For my final linking assignment I chose to look at Tanya’s post for Task 12. I really like Tanya’s layout on her site. She has chosen to host her blog outside of the WordPress platform and so you find yourself on a Weebly site with a beautiful flow between the posts. The first impression of the site is the spaciousness that the website format offers over the WordPress blog spaces. The simple design change has a huge effect on my experience of Tanya’s blog space. It just feels as if you have space to breathe as opposed to the cramped feeling I experience when I look at WordPress sites. Having chosen to host her blog on a website like Weebly also allows Tanya to take advantage of more fluid integration of media into her posts in a way that again just seems very visually appealing.

Since my own site is hosted on WordPress, I have none of these affordances. However, an element that I missed on Tanya’s site was the comments section so prominently displayed on WordPress blog sites. This might be because websites aren’t designed to incorporate comment sections for every paragraph or topic on display. It would hinder the experience of scrolling through the visually curated information on display. Once displayed, comments are much smaller in contrast to the post or task’s text on the website, another indicator that the website’s design might not place as much emphasis on comments as the blog sites do. I feel as if the WordPress site better facilitates discussion through comments than what would be possible on a website. I also really struggled to find anything that could connect the website to its author. There was a home space with an about section but I couldn’t find Tanya’s name on the site which made the space feel a little impersonal.

Why I wanted to contrast Task 12 specifically in this assignment was because I felt as if Tanya’s stories bore a similar theme to my own. We had told similar tales of a future where technology becomes more integrated in the human body through brain implants albeit we chose different mediums to tell our stories. Tanya had made use of audio to tell her first person story and I had constructed a narrative story using Twine (a text based medium). Both I feel were equally successful in conveying our fears of this kind of future but what I particularly liked about Tanya’s post was her focus on the personal. She told her story from a first person perspective of someone experiencing the implanted technology whereas my story was more removed with one of my characters simply discussing his company that designs similar implants. It was this personal touch that added a different dimension to her story that had me easily connect with it and want to listen on. There just is something very special about oral storytelling that speaks to the human mind and heart. The messages conveyed in her tone and the other sounds included in the audio adds so much more to the story than what would have been conveyed through just what was spoken. She also crafted several themes in her story which adds a level of sophistication to the narrative which I think my own lack somewhat. I had a very straightforward story to tell with one message whereas this one was intricately planned and weaved together.

Jamie has such a unique interface and design on her blog site that one is immediately drawn in to want to start exploring her space. On the site home page, which feels almost futuristic she has utilized a completely different design to any other blog site I have seen in the course. She has made use of visual “cards” to display her individual posts, that give a quick view of the content that the post will contain and is visually inviting to the reader of her site- you get to pick from the onset what post looks like it might be interesting to you. They act almost as little teasers of what’s to come and I love looking at these cards. Most of my peers, including myself, make use of a scrolling main home page.

Once a post has been selected on Jamie’s site, you are taken to that post and all other menus disappear from view. Instead your mode of navigation to other posts becomes the arrows positioned at either end of the post or by clicking on her page name to go back to the main page. Additionally you could also go to the linking assignment from within a post. In that regard, the navigation feels a little more restricted than the open flow of my own blog design that allows movement between categories a little more effortlessly.

For my fifth linking assignment post I chose to compare our submissions for Task 11. I love that Jamie always gives her readers a well-curated experience of the topic at hand each week in her posts. She never has a post without additional resources available to us all to extend the discussion points of the week with Task 11 not being any different. In this task, we both ended up taking on small experiments with predictive text and ended up with very similar conclusions drawn at the end. She made use of WhatsApp and Facebook to test whether the use of these technologies would have influenced the predictive text options given for the same questions where as my own experiment involved changing the language on my phone and testing whether any sensible message could be constructed without me knowing what I was selecting. I think we both were slightly disturbed and upset by the results of our experiments.

Absolutely it was possible to construct some message with these technologies but what they lacked was our own voices in those messages. Taking away our choice had robbed us both of feeling as if there was any realness in the messages created and they could in no way truly represent us. We both clearly share similar concerns for a future in which algorithms such as those used in predictive text software limits our choices and continually prevents us from expressing our individuality. The implications of a world in which humans cannot freely express themselves seems bizarre right now but that might change in the next decade or so (given how fast technology is evolving). I hope that as more people become aware of the trade-offs being made between convenience and individuality that we will consider more closely the use of algorithms and the implications of entwining them with our daily lives so extensively.

I chose Kristin’s post for Task 8 to compare for my next linking assignment submission. I have wanted to write about Kristin’s blog space for quite some time so I am happy that I am finally getting the opportunity now. The design of her blog space is inviting and organized in a visual way that helps guide the reader of her site to where information might be accessed. She has picked a relatively large font size for her posts, which helps to read her posts more easily than my own site allows I would say. Although we both chose grey as our font colour, her darker choice and bold font type again aids the reader. She has also made use of categories on her blog with labels displayed in all capital letters. I feel as if the contrast to my own site where my categories combine capital and lowercase letters, allows one to more easily navigate to relevant content on her site.

It was quite interesting to see how we have picked similar one line descriptions for our blog sites. On Kristin’s site, she mentions that this is her site of exploration whilst my site uses the word adventure. In a sense it feels as if these words carry similar sentiments and as such this might be part of the reason why I have felt a strong affinity to always go over Kristin’s new posts- we potentially  share a similar outlook in the course and our MET studies.

Why I really wanted to include her blog site in my linking assignment though is the true blog feel that is present on her site. Kristin has the ability to present her tasks in such a way that one always feels as if you are part of her personal journey. She weaves elements of her daily life quite effortlessly into her tasks and this has allowed readers of her blog to get to know Kristin on a deeper level than just through discussions of course work. In this task in particular, she structures her post in such a way that you travel with her thought process as she made her song selections. It’s almost as if we are following her internal dialogue.

It was fascinating to follow her thought process and in comparison to my own, we clearly had wildly different methods for our song selection. Where Kristin had included an 8 odd step process of elimination, my own criteria was summed up by a single sentence- choices were to be made on emotional reactions. Interestingly though, this task and the subsequent task of network analysis ended up revealing that we in fact had chosen 9 similar songs! A happy coincidence? Or did our one line descriptions of our sites elude to more similarities than what meets the eye?