Click on the image

When first looking at Peter’s task 10, I quickly noticed that his entry wasn’t simply labelled as “Task 10”, but instead as “Click Bait and Advertising today”. When I glanced at his sidebar, I saw that he had done this for several of his entries. Because of this, his tasks were a little more difficult to find, as information was less encyclopedic in it’s organization. I liked this switch out of the norm, because it made you question the role of a title, and “…it’s illusion of self-sufficiency and completeness” (Bolter, 2011, p.173). Additionally, his titles made his tasks look more like they were situated within an authentic blog space, as his assignments used words and opinions to frame the reader’s experience. I feel like reference material uses titles to archive and organize, while blog spaces use titles to add an extra layer of interpretation. Pete also adds another element for reflection, as he arbitrarily (is it?) uses capital and lowercase levels in the title of his blogspace. 

Peter and I both touch upon how User Inyerface lacks naturalness, but he uses the term ‘intuition’ and I use ‘expected’.  Both of us discuss how the interface doesn’t align with what we are used to, but Peter asks specific questions about the nature of intuitiveness. I think that intuition is based on personal experiences that shape your ‘gut feelings’ or knowledge of the world. The overload caused by User Inyerface pushes us into our lizard brain (Harris, 2017) Because we are in unfamiliar territory and cannot use our intuition to make decisions or have agency. 

To answer Peter’s question, “Would something be intuitive to my 1994 self or my 2004 self…”(2001), I think that User Inyerface would not be as stressful to our 90’s selves because we would not be expecting as much from the interface. It is because we are used to gathering information in a certain way, and using our intuition to adapt to small changes in new interfaces we encounter, that User Inyerface is frustrating. 

The final difference that I would like to point out between Peter’s blog entry and my own is that he uses more personal examples and outside material to make connections to course content. These connections are valuable, because they situate the text within experience. I also think that emotionality adds another mode for the reader to experience the text.

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space : Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention?language=en