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Thinking about the apps I use daily, I realize how much they rely on amazing designs to encourage people to continue using the technology. Reading Sara Wachter-Boettcher's "Tracked, Tagged, and Targeted" chapter in Technically Wrong made me question the real intention behind all of these "cute" aspects of technology that content strategists create.

Wachter-Boettcher points out in this chapter that "cuteness becomes another cloak for tech companies: a shiny object that deflects criticism." I took this to mean that everything they create is a distraction to keep users engaged. So, while I'm busy scrolling through classic rock music edits on Instagram, companies gather data about me without me even realizing it.

This is a huge ethical concern for content creators to consider because it would make me question their intentions. In this sense, I would think companies care more about keeping us distracted and stealing our data than about actually creating content they think we'll enjoy.

In today's world, I feel like people want to find information quickly and easily. Everyone has questions, important assignments to complete, and information they need to know. However, it can be tough to find accessible, effective information if the content is filled with sentences that are hard to understand or phrases that aren't easily recognizable. That's where plain language comes in, as I believe it's the most important factor to consider when creating effective web content.

Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery, in A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences, emphasize in Chapter 8: "Plain Language: Creates a Conversation," plain language is about making sure people can find, understand, and use information effectively. They define it as a behavioral measure, asking: "Can the people who are the audience for the material quickly and easily find what they need? Understand what they find? Act appropriately on that understanding?"

For digital writers and designers, I feel like their jobs are about ensuring everyone can access and use the content they create. While they want the content to sound good and engage people, none of that matters if everyone can't access it. According to Horton and Quesenbery in A Web for Everyone, "When websites and applications are badly designed, they create barriers that exclude people from using the web as it was intended." They explain that accessibility is about designing in a way that gets rid of barriers for everyone else. They also make the argument that "disability is a conflict between someone's functional capability and the world we have constructed." In my opinion, this means that poor designs are usually what makes content inaccessible, so it's not always the designer's fault.

I understand intertextuality to be all about how texts connect to and influence each other. It’s when a piece of media, such as a book, movie, or song, builds on another piece of media in order to create new meaning. I feel this idea can take on a whole new level in digital spaces. According to Douglas Eyman in Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice, digital intertextuality makes it so we can have even greater connections because “contemporary users of Web-based discourse have at their fingertips resources that enable them to seek out information in the moment in order to more fully understand and appreciate an intertextual reference” (Eyman, 34).