People used to be spoon-feed the news, today a person can choose what it is they want to know about, they have the ability to customize news sites to (for example) just cover information that is left-wing politically and what is going on in Spain.  Before the news broadcasted what people would receive, there was only a few sources of news; now there are so many choices outside the realm of popular culture.  Without the internet societal possibilities are limited, there is a a giver of information and a receiver in the old model, but in this new fast pasted, always connected world, everyone can be both the giver and receiver of information.  There is a much more fluid relationship with the news and current events than before, and the mystery surrounding the broadcast is gone due to the fact that the internet is a 24/7 news platform that can be customized an accessed by anyone at any point in time. The time of the instantaneous customization is now.

I think it’s safe to say that every college student uses the internet every day, be it for social networking, finding information for their essay that’s due tomorrow, or writing a blog for their innovations in mass communications class. We have come to use the internet freely, and we get upset when it doesn’t work right away, fast enough, or when we can’t reach a Wi-fi signal.

I also think it’s safe to say we’ve become addicted to the internet and it’s capability to provide us contact with others, information, all the information we could ever need, and a way to connect.

But it wasn’t always this way, as Janet Abbate portrays in her article “Popularizing the Internet.” She explains that the 1980’s version of the internet had an infrastructure that was growing rapidly, but poor networking applications, making the internet anything abut user-friendly. She goes on to explain the difficulty in finding information online. While file-transfer programs were available, the user had to know the names of the desired file and its host computer, and there was no automated way of getting this information. Therefore, there weren’t many applications to make the internet and its contents user-friendly, and it was difficult to attract novices. If this were the case now, I don’t know that the internet would be popular as it is, which turns out to be the point of Abbate’s article. The desire to have any piece of information at our fingertips at any time is the key component of the internet making it so attractive, especially to younger generations who are already moving at a quick pace to do things throughout their day.

Abbate also explains that the world wide web didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. It took a lot of people working on it to make connections with one another and share information to provide so many sources we can now reach instantaneously. In my mind, this is the main reason the internet has been so successful and widely used. It provides anyone with a connection to share information, opinions, and news with the click of a button. Just as we discussed while watching Wesch’s video Web 2.0, we’re now reaching an overload of information being presented to us over the internet and the tables have turned from where we previously couldn’t find much information in the 1980’s to where we are now responsible for sorting through al the information we’re presented and finding reliable sources.