Connection 1: Angela Jarvis – Golden Record Curation
I connected with Angela’s Golden Record curation immediately because we approached the same task with a similar intention: choosing music that represents emotion, culture, and the human story. But even though we both focused on universality and feeling, our selections and writing styles highlight different interpretations of what “humanity” sounds like.
I emphasized global rhythms, cultural identity, and the emotional power of sound across different eras, Angela concentrated more on the expressive qualities of each piece and how they reflect the human condition. Her reflections are more literary and philosophical, while mine lean into cultural diversity, emotional texture, and musical evolution; especially how sound travels across time, technology, and geography.
This link stood out because it highlighted how two people can respond to the same prompt through completely different musical pathways and yet still capture the heart of the assignment. Her curation helped me reflect on my own choices and the way I used culture, rhythm, and emotion as the backbone of my selections.
Connection 2: Tarana – Attention Economy Reflection
I chose this link because Tarana’s ideas about the attention economy connect directly to my own experience analyzing dark patterns. While her piece focuses more broadly on how platforms compete for attention, my reflection zoomed into how specific interface tricks can manipulate decision-making. We’re tackling two sides of the same problem: Tarana looks at the systemic forces behind distraction, and I look at the micro-level tactics that shape user choices.
What struck me was how her emotional response” feeling overwhelmed, fragmented, and pulled in multiple directions” mirrors how I felt navigating the dark-pattern game. We both reflected on how design can disrupt agency instead of supporting it. Our different examples end up reinforcing the same message: digital environments are not neutral, and interface choices carry values and consequences.
Her reflection challenges me to think beyond the manipulative choices I noticed in the game and consider the larger system that encourages design to chase engagement at all costs. It raises the question: how do we teach young designers, like my Grade 8s, that ethics and user dignity matter just as much as functionality? Her post reinforces my commitment to guiding students toward transparent, user-centred design practices.
Connection 3: Kelly Brett – Mode Bending
Kelly’s mode-bending task stood out to me because she approached redesign as a process of disruption; taking something familiar and deliberately shifting it into a format that forces new interpretations. Her reflection highlights how meaning transforms when it moves from one mode to another (written – audio), and how the act of redesign exposes what each mode can amplify or limit.
This contrasted with my own experience in an interesting way. She focused on conceptual shifts in meaning, my redesign became a sensory challenge. Trying to translate textures, materials, and the feeling of holding everyday objects into a completely digital collage. Where her post asks, “How does the meaning change when I switch modes?” mine asked, “How can I recreate touch in a medium where touch doesn’t exist?” Her reflection made me think more deeply about how authoring tools shape what kinds of literacies are foregrounded. Her poem to song encouraged her to privilege linguistic and reflective literacies, while my Genially piece pushed me toward spatial, visual, and tactile suggestion. The connection between our two pieces helped me see how redesign is both a technical and theoretical process rooted in the multiliteracies idea that meaning is always being reshaped, remixed, and re-imagined across modes.
Connection 4: Michael Cafuta – Emoji Story
Michael’s emoji story immediately caught my attention because of how differently he approached the challenge of translating narrative into symbols. His version focused on distilling the plot into the essentials; choosing emojis that captured setting, emotion, and key events without overwhelming the reader. What I noticed was how intentionally he pared things down. He leaned into the constraints of the medium, using fewer emojis but choosing them strategically so the “story” still felt coherent.
Seeing his approach made me reflect on my own emoji task in a new way. I realized that while Michael trusted minimalism, I relied heavily on the visual actions and unique symbols from the show I chose; especially because I had to work around the challenge of watching it in a foreign language. His piece made me think about how different our strategies were for communicating meaning with the same basic toolkit. His work echoes Bolter’s idea of remediation in a very streamlined way: the story becomes a kind of visual shorthand that still invites the audience to imagine what happens between each symbol. My own version felt like the opposite challenge! I had to compress a rich visual world into small icons while hoping my peers could fill in the gaps. Putting our two pieces side by side highlights how emojis can be both limiting and expressive, and how much creativity is required to translate a full narrative into such a simplified mode of communication.
Connection 5: Sara Johnston – Manual Script
Sara’s manual script task focuses on the shift in mindset that happens when writing moves away from the keyboard and back onto paper. Her reflection touches on slowness, physical effort, and the small traces that handwriting carries (erasures, uneven lines, personal quirks). What stood out in Sara’s piece for me, was how clearly she articulated the tension between the convenience of digital tools and the grounding feeling of handwriting and it reminded me of how handwriting is a medium that shapes pace, tone, and even the intimacy of the message.
My own experience with the manual script connected to many of Sara’s realizations, but from a slightly different angle. She reflected on the slowness of handwriting, I became very aware of the messiness; the crossed-out words, the lack of a backspace key, the tiny edits squeezed between lines. It made me work differently, less polished and more present, which ties directly to Bolter’s (2000) point about how digital writing remediates print by smoothing over the physical traces of authorship. Typing makes everything crisp, quick, and clean, but handwriting exposes the process. Connecting her reflection with my own made me think about how many literacy practices we take for granted because of speed and convenience. Both of our experiences point back to the same idea: the tools we use don’t just record our thoughts but they fundamentally shape how we think and create.
Connection 6: Jonathon Dueck – Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation Quiz Data
Reading Jonathon’s reflection made me connect it to my own analysis of the Palladio graph. Like Jonathon, I also noticed the clusters and the way our class grouped together based on certain genres, but my focus was more toward the missing layers like what the visualization couldn’t reveal about personal histories, exposure, or individual emotional responses. His interpretation pushed me to consider not just about what Palladio shows, but how the visualization shapes our understanding of each other. It risks compressing rich, subjective musical experiences into neat data points. Connecting my piece with theirs made the limitations of data representation even more visible. The similarities in our observations highlight that while Palladio organizes our choices into clean clusters, it can’t tell the story behind why we gravitated toward particular songs. His reflection strengthened my own belief that data visualizations are helpful starting points, but they never replace the complexity of human experience.