Author: Mingyue Deng

Project: CSS Exercise

Documented By: Mingyue Deng

Link: imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~md3606/www/commlab/week2/index.html

When I did this exercise, I was able to link the fonts to the Google fonts website and chose my font from that database. I changed the background color and font size, etc. One of the troubles I had, when I practiced, was that I could not make the position fixed box flow when I scrolled up and down my website (I still could not fix it). I was able to do other things as I wished including changing the padding and box color to incorporate them and make them stand out on my website.

Project Image: 

I used three images of different cities, Nanchang, Shanghai, and New York. Then I changed the background into purple to represent NYU. I put a little one in the corner to represent NYUSH. I put three images on top of each other and chronologically by size representing the time as I left these places but I still go back sometimes. I blurred these pictures together as a symbol of I am still looking for an identity for myself, where am I really from? NYU is a part of me, but I am from these three cities, so I try to blur them in the effect of rain on a window, and I try to wipe the waters off to see clearly.

In Marshall McLuhan’s Medium is the Message, he talked about how he thinks that there are not three parts to media but two, media and medium instead of media medium and message. His main focus is that the medium is the message already, so people should not confuse it with message or content. Many media scholars would say that there are three parts because medium should not be the message, the message or the content of the piece of information is separated from the technology and the ways the messenger sends to a receiver. However, McLuhan thinks that those scholars are wrong since the medium is the most important of those three parts and message is included in this part, that it is not separated.

How an engineer puts in the message is the medium and also sends out the message of how he wants it received. However, in this excerpt of his essay, he does not take interactions and relationships between people seriously enough. He talks about how the light is the medium and the message through an electric bulb instead of electric bulb is the medium or the ways to how light as the message is transmitted. Yet,  if we consider his opinion true, if lights are both the medium and the message, then the receiver’s interaction to the lights would be considered obsolete. McLuhan only creates a one-way relationship through which the medium is the message and it is only from the sender to the receiver. However, he does not consider that media is a bilateral relationship in which both sides act. The sender sends the message or the content to the receiver and receiver interacts with the contents to make a decision if he or she would do something regarding the consequences of the message.

In Tim Berners-Lee’s Long Live the Web, he made a very interesting point on the difference of using HTTP as an open standard system and using iTunes as a closed standard system by Apple. He thinks that the closed worlds are not going to grow as much as the open worlds, and says “If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth.” However, many evidences have pointed out that since Apple as a company expanded its business, many software developers are developing softwares for iOS and MacOS systems besides the ones compatible to the Windows system.As a result, there are more applications in the iTunes realm. Also, Apple has expanded its acceptance to the Web which uses HTTP instead of iTunes so there are more people in its target market.

In both Tim Berners-Lee’s Long Live the Web and Ingrid Burrington’s The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud, the idea of violation of Internet citizen rights are discussed to a great length. This topic is very controversial since the day of the birth of Internet and the World Wide Web. Both authors tried a different approach to explaining this phenomenon.

In his article, Berners-Lee viewed the violation through his explanations of the basic terms which forms the Internet as we know it today. Firstly, he claimed that the Web is an online location where free speech is protected. Then he said that the Web is where people practice free speech the most, and that universality is a huge factor in how people use the Web globally. However, many countries are trying to prevent the uses of what they call improper usage of the Internet. In Berners-Lee’s words, there are no improper uses since the Internet or the Web is the main medium for freedom of speech nowadays. In Ingrid Burrington’s The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud, he dedicated the majority of the article to the discussion of human rights on the Web. He gave the example of Microsoft and Deutsche Telekom’s data storage and the access of data from these two storages. Of course, the example was talked about by Burrington through the two companies’ perspective and especially the U.S. perspective. However, from this part, there are questions which rose up of how would the data center of Deutsche Telekom be different from Microsoft when it comes to the data usage in building private digital profiles of people and its harms and benefits from the global citizen perspective. This is a very interesting point since he also talked about other companies like Amazon and Alibaba, which still the same questions remain.