Recently we were assigned the task of using the internet to research a song. The song is one that we heard in class and were not given any other information about. Having deduced the songs name, “Computer Love”, from hearing it and reading the syllabus, I sat down at the computer and started where all of my online research usually begins, www.google.com. Like most search engines, Google is really helpful for leading one in the right direction through a multitude of relevant hyperlinks. After I typed “computer love song” into the search box and hit the search button, many links showing sites that had useful information appeared. From the links that popped up I could tell right away that the song was by a band named Zapp & Roger. To find out if this was the song we heard in class I needed to research further. While the internet may be a very useful tool, you can not always believe everything it offers. It is usually best to do additional research to confirm that what you are reading is true.
Recently I have discovered that You Tube is a useful site for tasks other than watching pointless videos of people performing senseless acts. It is also good for viewing music videos, particularly old ones that are hard to come across on television. Once at www.youtube.com , I typed the name the name of the song in the search box and hit search. A new page popped up with a bunch of links to videos of various versions of the song. Remembering the band name Zapp & Roger from my previous Google search, I clicked on the link to a music video by them, called “Computer Love”. When the web page came up, the song started to play and the video screen displayed a picture of what appeared to be the album cover. While the song was called “Computer Love”, it was not the one we heard in class. This was a more funky Seventies style electronica version of the song, which I assumed to be the original song, since computers were a newer technology during that decade. Intrigued and wanting to find out more, I went back to the You Tube search engine and found another version of the song, a remix by a band called Kraftwerk. Clicking on this I listened to a different version of the song, much more like the one we heard in class. This seemed to be a faster-paced techno version of the song. While I’m not certain they are the same song, it is very close to the version that we listened to in class.
To get additional details of these songs I needed to go to a more informative website. For this I choose to go to www.wikipedia.org, a site that I believe to be one of the more useful resources on the Internet. In the Wikipedia search box I typed in “computer love” and three different results came up. It appears that this particular song has been preformed by three different bands, of which Wikipedia knows. Both bands that were mentioned before, Zapp & Roger and Kraftwerk, have articles for their version of the song here, as well as a band name that I have not seen before, Eruption. Since the article about the Zapp & Roger version appears first, I clicked on that link and proceeded to read about it. It turned out that this version was released in 1985 on the album The
When I went back to the Wikipedia links, I discovered that there is no article for the version of the song by Eruption, just a link to the article about the band. All that left me with was the link to the version of the song by Kraftwerk. To find out more about this version I went back to the previous page and clicked on the link to the article. Once there, I found that I was wrong in my earlier assumption that Zapp & Roger were the first ones to create a song by this name. Kraftwerk’s version was released first, in 1981 on the album Computer World. The article also gives details about the song, such as where else it has been used and that the song is about finding love through a computer. I found this description to be very relevant because it explained why the song has significance in our Computers and Culture class. The song is about a person who finds love through a computer, and this was back before Windows, or any other operating system for that matter, even existed. Before computers had even become a mainstream part of culture, this song was evidence of the impact that computers already had, and even served as a premonition of how they would further influence society. Keep in mind that Kraftwerk is a German band and that this song reflects the impact of computers on European culture, not just American culture. This songs meaning even holds true today, almost thirty years after the song was written. Millions of people turn to the computer as a method to find love with sites such as www.eharmony.com. While internet research is not new to me, I have never documented my methods while searching for information. I found this exercise to be an interesting one and a good of example of yet another way computers have influenced our everyday life.
Posts
All I had to do was find a suitable topic that I wanted to write about and then I could get back to blogging AND be inspired by a wealth of material that directly pertained to my passion.
ReplyDeletevumoo