Sydney Brooks ENGL 3360

This week, we learned a little more about how our search results come back to us in a specific way through search engine optimization. From our reading in  Update Culture,  we learned that picking a specific time to write, revise, share, update, and respond will affect if certain content is “on” or going viral. If content creators are aware of this timing; of when their audience will encounter their writing and interact with it, they can prepare fresh content that their audience will engage with. They can be sure to include keywords that their audience might use, continually update their sites with fresh content each week, and include multimodal elements for entertainment. Going over SEO and its basics was actually a refresher for me because in my previous internship working at the Atwood Innovation Plaza, incorporating SEO into my technical writing projects was so important. I would write technical materials for the start-ups there, but occasionally, I would also write...

In our reading of Weapons of Math Destruction, we learned a little more about how advertisers will categorize people based on what they know about them. Some categories include sex and/or gender expression, age, location, education, income, interests and hobbies, and political and religious affiliations. They will try to discover our habits, hopes, fears, desires, relationships, and points of pain so that they can send a message that will trigger us into making a decision, and thus succeed in hauling in another paying customer. They are able to find out all of this information mainly based on what we do online. In our in-class discussion on Monday, I posed the question of what ethics marketing and advertising companies actually follow when creating targeting ads. Reflecting a bit more on that question myself, I found this cool article: https://www.bluelaserdigital.com/ethical-target-advertising/ that talks about the no-nos of target marketing and what audiences they shouldn't be f...

From our reading, we learned a little bit more about how we write not only for our general audience but also for an algorithmic audience. There are certain methods one can use in order to appeal to the algorithmic audience so that the post you’re making is broadcasted to a lot of people. For example, in the video that we watched on TikTok a couple of classes ago of the lady painting the bricks into her pantry, the hashtags that the realtor included in her post were so bizarre. I don’t exactly remember what they were but a lot of them had nothing to do with the content that she was actually posting, however, we found out that the hashtags she included were the trending hashtags at the moment. By including those hashtags, her content was shown to a bigger audience and there was more interaction with what she had posted. Later in class, we talked about how the algorithm audience can filter out what we see on our social media platforms based on who we are. After having watched the TED T...

Something that was brought up in our reading of the Update Culture textbook that I really liked was the quote “print writers deal with editors, and newspapers print letters to the editor. However, social media is different from this response due to the scale of response and real-time responsivity” (Gallagher 4). Our reading for the week and our in-class discussion went over this idea a little bit more in-depth when we talked about how creators and users really can interact and have an influence over the kind of content that is created and the changes that it may undergo. I’ve seen this personally take place within writing forums, like the writing site Wattpad . On this popular site, creators and authors will write up their stories and post them a chapter at a time, or how often they wish to update their stories. Within each sentence or grouping of text, readers of the stories have the opportunity to comment and interact with the writing. Some will leave links to gifs, emojis, tag the...