This week we had to watch a documentary on Napster. Back in the 90’s Napster was notorious for everyone that had a computer basically getting their music for free. It started with a hacker getting access to a whole bunch of files or something like that and then you can share the files with all your friends so that you could get access to whatever songs you wanted. So obviously the Music industry took a severe hit and crashed immensely.
This documentary is all about how this revolutionized the way we use computers and the way we look at the internet, like this was a very big deal back then.I think this was the dawn of like technology and how we think about it and what we can do with it. This had to be one of the things to start the trend of oh what if we did this with the computer or, maybe we can have all of this open at once on my computer or something like that.
I really enjoyed the documentary and I really liked hearing the story of the co founders of Napster and their story too.How the one really struggled at home and didn’t have a real stable family and he had to go to foster homes a few times. Its very heart warming to see people that don’t have a lot, to face that adversity and get through it and still make one of th best discoveries ever as far as technology goes today. When they met they were both like hey your exactly how I pictured you to be and that was just funny to me.The founders of Napster were some of the smartest and most bright minded individuals back then for the discovery. To look at how far we’ve come now looking at this from way back then is just absolutely incredible and scary to me in a way. Like one hundred years from now technology is going to look completely different from now and I do think that’s cool and all but its just scary to me to keep progressing like this but I also love it.
I really connected with one of the co founders (Shawns) story. He faced a lot of adversity throughout his life, but then he found sports. It said in the documentary how much sports and music helped him disconnect from all of the stuff happening at home and he just was happy. And Im the same way. I went through stuff as a kid and football saved me in a way to just focus on it and embrace the love for the game instead of focusing on the bad stuff.
Looking back on all of this Im really thankful that I live in this generation with the technology being decent and not having to struggle too much to download a file. Its the little things that the technology of today brings us that im thankful for and its only going to get better from here.
Check out this article about the debate this past Thursday
SOCIAL MEDIA & SOCIETY 