Site

“Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.”

Poetics

My screen self-portrait is an accurate description of my digital identity.  I used WordPress as my website platform because it is highly organized and looks clean and professional.  It is easy to navigate with a navigation menu bar because if I am on a website I will go straight to a menu first to see what information the site contains.  I did however leave the titles of my pages fairly ambiguous so that the viewer would need to go to each page to understand a little better what that page entails.  I chose 4 pages that are somewhat broad but have a few boundaries. An example would be my philosophy page.  This page demonstrates a few of my beliefs through images with quotes and a video of something I believe in strongly.  This page can’t encompass everything about me as philosophy doesn’t include more on-the-surface items like my surroundings page which can demonstrate my ideal place and setting that I would like to be at or weather I enjoy. I would have liked to have the video on the page autoplay as I love the soothing background music as well as the concept of the time lapse of beautiful scenes in nature.  WordPress didn’t support autoplay on this video or allow for a background noise on the page.  This didn’t end up being a bad thing as I realize most people browsing the web, including myself, aren’t fond of videos playing without themselves hitting play button.  My digital identity is also displayed as uniform through same fonts and colors throughout while each theme has descriptive featured images on each page to further demonstrate how all aspects of my webpage are interconnected but also fairly separate.  My website is a compelling demonstration of my identity as seen through my own eyes and played out in media forms of images, quotes, gifs, and videos.

Reflection

While I am happy with my multimodal media infused website, I would have preferred to be able to write descriptive captions to expand on the photos or gifs to describe why it is there.  It was difficult for me to form a website that seems so incredibly random at first glance because it is a mix of funny gifs and simple or serious pictures.  This helped me to realize that it is difficult to get a full story across through media depictions and website restrictions like not being able to autoplay a video.  While my identity can be mediated through media I don’t think every aesthetic appeal can come across the same as the true human emotion or feeling.  I would also expect that a longer timeframe to compose a website like this due to reflective aspects and figuring out all of my private identity and how to demonstrate those exact aspects through media.  Visible experience is easily shown through media while sound and movement are more difficult aesthetics to put into media even when I did create a gif.  Gifs are an interesting tool and as helpful as animation is, it still isn’t completely accurate in portraying emotion.  I found it difficult to pick the perfect clip to portray an emotional response while also adding dialogue to support that same feeling.  This project allowed me to reflect on the different parts of my life as well as intersectionality despite not being able to portray me and my life perfectly through multimodal media.

This was a good test of the intersections in the Experience Paradigm.  It combined aesthetics with interpretation of information from unit two.  Another viewer of this site may interpret the media I used as a completely different aspect of my life than what I intended it to portray.  A site like this cannot be quantified even if there is a gif with words that someone could attempt to quantify. The high possibility and probability of viewer interpretations makes this site the opposite of data in a scientific proof setting.  Electracy is important in realizing that media is another way to represent one’s emotions and senses in comparison to pure textual explanation.  Apparatus theory demonstrates the restrictions on specific types of writing although I am still skeptical about if Electracy is better or more advance than written literacy because there is less interpretation with descriptive writing. The skills of Electracy are valid to learn in this age of technology while I still think the mix of literacy and Electracy is the best compromise to portray aesthetics and emotional appeal.  Both Electracy and written literacy allow for creative licensing while technology makes it easier and more efficient to get one’s own viewpoint across through multimedia as gifs and videos that are seen is a second versus spending ten minutes reading a chapter of another’s experience in written word format.  Overall this project demonstrated that identity experience is difficult to portray through one mode of communication whether that is all technological media or written but that a mixture of many forms can create affect for the audience to feel and interpret.