Untitled

I found the reading from the University of Minnesota about accessibility on social media particularly interesting. Having read about web accessibility in this class and in others, there’s a huge focus on making sure professional coders are creating web pages and apps that are accessible. This reading shows the end user how you can make your own social media pages more accessible without having to learn even one line of code. It sheds light on the really easy things we could do as users rather than developers to make sure everyone can enjoy our content. 

I also enjoyed the reading on classroom activities involving social media. Media literacy is incredibly important in an era where we’re deciphering new information constantly. I think these classroom activities can teach kids about media literacy early on as well as encourage them to think critically while using social media. 

If you were a high school teacher, would you use any of these activities in your classroom? If so, which one? 

Are you open to making small changes in the way you post on social media to make your own content more accessible?

After reviewing the UMN article, I have already started making changes to my facebook and twitter posts!

The readings on the social media classroom activities were just as fascinating as they were of importance. I feel like the activities in the “Social Media Classroom Activities” should be implemented in either late middle school to any grade in high school. Students need to be able to analyze rhetorics and in this day and age, what way is easier than using social media to teach a class. Adolescents need to know how social media can affect them in the long run, esp. when searching for a job. Technology is advancing and social media is bringing people even closer as a result. The reading “Accessible Social Media” from the University of Minnesota also enhanced the recurring emphasis on making sites accessible to individuals with disabilities. 

What goes through your mind before you post something on social media? Does anything go through your mind at all? Live by the F.I.S.H. (F*ck It Sh*t Happens)? 

Thoughts on Instagram potentially removing likes? How much do likes and followers mean to you?

I think likes are a cool part of social media. It would be pretty lame if Instagram removed them! A lot of friendships and relationships start from likes!

In our society, the internet is an integral part of our everyday lives. But what we see on the screen is a result of hours of work and hundreds or even thousands of lines of code. It’s important that we don’t take the web for granted, but if you’re putting in hours of your time to create a web page, you want to make sure everyone can access it. A large section of the internet-using population is disable in one way or another, and it is important that we design the web pages to be accessible for those with disabilities as well as the majority. 

I’m currently taking a coding course where we design our own web pages from scratch, and it’s no easy feat. Code itself is incredibly finicky, so it’s a challenge just to get your page functioning. Then you have to make sure your page is intuitive and easy to use as well as attractive, which requires an entirely different skillset. Making your page accessible might feel like one more tedious step, but it’s incredibly important so that you can reach your full audience. 

Have you ever been on a horribly designed website? What made it so bad? Did you ever visit that page again?

Before reviewing the readings, did you ever think about how disabled people use the internet and other modern technology? 

It never really crossed my mind that websites need to be and can be accessible to blind people before I read the texts.

As a journalism major, I’ve had to do my fair share of transcribing. It’s not fun; it takes forever; and in my line of work, you end up not even using half of what you transcribe. Regardless of all of that, I understand the importance of transcriptions. In a digital media setting transcriptions make your content accessible to everyone. There are a number of reasons some of your audience may want/need a transcript when consuming your content, and it’s important to be sensitive to those groups who do need them. 

Audacity is a fantastic tool that I have used in the past. It’s mind blowing that this is a free service, as many paid options are very similar. This means thousands of musicians and podcasters can share their work with the world. I used Audacity for a project in high school. It obviously has a ton of uses, and allows thousands of people to share their creativity.

When you watch TV, are you a subtitles person? Why or why not?

Did you use Audacity to edit your podcast? Was it difficult to learn or generally intuitive? 

I didn’t use audacity to edit my podcast, but the tutorial showed me how generally intuitive it is.

“The Earliest Stop Motions are Weirdly Wonderful,” The History of Stop Motion - In A Nutshell,” Stop Motion: a History and A Process,” and “Evolution of Stop Motion History” dive deep into the history of stop motion filmmaking. Stop-motion has rarely been used in films post 20th century. Stop motion isn’t used today in filmmaking as much as CGI is because it’s more tedious and take more time. Directors such as Wes Anderson and Tim Burton have done an excellent job capturing the beauty and brilliance with films like Isle of Dogs and The Nightmare Before Christmas. 

Have you seen either of Tim Burton’s or Wes Anderson’s stop-motion films? If so, who’s style of filmmaking did you prefer? 

Where else besides movies have you seen the usage of stop-motion?

Stop-motion is used in art exhibits and in flipbooks!

With an extensive amount of time to process, digest and understand bibliocircuitry, the text Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday provides most readers with an immersive experience of reading text and how we perceive information based on its form, eg. whether it be from a graphic, an interactive site or simply a book. Texts, rhetorics and other forms of graphics using bibliocircuitry allow the reader to look at the text easily. The alterity relation in bibliocircuitry lets us “look at” the text rather than “look through.” Sure, that does take away from the imaginative experience that you’d go through when reading just words on a paper, but it’s still unique, impressive and pretty iinnovative. 

How long did it take you guys to understand Bibliocircuitry?

Do you prefer “looking at” an object/text or “looking through” it?

I like looking at an object of interest and taking my time. I use bottom-up processing and try and use clues from various characteristics of the object to infer something deeper about it.

It’s obvious from the assigned readings that Internet memes, gifs and other graphics have become essential to our current internet culture, but are largely skipped over when studying different forms of communication. We communicate differently online than we do in person and these memes and gifs have contributed to if not created the separation in these two forms of communication. Gifs and internet memes allow the user to say something more and create more meaning than we ever could with just text. As internet users we create layers of meaning for each individual piece of content. This forms a few different groups of people: the intended audience or the audience that’s sure to comprehend all the layers of meaning portrayed by the original author, an audience that understand some of the content’s layers, but not at their full capacity, and an audience that can’t comprehend the underlying layers and views that piece of content at face value. This can create separation in the internet community.

Have you ever sought out the origin of a gif or meme? What did you find?

In what context are you most likely to use a gif or meme to communicate? 

I usually use gifs when texting my friends. I send instagram memes to one of my friends who enjoys them and he usually sends a different one back. Both are good ways to have a quick laugh during the hustle and bustle of a busy day!

The article “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Towards Rhetorical Analysis” provides relatable information on how we use rhetorical analysis in our everyday life. It gives the reader the context of a rhetoric situation, how to identify it and finishes with either the rejection or acceptance of the rhetoric. The question I will be asking my peers is “when was the last time you came across a rhetoric and how did you go about analyzing it?”

Implied authors can be seen on advertisement websites. The implied author would be the company writing the advertisement.