One of the biggest themes in blog posts of mine for this class (and others, now that I think about it) are ways in which what I am blogging about directly affects society. My first post was titled “The Affordances of the Electronic Codex” and explores the implied history of electronic literature through its invention and many facets. It also notes that “the age of electronics has muddled the affordances of the codex we read about from Kirschenbaum” while questioning “what are some affordances that technology has served to offer to literature?” In another blog post, I weighed the pros and cons of different kinds of interactive fiction and speculated why people preferred one over the other. Along with this theme comes the concern that some technological advances are more harmful to society than good, such as blogging about how The Network Effect emphasizes today’s unhealthy reliance on the internet. I also worry that technology’s attempt to make life easier instead makes life less authentic by allowing technology to alter the human experience in an unethical way. This concern is apparent in my post questioning Rettberg’s suggestion “that a new role for the human poet could be editing “poetry entirely generated by machine intelligence based on a process that remains both invisible and largely incomprehensible for the human poet” (53).”
One change I have noticed over the past fifteen weeks is a more acute awareness of how technological design affects a user’s experience, such as the bad spelling and other choice details in How to Rob a Bank heightening socioeconomic disparity in Ted and Lizzie. I had also written a blog about The Network Effect in DIG101 as well, so it was cool to revisit the topic after having explored digital studies in more depth.
My focus on how technology affects us in my blog posts is reflective of my real-life career desires. I took my first digital studies class at the same time I took English 220 and designed not only my own domain to serve as a personal portfolio but a website to serve as a final project. I became fascinated with making my website’s experience as carefully constructed and seamless as possible. When I took DIG101 I learned about the tremendously positive and negative nuances that technology affords society. This semester, DIG220 and 240 has not only helped me to understand those nuances in more depth but has also heightened my desire to fix the negatives and make the positives even better. This theme is something I will definitely revisit during my lifetime as I feel my understanding of it tremendously compliments my English major and allows me to succeed in a more tech-driven world than ever.