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Our ad is a parody of a tourism ad for historic sites in Virginia. It’s placed somewhere around the 1930s-1940s (after the sites I mentioned would’ve opened) and the main thing about this ad that is supposed to place it in time (outside of the things I mentioned being open) is the racism and Virginia-centrism. I proclaim George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to be the greatest presidents, and that Virginia was the birthplace of the U.S. Both of these are parodying the idea that some Virginians had (and still have) that Virginia is the United States in some meaningful way. And then of course I say stuff like Robert E. Lee being an infallible general, war of Northern aggression, Battle of Fredericksburg being a victory for Virginia which comes down to the prevalent Lose Cause mythology. We even bring up the romance of the old south, basically fully embracing Gone With The Wind type stuff. Also we thought it would be funny to frame the ad with a set-up for fundamental rights being disrupted only for them to be revealed as aliens after the racist ad plays (also as an homage to War of the Worlds broadcast). So this is kind of an amalgamation of a bunch of stuff not really directly related to a specific ad, but the time in which an ad like this would’ve taken place, and we had a lot of fun with it, as you can probably tell.

Bibliography:

Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. “About Mount Vernon.” Accessed February 26, 2025. https://www.mountvernon.org/about.

Virginia Historical Society. “Monticello.” Accessed February 26, 2025. https://virginiahistory.org/research/collections/garden-club-virginia-historic-restorations-project/plantations/monticello#:~:text=After%20Jefferson’s%20death%20and%20the,save%20this%20historic%20American%20treasure.

Virginia Historical Society. “Stratford Hall.” Accessed February 26, 2025. https://virginiahistory.org/research/collections/garden-club-virginia-historic-restorations-project/plantations/stratford-hall.

Overall I think this was a really fun and interesting first project to do in this class. I found it really interesting to see how everyone interpreted the assignment differently and we all did pretty different things. It really made me question what associations I had with products even with language removed (identifying Old Spice comes to mind). I thought it was fun to see how easily we understood most ads, even when they weren’t as obvious and it made me reflect on how ingrained ads are in my human experience. I would say that I would change a couple things if we were to do it again. Firstly, no AI image generation, I can’t draw at all and I still had fun actually making my ads, and this really takes away a key aspect of the assignment which is making the darn things yourself. Secondly, I would remove the guessing correctly aspect as part of the grade because frankly some of them were too obvious (looking at you Minecraft and Coke Zero) and I think that issue could be solved if people worried less about getting people to guess it right. For my ads, I did a simple Rubiks Cube one that was not really inspired by anything, and a New Coke ad that I tried to recreate from one of the contemporary ones. Those are posted below as well as a citation for the article I took the New Coke ad from.

“New Coke pops… 34 years later,” AdAge, effective May 25, 2019, https://adage.com/article/classic-ad-review/new-coke-pops-34-years-later/2174086.

Going into this class I was unsure what it would be like, and had some anxieties about how I would fare in my first 400 level class. On top of the new level of rigor, professor McClurken made it clear that the syllabus would be crafted by the students, and that would be something new for sure. A few weeks in, although mostly brainstorming the syllabus, I feel like I’ve gotten the sense that this will be a super fun semester. Obviously the assignments we’ve come up with will be interesting, but also the topics that we’ve narrowed it down to. The level of rigor hasn’t shown itself yet, although that is soon to come, but when it hits I think I’ll have gotten over my anxieties that I had coming into this semester.

Last semester for Virginia Issues & Controversies with Professor Moon, our final project had to incorporate a “digital tool,” and I made a timeline. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jKM1fX9Cu5_wqodZZOHfeIcdduJEq0l1yPAyDO3rXFs/edit?usp=sharing

Downey breaks down the information age into discussions of the technologies of communication and how they evolved and replaced each other over time. He identifies four major periods of communication technology, and discusses social, cultural, political, and economic factors that influence the evolution throughout these periods. Downey also describes historical actors working towards certain goals in these periods. Starting with print communication and ending with computers, Downey paints a picture that contrasts the pushed perspective that new technology trumps old technology. He makes a more nuanced argument that new technology pushes for older forms to adapt to new roles/audiences.

Of the five introductions we were tasked with reading, the ones that I landed on were The Cybernetics Moment by Ronald Kline, The Information by James Gleick, and Media Technology and Society by Brian Winston. Kline’s introduction provided context for the rise of the term cybernetics in the wake of the information age. For Kline, the information age describes a recent phenomenon that people proclaim we are living in with its roots in cybernetics and so-called “electronic brains.” I think that Kline’s thoughts about the origin of the term information age and the history of the discipline are interesting, but his definition of the information age as it being a second half of the 20th century and onwards period doesn’t resonate with me as much. Gleick’s understanding of the information age comes with a more historical and scientific perspective. He reasons that the invention of the bit as a measurement of information allows for a greater understanding of information as mathematical. Gleick claims that, “for the purposes of science, information had to mean something special.” (Gleick, pg. 7)  I think that studying this moment of quantifying information and how that has influenced our modern understanding could be an interesting topic to explore this semester. Winston takes a more critical and philosophical approach to the information age, analyzing semantics and how our understanding of these technological advancements are impacted by the words we use to describe them. Winston uses many models to try and demonstrate his argument about how words/concepts interact with one another, but I didn’t much care for his premise, especially when compared to Kline and Gleick. Reading through all of these gave me a potential idea for class this semester, where one class we try and crowdsource definitions to terms (similar to what we did on the first day of class) with debates about semantics and what meanings we give to words. Something like that where groups have to debate each other about interpretive definitions might be an interesting way to think about different perspectives on whatever we would be talking about. 

My name is Ewan and I am a sophomore History major here at UMW. What interests me about the History of the Information Age is the evolution of information spread/impact, especially with the context of the modern day. I have never known a time without all of humanities collective knowledge in my pocket and never had to wait more than a few hours to hear about major events, even if they are across the world. I like wondering about how we got to this point as a society, and what have we lost/what has changed to achieve this age of instant information. Seeing how the phenomenon of information developed over time will be a throughline I’m excited to explore. As far as one past assignment I liked, the 2021 iteration of this class did an imaginary propaganda campaign for a fictitious leader utilizing three distinct modalities of information. I think that it is very clever and sounded very fun to do, but also demonstrated that era of information really well. One piece of advise I’ll take from the 2014 class is that I’ll do the readings to participate in the discussions so that it is less awkward. Especially in a class as small as ours, any awkward silence could be devastating, so I’m gonna try and stay on top of the readings to avoid that outcome. Thanks for reading my first blog post, there will be many more to come!