Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Technology Development and Changes in Human Life

One of the discussions Dr. Gilbert brought up in class today was interesting. When talking about searching for audio files on google, he mentioned that there is a search opiton for sound files in search engines in China; while western search engine like google doesn't have one although we do have the opiton for an image search.

His argument was that one possible reason is because, for western people,  visual information is more important than what we hear. As I myself being Japanese, there were some points in my life when I noticed this difference. The differnce is obvios, for example, in notation system. Japanese do have classical music as we do in western music, but most of them are handed down from exparts to the students orally. We do have a 'kind of ' music sheets, but the information we can visually get from the sheet of music is not sufficient to reproduce the music unlike the notation system of western classical music.

This is partly because of the delay in installing the printing system but I have a feeling there's something more to do with our culture or personality. Even today, I feel more musicologists in Japan are interested in social background of music, composers, and so on, rather than analyzing the music and describing the analysis logically on papaer. In Europe, Musicology, or a analysis of music as one kind of study has just as long history as western classical music do: while in Japan,  musicology is as new as western music introduced in modern period.

Another interesting point Dr. Gilbert brought out was that as the technology develops, people are returning to a balance between visual and oural (or audio) information. Looking at the new PCs and mobile phones coming out, I've been thinking 'Are we returning to do things with fingers?' In the process of human development, we came to use tools to write, grab and touch things. And then, it seems to me, like ten years ago , that we are going to do things witout touching things directly, using buttons and remote controllers. However, many devices are now coming out with touc panels.... Well, what the technology development does to human culture is so interesting, I think...

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