Journal Entries

This is not the first time that I have been assigned this reading, but to be totally honest- I struggled a bit with this reading both times it was assigned to me. My brain is extremely literal and can have a tough time with abstract metaphors.

Laurel mentioned that her students asked her how to “actually make a website” at the end of her class that she teaches. To be honest, I can understand where her students were coming from. As students, we want to feel prepared for the expectations that will likely be thrown our way when we apply for jobs/try to find work. And I think being familiar with/knowing how to emulate current trends is a pretty common expectation. I appreciate Laurel taking a step back to really analyze this question instead of being dismissive to a question that, clearly, many people have.

And I do understand where she’s coming from when she mentions that when we think of a website, many of us tend to think of what websites look like at this very moment in time, and that this could be considered somewhat of a narrow-minded approach. I do think that, as designers, our work will certainly be more interesting and powerful if we can remain open-minded and commit to broadening our thinking patterns and approaches. And I think Laurel is trying to facilitate this in this essay.

While I had trouble wrapping my brain around everything that Laurel said in this essay, I think I get the general gist of what she’s saying. I can also appreciate the fact that Laurel is encouraging individuals to take up space on the web as an act of rebellion against the mass commercialization of the internet. She's right in that there are a lot of forces in play that don't prioritize or even care about their users' best interests/needs and I appreciate her call to action for individuals and artists to put forth an effort to guide the web in a healthier direction.

I was assigned this reading in another class and I remember that, back then, it did challenge my perspective on the idea of what technology is, something I hadn’t thought too much about before. After reading it then, I came to the conclusion that technology is really any man-made tool that we use to make life easier in some way, shape, or form.

After reading this a second time, I found myself thinking about the knee-jerk associations we have with words. Ursula talks about the associations we have when it comes to the terms “high-tech” vs. “low-tech”, and how we can often think of low-tech items as less impressive than high-tech items, such as a computer. But I agree with her in that low-tech items are not necessarily “simple”, even if they appear to be.

I am particularly interested in accessibility (both in a digital context as well as in "real-life"/in-person scenarios) and one thing that I've been learning about lately is assistive technology. If you look into different examples of assistive technology, you see all sorts of different devices- both "high-tech" and "low-tech".

A screen reader or a speech-generating device are examples of assistive technology, but you could also consider noise-reducing/noise-canceling earplugs to be assistive technology. I use those myself, actually, and they are just little objects made of either plastic or silicone, etc. and all I have to do is put them in my ears. No buttons or wires or electricity- just 2 little pieces of plastic/silicone. Some examples of assistive technology are pretty high-tech but others aren't, and I think this is not irrelevant to the theme of this essay.

One line that stood out to me was “As if linen were the same thing as flax”. This made me think about the process of the development of technology and the human’s role within that. In that paragraph, she talks about tools such as paper or wheels, which have been around for a very long time but even when you think about modern-day technology, humans are still pretty necessary parts of the development of technology (I don’t know how AI will evolve in the future and if, at any point, this will not always be true but that’s a can of worms that I’m not going to open right now).

I will say (even though I just said I wasn’t going to talk about AI), I recently watched a video where someone was talking about AI in the context of how it can help disabled folks and she kept bringing up the fact that humans are tool-using creatures. Ultimately, technology is a tool and since humans have the ability to think critically, we can think about the tools we use and the impact those tools may have (whether that impact is cultural/societal, environmental, psychological, etc.).

I preferred this reading over the essay by Laurel Schwulst. It was easier for my brain to understandand and I like how the author's tone is poetic, at times, but still straight-forward. I just generally have a preference for plain language.

I made a comment in one of my previous journal entries that I have a preference for plain language. To be completely honest with you, when I started this reading assignment, I thought to myself “Oh, I should have saved that comment for this reading” lol. My vocabulary is not the greatest of all time and the amount of words I had to look up in this essay was not insignificant (VCU seems to like stuff like this, though). *I say these things lightheartedly- no hate to the person who chose this essay as part of the curriculum!

I do like the line “In the morning her arms were sore, like she had been trying to fly” and I like the illustrations, as well.

The design of the page that the essay is on feels reminiscent of what I picture when I think of older web design, which I think is appropriate given the content of the essay. I am 33, so I was around in the 90s but I was still pretty young, so I wasn’t on the internet too much in its early days (my first memories of being online involve me being on AOL Instant Messenger- or “AIM”). But I think even if you weren’t around in the 90s, you can still recognize design elements that feel reminiscent of that time.

I can see the association between J.R.'s project “Fishes & Flying Things” and a zine. I actually really enjoyed that website- I appreciate its simplicity and I enjoyed her writing on this page- there were some really lovely lines.

I just think there was a decent amount of “artspeak” (or IAE/International Art English) in the “Handmade Web” essay, which can sometimes act as a barrier towards certain people understanding the information that you’re trying to share. I’m sure the author wasn’t consciously thinking about the concept of artspeak (I don’t know if that was even a topic of conversation when she wrote this) and possibly being   exclusionary   towards some people.

I think the problem is that some people just get used to speaking a certain way and don’t think about the fact that some people may have a hard time understanding them (for a number of reasons, such as English not being their first language or not having that great of a vocabulary, like me). These are just some of my thoughts that came up as a response to this essay when it comes to artspeak.

Lastly, I will say that I can appreciate the line where the author says “I evoke the term 'handmade web' to suggest slowness and smallness as forms of resistance.” I do think this is a lovely sentiment that is really relevant to the web as we know it now and it will likely become more and more relevant. Because of the culture that late-stage capitalism cultivates, we’re so competitive and there’s always a sense of urgency and I think all of us have been socialized with the idea that expansion = success.

Overall, the author’s style of writing was not my cup of tea, at times, but I can appreciate what I believe the author was trying to say.

I ended up reading the PDF version of this essay since the internet link seems to be broken, and I really enjoyed the design of this essay. I find it so much easier to comprehend what I’m reading when things are visually “bite-sized” and there’s minimal competing visual information. So I really appreciated all of the breathing room between paragraphs (and I even noticed that the author used a bit more line spacing than some people tend to use, which was appreciated, as well!).

I think the world of computer science can be pretty intimidating for most people (myself included) so I think the way the author approached the design of this essay (I’m assuming the author designed this themselves) was really considerate and thoughtful. The truth of the matter is that this stuff is dense but I just thought that the author’s approach to presenting this information was really nice- making things bite-sized and even the use of the watercolor handwriting and illustrations -- I feel like that introduced a more personal (and maybe even informal?) tone, which has the potential to make things feel a little less intimidating. It was much appreciated on my end.

I will admit that some parts of this reading went over my head a little (it might make more sense if I had a better understanding of the history of Silicon Valley and computer science in general) but I am curious to learn more about the development of the computer in relation to an "idealized California subculture". It also makes total sense that the history of the computer would be tied to the military and the notion of mass production.

Here are some bits that I enjoyed from this reading:

I ended up looking at this website twice and both times I found the design to be anxiety-inducing and pretty unbearably distracting. The first time I visited, I somehow managed to get all of the pop-ups and notifications to go away and I actually found the design to be kind of nice/lovely once all of the movement stopped (I like the colors and the hanging glow of the top bar- the text is also on the bigger side, which I always appreciate because I find it easier to read big text with ample line spacing).

The second time I visited the website, it was almost like I was playing whack-a-mole because I kept clicking all of the notifications, thinking that they would go away once I clicked all of them- but I was doing that for what felt like a pretty long time and I started to doubt that they would ever stop appearing so I gave up lol. I found it kind of interesting how different the PDF is from the website, in terms of design. But maybe that’s just because it lacks movement and color. The website was just so loud and the PDF feels pretty “quiet” to me.

I feel like there’s a lot to unpack with this reading, but one thing that struck my interest was the topic of computer mediated communication. This line, in particular, was interesting to me: “Whereas a truly instant messenger would display each and every keystroke in real time, instead we have an exchange that sits halfway between speaking and writing”.

I spend a lot of time thinking about language/different forms of communication and I think it’s fascinating to think about the ways our devices (and even internet culture) shape both the way we communicate as well as the language we use.

Recently, I worked on an ongoing project through my internship where I had to watch video recordings of lectures that were done at a recent conference, and it was my responsibility to listen and correct the YouTube auto-generated captions (which were horribly inaccurate). Through this project, I really started to realize how different written language vs spoken language is. So when you think about this additional form of language that we’ve created, we cherry-pick aspects from both written and spoken language but we even use visual language, as well (with emojis and gifs and memes, etc).

There definitely is a level of anxiety that can come from computer-mediated communication. It’s worse for some people than it is for others, but I see it and I understand it.

I decided to write my journal entry about "House of Dust". When it was mentioned that "House of Dust" was one of the first computer-generated poems (created by Alison Knowles and James Tenney in 1967), this definitely piqued my interest/caught my attention. I ended up spending a good amount of time with the website by Nick Montfort, where he reimplimented this poem. It was fun for me to read which new scenarios popped up, and for me to pick out favorites amongst them all.

There's something about this poem that reminds me of the game "MASH"- which I would play with friends when I was young. MASH stands for "mansion, apartment, shack, house" and in that game, you end up creating fantasy worlds regarding your hypothetical future. There was just something about me sitting and waiting to see which new scenario/poem would pop up- waiting to see if I felt drawn to that specific combination of factors or not, or if it moved me in any way. Here are a few that I liked:

This was an interesting read! I learned a lot from it.

The idea of the "Whole Earth Catalog" is certainly interesting (especially when you think of the historical context that pushed it into creation), but I found myself even more interested in “The One-Straw Revolution”. Maybe it’s partially because I’m at a point in my life where I am interested in native landscaping/gardening but I'm also interested in the idea of working "smarter not harder", conserving energy when possible, and working in harmony with the way things/people naturally operate, as opposed to trying to force something that’s not natural nor sustainable.

Here is one bit from this reading that stood out to me:

"Dreaming utopia is at once hopeful and analytical. Its design critiques the evils of an existing world, while simultaneously providing the blueprint for a new one. …… a utopia cannot be extricated from its dystopian counterpart; it’s always imagined in response to some kind of crisis.”

The idea that utopia is a reaction to crisis is an interesting one to think about. This was another bit that stood out to me:

"Utopia comes from the Greek words meaning no-place. The impossibility of its own existence is built into the very concept. A global society free from problems, in which every desire is met, has proven unrealistic—a failure, even. But the brilliant thing about the web is its ability to host multiple worlds simultaneously."

True utopia may be unattainable, especially since we each have a different idea of what "utopia" entails and we do have to coexist with one another- but it's so true that the web provides a space for multiple worlds that exist right next to one another. This can sometimes pose a problem when people get so immersed in their virtual worlds that they forget (or perhaps never learn) how to engage with people who have different ideals/points of view. Sometimes virtual worlds are best when enjoyed in moderation, but I do love the way the internet opens access to not only community but also to different perspectives, information, imaginations, etc. Not only are you exposed to people who you wouldn't encounter otherwise, but you get to experience people in a different way and I think it can be really cool, honestly.

Also just because utopia is unattainable doesn't mean we can't be inspired by it as a concept or use it as a tool for reflection.

There is more to say about this reading, but the last thing I’ll share here is that I like how Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant handled the naming process of the WELL. When I saw that they abbreviated electronic to ‘lectronic- it made me smile, for some reason. I think I definitely have a soft spot for informality, but I also just thought it was kind of funny thinking about them being like “Well, WEEL is not a good acronym, so let’s just nix that first 'e' on 'electronic'- problem solved”.

When thinking about the idea of a “good room”, the comparison to the New York Public Library to current day Penn Station was a good one. I actually have never been to the New York Public Library but I have been to Penn Station (once around 5:00pm on a weekday which was literal hell) and the author is right in that our surroundings impact our thoughts, our ability to learn and our mental wellbeing.

In the context of digital spaces, the author was right when he said “technology has transformed from a tool that we use to a place where we live”. It’s easy to feel like we have no control over our digital surroundings (and even our physical surroundings, at times), and there is a real/unimagined lack of control to a certain degree but we do have the ability to create boundaries and systems for ourselves that serve our best interests/needs. We also have the ability, as designers, to create our own spaces- just as we want them to be.

It was interesting to read/think about people mindfully creating these boundaries/systems once they had children. I don’t have kids but I could see myself falling into that same scenario. Just like the author laid out his own “system” for himself (“yes to electricity, no to microwaves”, etc.)- I have my own “system” for myself, and while parts of it have involved mindful/conscious decisions, other parts have been less intentional.

It’s easy to be passive and not super mindful about the integration of modern technology into our lives when it comes to yourself but if you have children and you’re in the position of being responsible for the wellbeing and development of another human- it adds perspective. Like the author said, “we also create these sets of rules for ourselves—it’s just that the ones created for our kids are more evident because they are a mindful construction”.

I think the term “mindful construction” is key here. We have the ability to reflect on what a mindful construction of our own “technological set-ups” might look like. But also- as designers, we are out here making things and putting them out into the world. We can also ask ourselves how our work contributes to/impacts the world around us. Does it give or take away? Maybe that’s not always an easy question to answer but it’s worth pondering.