Author: Chloe Chan

Imanas Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~cc5581/week02/css_assignment01/

Reflection: 

I thought this assignment was a great way to figure out for ourselves how to style a page. What I struggled with the most was repositioning the content to be alongside the navigation, but I think with trial and error, I figured out the best way to reorganize the page. I think this assignment also gave me an opportunity to figure out how to use the inspector to make styling easier and quicker and simply copy and pasting the code from inspector into atom gave me the opportunity to tweak little aspects of the styling to what I thought looked right. I used w3schools to help me figure out small things that I struggled with such as changing the color of the links, but overall I thought it was a pretty smooth assignment.

“Understanding Comics” is an interesting introduction of comics as a medium that should be appreciated for the level of thought that goes into its creation. The author, Scott McCloud attempts to debunk the widely stereotyped belief that comic books were “poorly drawn, crude etc…” as compared to other mediums of storytelling. McCloud defines comics to be Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence, which encompasses the basic nature of comics, and the way that they convey their content to the reader. McCloud reminds the reader not to confuse the message from the messenger, as the content of the comic is decided by the creator themselves, but works in a symbiotic relationship with the medium to create meaningful content. McCloud attempts to alter his reader’s perception of comics by utilising his definition to portray ‘comics’ to encompass even the most highly regarded masterpieces of the 20th century, stained glass windows in churches, or the manuals and diagrams that we see and use day to day.

Comis as a medium employs the use of styling, space, and icons in order to convey a story to the reader. The reality of comics and the cartoons that are used in the comics are that they allow the reader to use their own imagination to fill in blanks, to create ‘closure’, and to place ourselves as a subject in the comic in a way that film and real-life photography is unable to do. McCloud argues that the simplified nature of cartooning allows the readers to become the cartoon instead of just observing drawings on a page. He draws on theories put forth by Marshall McLuhan describing how inanimate objects that we often use in everyday lives become an extension of our bodies, and how we are able to place our identities in a conceptual world just beyond our reach – exactly how we are able to do so with comics. Our imaginations continue to not only fill in the blanks for simplified features, but also for the spaces in between each panel, known as “The Gutter”. “The human imagination manages to transform 2 different images into a single idea” in a concept that McCloud introduces called ‘closure’, which is a strange psychological concept that is evolutionarily wired to further our survival.

It’s amazing how quickly one’s perception of comics can change from reading this piece by McCloud, and you notice the intricate nature of comics, and the amount of thought that goes into its creation, the importance of space in between each still and the artistic decisions that the creators run into, that either further their story or retract it. McCloud’s book enables the reader to think differently about comics as a medium, and to appreciate the different factors that go into its creation. By explaining the way that comics work, and redefining what a comic really is, it allows the reader to truly appreciate and interpret it in a way that the creator originally hoped for. 

This is the link to my about me page!

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~cc5581/week01/about.html

In contrast to the innumerable articles critiquing the rise of technology “Long Live The Web” by Tim Berners-Lee encourages its development stating simply that the internet will continue to be a fascinating resource which allows individuals in the world to have access to a variety of opportunities such as staying connected with public information or to accomplish scientific breakthroughs. Berners-Lee remains unshakably firm on his idea that the ‘Fundamental Principles of the Web’ must be maintained in order for the technology, and all of its resources to continue to flourish alongside human civilization. He appraises the commercialisation of the internet as in doing so, the accessibility to data, information is lost. It becomes more difficult to share knowledge on one open platform, it instead belongs to one gated community. The internet has become increasingly commodified which violates many of the fundamental principles that Berners-Lee discusses. He emphasizes the loss of internet privacy as social media platforms retain their user’s personal information to use for advertising and the monopolisation of search engines and browsers. The increased commodification of the internet limits innovation, and the ability for the internet to become this powerful resource that can lead to scientific breakthroughs because the web slowly becomes a resource that isn’t free to use. You have to sacrifice personal information, or join a group, give up precious time to watch an ad in order to access these platforms. 

Berner-Lee’s discussion of internet privacy pairs quite nicely with Ingrid Burrington’s discussion of Internet Soverignity in her article “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud”. The conversation around internet sovereignty still continues and multiple conflicts over the localised access to data still continue. Many companies have situated their data centres outside of the countries that they are operating in due to the climate and economic factors, this, however, makes it difficult for companies to access data of foreign users if internet sovereignty is enforced. Internet sovereignty discusses in this article can be compared to the walled fences that Berner-Lee discusses in his articles claiming that they will become a backwards force on the full potential on the internet. He believes that “if a walled garden has too tight ahold on a market [it] can delay that outside growth”. Berner-Lee believes that with these restrictions on data and information, we are no longer able to make a combined worldwide effort into furthering research and improving services that will make the access to the web a more streamlined service.