So I downloaded Google Earth and decided to use the map of Paris. I was going to use my hometown, Jupiter Florida, but realized that the maps in Paris would be more detailed to overlay. The who process turned out to be not as bad as I thought and the final product turned out to be not to bad. It was interesting to see how similar the two maps actually are. And the way they fit was very simple.

There is not doubt that slavery had made a huge impact in the way our society it built today. And there is no doubt that slavery was one of the major driving forces in the cause of the civil war. However, what many don’t necessarily realize and what historians are discovering is that slavery set much more of a precedence in the United States than we think. When reading “The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities” by William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers, it was interesting looking at the whole situation of slavery from a historian point of view.

First, although slavery is an archaic and barbaric concept, its origins dates back to times when life was at its most archaic and barbaric, since the beginning of time. Slavery was thriving during the time of the Egyptians and the Roman Empire up until it was most prominent in the United States in the Southern states. However, as life became more modern and less dependent on people rather than machines and rights and validity of the human existence became more sacred for all humans; the need and moral standing for slavery started to stir in people’s minds. Slavery has set the foundation for many historical cities and landmarks to be made today. With that said, this article states that slavery did more in the Southern States than just help provide a fluid economy. Slavery created a cultural precedence and a social standing for the South.

In addition, there was this constant struggle between slavery and the institutions of modernity, which was what the Northern States were trying to accomplish. However, while the Southern states were reaching towards that, it became clear that Slavery was holding them back. This article focuses a great deal on the concept of Modernity, which can be best described by Robin Blackburn as:

the growth of instrumental rationality, the rise of national sentiment and the nation-state, racialized perceptions of identity, the spread of market relations and wage labour, the development of administrative bureaucracies and modern tax systems, the growing sophistication of commerce and communication, the birth of consumer societies, the publication of newspapers and the beginnings of press advertising, ‘action at a distance’ and an individualist sensibility.”

Some claim that this is the major factor for the start of the Civil War, however some would argue that the cultural tensions between the north and the south were beginning to rise swiftly and this was just the major factor that they needed. Despite the clear cultural and fundamental differences, Thomas and Ayers would argue that on many different levels the two states were more similar than we realized. While the concept of modernization has a clear definition, the extent of it’s meaning can lead to different interpretations depending on what your goal is. Which caused a lot of conflict for the North and the South. For example, the North embodied the characteristics of modern society-democracy, economic innovation, and social mobility where the South, still claiming their modernization, very much were against those characteristics. This also leads to the constant debate about slavery and contract labor in detail and in relationship to one another. In order to analyze the two in relation to the North and South conflicts, Thomas and Ayers turned to the Geographic Information Systems or the GIS. This helps in understanding the social structures and how they were arranged by developing certain bits of information. By developing all of the information they need the GIS allows them to understand how the social standing happened with the development of Slavery in the United States, as mentioned previously, during the rise up to the Civil War.

So I attempted to make a chart of how a normal week in my life looks and this was what I came up with. Overall, it was relatively simple to enter the information and have the computer do all the configurations. At first it was difficult and I didn’t know what chart to pick, but eventually I got it and I chose the pie chart because for what I was doing, it seemed like the most compatible chart.

So after reading the post, “How I got my digital life back” by, Matt Honan, it made me very nervous about the security of my computer. It is so easy for any hacker to literally just tap into my computer and literally do anything to it. What struck me the most about this article was the lack of security that we truly possess and how much it can disrupt your life. When this hacker decided that this person for whatever reason was the one to hack it happened so swiftly and with ease. What was really scary was he could take on his identity do whatever and have others think it is the original person. Like saying profane things on his twitter and there is nothing you can do about it. When I had a myspace in middle school I found out that I was “sending” strange videos to my friends when I really wasn’t and that idea and lack of security freaked me out so much that I immediately deleted my myspace account.

When the hacker was able to infiltrate his computer system It completely caused his digital life to go into shock. He literally had to go from the ground up and start fresh after being forced to completely shut down his system. However, when he shut them out, he ultimately shut himself out too.

When hackers broke into my iCloud account and wiped my devices, my first assumption was that someone had broken into my local network. So the first thing I did was shut down the internet and turn off all of my other machines. I wanted those assholes out of my house. But that also meant I had no way to send or receive data.

 

Luckily though, he had the 1password program (which I didn’t know existed until this blog or this class). It allows you to store all of your passwords into one system and to access it all you have to do is to just log in with one password. Luckily Honan was able to retrieve his passwords since they weren’t technically on his computer, but on his 1password program roaming the internet. What was an advantage though that did help him exponentially was that his job is a technology journalist. Which therefore gave him that extra edge in knowing what to do and how to retrieve everything properly. I feel like if this happened to me, I would not know what to do at all. I would just panic and hope that I saved everything on my external hard drive previously. God! And the fact that the hacker even bragged about hacking on Honan’s twitter is just too much. I wouldn’t even be able to truly understand how far they have actually wrecked my computer without talking to an expert first. Luckily, the people at apple were super supportive and helpful (which is refreshing). Another thing that I didn’t know was that it is important to accept microsoft updates when they are provided because it is harder to warn off hackers when the system is up to date and accounted for as well.

Luckily though, all in all Honan was able to regain his digital life, which I realize now is actually more vital to function than I realized. Let’s just hope that some random hacker won’t tap into my system the way Phobia did for him. Luckily though I don’t exactly have anything on my computer that is so important that it needs to be hacked, but who knows.