Composing Digital Media with Emma Cichocki

  Though before this class I never really gave it much thought, I think I had some disillusion that technology did more than it actually does… I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was a special google system that graphic designers typed things in to like “make it look like I am dancing on mars” accompanied by a picture of themselves and bing bang boom there it was… It’s almost as if I thought incredible effects in movies and posters made with insanely real photoshop were almost too good to credit the human race with…upon realizing just how little the computer can do without those extraordinary people, I think it’s sad that the masses have this implicit bias that places a higher prestige upon art created by painters and songs played by instrumentalists above the incredible people who create magical content on photoshop or in Audacity respectively. Anyone who can click through filters and hit enhance think they’re photo editors but rarely do they take a moment before posting to acknowledge the technology that someone created that allows for those buttons to work and the artists who took part in creating those filters and defining what that enhance button would do… Okay that was a bit of a rant but it seemed necessary, I really don’t think web design and digital media as fields are as respected and fawned over as they should be, these people create things that sub consciously the masses like for reasons that they are not even aware of…

  The field necessitates not only having the skill to produce things using technology as a medium (practically a magic wand when used by those able vs. a brittle twig when used by the majority who are unable) but they also need to know the audience more than the audience knows themselves… working in digital media is like working in five different fields: computer science, psychology, history, art, and marketing, also sprinkled with minors in several foreign languages if you consider Html, java, css, python, ETC. That’s crazy. Wow but back to this sorry…

 As far as revisions go, I honestly think one recently acquired cool revision to my intellectual repertoire is that I even know how to talk about this… If you were to have asked me last semester what the definition of revision was I would tell you it’s fixing something and making it better… and I would think it was a silly thing to ask, but that definition and attitude seem completely void now. Nothing can be better in a vacuum because better is completely dependent upon what it is someone is trying to accomplish. Audience isn’t just important to consider in creation and revision it is the sole reason for it and it is the only thing to consider, one should not ask how can I make this better… one should only ask what is it I want to convey and to who and how can I better do that. Put in a way that I would put it if a fifth grader was my audience, people may think revision is the umbrella and audience is a rain drop… but in reality the audience is the umbrella and each raindrop another aspect of it to consider while creating or revising content.

  I have approached revisions in this class with two main audiences in mind, you as a teacher grading me on effort and growth and then children who I mention so often as a population I hope to work with in the future… I often used the younger mentioned group as the reason behind my child friendly design concepts. Simplistic, colorful, easy to use, and happy, I really delved into how so many of the things we discussed are utilized in designing digital media by showing that all of my decisions were for my target audience… What I neglected to reflect upon in prior reflection is that I was miscalculating who my target audience was… As an adult would I go to a doctor with the non-threatening website design that prioritizes fun over professionality? No, if a doctor’s office had my page today, when technological understanding and utilization is so expected by professionals in any and every field, I would seek medical attention elsewhere. So obviously some of the concepts I did not consider heavily enough are that of accessibility and representation. In my desired career field, children don’t seek out Occupational Therapists, their parents do. So while I had an audience in mind I didn’t have one that would be able to be affected by my content. I think that is one very common flaw in distributing media.

  Most of my revisions have been made in the name of expressing myself as a few target buzz words, I want to come off fun, friendly, whimsical and funny. I constantly focused on putting smiles on the faces of my audience. But in doing so I was committing the sin of prioritizing content over audience and dismissing the idea of accessibility and context. If I hope to be a medical professional as opposed to a motivational blogger I can sprinkle bits of fun but in that context it shouldn’t be my number 1 concern. While I understand this is all theoretical, and I fully acknowledge that if I do become an OT I will not be creating my own website, I still think that this is important to discuss. For a lot of my down falls I could rationalize them in terms of computers not being a field I knew much about and therefore my lack of ability could be explained by lack of experience, but I don’t think this type of miscalculation in hindsight is as isolated to college kids taking a gen ed as I would have thought.

  What I find so interesting about this idea is that it represents how unstable the field of digital media is, it’s a game of predicting and analyzing people and their preferences, priorities and tendency’s. Even more so it is the predicting and analyzing of people and the preferences, priorities and tendency’s that they don’t even know they have…

  This class has given me so much more to consider when thinking about revision in that it isn’t just what is on the page, it’s how it’s on the page, when it’s on the page, where the page will be, how things on the page work with how other things on the page are being expressed. I think one thing I took from this class that I never set off to do was fall in love with the psychology behind it all, I loved watching how other people in our class were able to express themselves through the design principles they utilized it’s almost like another form of finger printing where no two people even if given the same prompt would ever create the exact same thing. This idea came into my revision process as well because it emphasized how crazy it is to attempt to reach the masses when really people are all so different that universality seems almost like a myth.

In the end I am happy with my growth, not only in the relative ease at which I now produce slightly “better” content and in my more educated ability to revise it in response to an ever changing audience, but the growth in my understanding of the complexities involved in everyday media creation and consumption and the growth in my interest in it. The main point being that I have come to realize revision isn’t about my vision it’s about my audiences because media is nothing other than how it affects those who see it.