Week 1 Blog Post: Choosing What Wolf to Feed

Week 1: Choosing What Wolf to Feed

In the video that we watched, The Data Explosion | The History of the Internet, Part 3 from the channel SciShow, the man leading the discussion said that “The citizens of the internet get to decide what our priorities are, and we get to choose what kind of internet we want to be a part of – now and in the future.”

We talked in class about the history of the internet and had a really great discussion on who truly has the ability to censor people who are using their platforms for some negative things, and I love that we talked about this same point as a class. Though there is a lot of garbage, negativity, and just plain stupid things to be found, we are the masters of our own devices and can choose what we do with the internet. We may not be able to censor those around us, but we can pick for ourselves what we consume and change our personal algorithms. It reminds me of the analogy that I’ve heard multiple times on the wolves, and the loudest one is the one we feed. By looking for ways to positively promote specific messages and ideas, we have the power to become a creator of calm instead of a creator of chaos. Did that sound too inspirational?? ðŸ˜Š




Comments

  1. Cora WilliamsonAugust 27, 2022 at 7:19 PM

    Hi Sydney! That is such a good analogy, and I love how you turned it into something positive and uplifting like that. Personally that wasn't how I would have interpreted the analogy, so it was nice to hear your thoughts on it. I specifically liked that phrase you used, "creator of calm." It really puts me in mind of the idea that people are more than their emotional responses to things, so even if there is a lot of terrible things on the internet we can navigate it such that when we do come across such things we can handle it in a calm manner. Great blog post!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 15: Ethics of Online Writing

Image
This week we talked about ethical considerations for writing online by reading through Update Culture and having that fun discussion of ethical “commandments” in class. It was really interesting to reflect on the class as a whole to see what each of us would personally deem as important rules to follow when writing online. The five commandments that my group and I came up with were:  1. Thou shalt cite your sources 2. Thou shalt write for the platform 3. Thou shalt know your audience 4. Thou shalt use images in a smart way and  5. Thou shalt follow the rules and guidelines of the platform you’re writing on.  I felt that each of these rules was important to include because a lot of online platforms have their own unspoken rules to follow like following the rules of the platform and writing in a way that applies to the platform. Writing a social media post will look very different from writing for the online version of  The NY Times.  I also think it’s important t...
Read more

Week 7: We Can Fix It!

Image
This week, we talked a little more about how SEO terminology will be fitting into professional settings as we start to get to work on our iFixIt projects. Specifically, when we’re designing pages for a certain product, User Experience will be really important. We’ll want to make sure that each page is loaded up with helpful information, images, and step-by-step instructions so that users can easily navigate the fixes and the page itself. From the User Context Signals & Search Engine Rankings reading that we had this week, Nguyen said, “Visitors should be able to quickly discern whether you’re offering what they’re looking for. Since audiences’ expectations vary greatly, so too will UX from site to site. Hone in on your audience’s preferences and tail your pages to meet their needs.” We can do that by applying the specific glossary that iFixIt provided on their website, such as using natural language, packing the page with content, using headings, and using keywords. In class, we ...
Read more

Week 2 Blog Post: Marketable Chunks

Image
In the "When Writing Becomes Content" article, we read about how writing and content can be used in tandem but do have a difference in format. Dush also mentions the importance of how professionals who are in the world of English take care to not fall behind on the importance of content as the rhetoric of the world seems to be changing. In "Writing as extended mind: Recentering cognition, rethinking tool use" we read about how writing and technology can have an equal impact on one another. Overstreet also discusses that we, as digesters of anything written need to include our extended minds. Meaning that we not only use our brain but that our internal processes and experiences can help challenge our current understanding to make way for new beliefs.  The question that Lexi raised today in class of the problems that could arise from putting a paywall behind free information was really interesting, but I also really understood Adam's point of how that censorship w...
Read more