There are many ways, most of them slightly stalker-ish, that companies can utilize data to market to their customers or targeted customers. Everyone who goes online sees those personalized side ads while browsing the internet. Companies are getting smarter and smarter when it comes to using tracking of different trends. Companies can use what type of vehicle you drive, what magazine subscriptions you have, what your salary is, and if you have children as well as many more categories to sell their products and services to people who are most likely to buy what they offer. Advertising is expensive, modern companies don’t need to waste money advertising to people who probably won’t buy what they’re selling.

Amazon tracks what you buy, heck it tracks what everybody buys, and uses that data to try and sell you things they think you like. Bought an espresso machine lately? Amazon will probably try to sell you a frothing pitcher or a tamper (I didn’t know that’s what they call the thing that is used for compacting the espresso).

Music services, such as Pandora, Songza, or Spotify, try and cater to your tastes by playing the music you like and not the stuff you don’t, not always correctly. Music services bet that you will like the music they are offering you so much that you will buy the premium version, or click on their ads to make money.

All these ways that your spending habits and personal tastes can be tracked feels a bit like Big Brother is watching. Although with the demand for faster and more personalized service are these companies just giving us what we’re asking for?

My mom told me she has received no fewer than 12 Land’s End catalogs this month.

I am writing these words, typing away on a keyboard, and my thoughts appear as words on my screen. Technology can take my written/typed out thoughts and transfer them almost anywhere. It breaks my words up into small packets and delivers them to a destination, in this case some server that holds my blog posts, and enables them to be viewed by anyone with an internet connection and a desire to read obscure blog posts.

This is possible thanks to a lot of different people and inventions, one of the biggest contributors in all this was Claude Shannon. Shannon was able to turn messages into small packets, by simply asking yes or no questions, and therefore making it possible for information to be transmitted.  Shannon was radical in that he separated information from its context and messages from their meaning. Sorry I don’t understand it well enough to adequately write about it, moving on. I originally had some way to connect this to thoughts that I had about the meaning of a message being more than the physical message itself, it also has a lot to do with the source of message. My brain must be trying to make me look bad. Okay, no fancy segue into this, I think a large part of a messages importance is where the message comes from.

Most teachers won’t let students use Wikipedia as a reference source, but Wikipedia lists a lot of correct knowledge. A student can reference a quote from a book and it will be taken more seriously than if the student references a quote from Wikipedia.

The Bible also provides a good example of the source being an important factor of a message, do I have to explain why…? Fine, the Bible is taken as law to those who follow the Bible’s teachings whereas a book about how to follow the Bible is taken as a guide, even if it directly quotes the Bible.

Or take for example getting an email from your boss that says “Great job!” versus getting a spam email from some company that say, “Great job! You’ve earned enough points to buy more crap from our store!”

The source is important, also necessary.

I was going to try and write a poem but I didn’t get any farther than, “The source is of course…”

*This blog post is not under copyright*

I dislike when things don’t fit neatly into a category, like copyright. Why shouldn’t inventors get the credit, and the money, that comes with inventing stuff? Same thing goes for artists. Seems to be that most of the problems happen not because of an original copyright, but after the sale of a copyright to some big company. If a widow sells her husbands book rights to Big Company A to help her get by, is that any different than if she had sold her husbands car?

I wonder if instead of changing copyright laws, a new way of buying and selling copyrights could be established. I’m no expert in that area however, I have to leave that one up to the smart thinkers. Or the lawyers.

I am really glad that I don’t make a living through art or inventions.

Intellectual property being treated as physical property is both fair and not fair. If we compare living off of royalties from a song, to working in a “normal job, let’s say a doctor, things start to seem a little unfair. A musician wants to provide for his family, so he writes a song, it gets popular and earns that artist lots of money in royalties. Many years later the musician dies, his widow now collects his royalties, its almost as if that musician were still alive and earning money, well maybe not to his family… A doctor wants to provide for his family, works hard for many years, earns money for his family and dies many years later. When the doctor dies, that’s it, no more money being earned by the deceased. His family can invest his money but there is no new money coming in for the doctor. Is it fair for a dead ma to earn money? If we change the scenario to lets say a musicians royalties and a property investor, it may look a little different. Same basic story, musician makes music, earns royalties and eventually dies, only this tine his widow sells his music right to Large Company A, she sells her husbands property. Now Mr. Property Investor comes along, invests in property and dies, his widow sells his properties to make money, is there a big difference? I may have made that super confusing, and I may not totally grasp all the intricacies , but I hope the main point is coming across.

Copyright can be confusing, simply because there really isn’t anything like it. You can view it as property or not, but honestly it’s not 100% of either. I think viewing it as property makes it an easier concept to grasp, makes writing laws about it simpler and can help out those who are creative.

Short Story: I was reading Sterne’s “MP3” the other day, I began a new chapter and it started off talking about scientists performing experiments with “cat phones”, and my first reaction was, “Oh kitties talking to each other, how cute!”. Upon further reading though, these experimenters would remove most of the cats brains, hook them up to electrodes and watch how they reacted to sounds.

Not the same thing. Not at all.

Boogaloo, what is it and where did it come from? Spoiler alert, after researching it for an afternoon I am still far away from the answer. I could probably have a polite dinner conversation about it with someone who isn’t an expert, so that’s a positive I guess.

Here’s what I got:

First mention I came across is in a book about Australian peoples with the very interesting title of, “The Australian Race: Its Origin, Languages, Customs, Place of Landing in Australia, and the Routes by which it Spread Itself Over that Continent, Volume 2“. Doesn’t that just roll off the tongue? Apparently, for one group of Australian people located near Tolarno Station, “boogaloo” meant “death”. “Boogaloo” also appears to be the name of “a happy-go-lucky Negro” in vol. 34, page 6 of Time magazine.

There is a Chicago Tribune article from 1967 that states “The Boogaloo came from Florida. It first started in New York’s Puerto Rican districts. It came from Harlem, from Rush Street from Chicago’s south side, from Philadelphia… No one can agree on where or how it happened, but no one really cares. It’s here now!”.

Lots of other references to it on billboard charts in the ’60’s, but not many published mentions of it before the ’60’s. No references to it before it was popular and nobody cared where it came from. It is usually referred to as having a Latin flavor, it also appears alongside African American references. The Library of Congress was of no help to me in my search.  I had no choice, time to Google/Wiki it.

In my Googling a few sites threw out speculations that “Boogaloo” came from “boogie” or “boogie-woogie”.

There is a common thread among a lot of pop culture/ slang terms that their roots are difficult to uncover. Sometimes pop culture terms come about just because they sound cool, or sounded cool at the time, I’m looking at you “boogie-woogie”. Take the modern term “fleek”, are people in 100 years going to try and research it’s origins only to be frustrated by the fact that pop-culture terms don’t always make sense?

I am not sure how much the Latin culture aspect played into it being relatively unknown until suddenly it was popular. Or is it because of the different modes that pop-culture terms traveled around in the ’60’s? Pop culture terms now can travel around the world in 60 seconds. In the ’60’s the fastest way for pop-culture to spread was TV or radio. It would take awhile for a popular craze in New York to make it’s to Chicago. If a new popular form of dance was invented tomorrow it would be tweeted about on Twitter, a How-to  video would be posted on Youtube, viral videos of people doing it would be on Vine, SnapChat and Facebook and people on the street would get selfies with the creator to put on Instagram, all within a few days.

I wonder how much I miss out on popular culture because I am not Latino or African American? How much goes over my head because I don’t understand the culture? Would I understand more about the Boogaloo if I were Hispanic? Would it’s lack of an origin story make more sense?