From our discussion this week, I liked the piece by Sydette Harry -- the concept of
willful self-surveillance failing as an answer to surveillance. I also don't buy that
one can resist surveillance by self-surveilling. I don't love the idea of surveillance,
and while it isn't the reason I deleted all of my social media a few years ago, I've
come to realize that would have been a perfectly sound reason for doing so. I think I've
only become aware of the pervasiveness of surveillance in the past year. I learned that
my iPhone literally listens to what I say and informs the ads based on that, which feels
like a huge violation. There's a difference between the conversations I conduct on the phone
or type into texts on my phone and those I conduct with my phone nearby. It seems wrong to me
that it has given itself that authority.
I liked learning flex this week -- I think in project one I will build a
website to showcase my portfolio. Seeing how one can display photos of different aspect
ratios in an appealing grid was very useful. I think I will use that when building my site.
The cascading element was really what I think has been lacking in my web development styling
so far.
I'm excited for the upcoming project. It has a lot of potential but what I learned from doing
the exercises this week (html and five variations) is that, even if the vision is there, sometimes
you simply don't have the time to see every idea through. Hopefully, I can go back later to hash
out all the details, but my goal for this assignment is to get a functioning, appealing website
and to see through at least 80% of the vision that I had originally desired.