Author: Oona Pecson

Reading “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud was a very fun, but also informative read! Comics have always played a major role in my life, and have shaped my goals for drawing and creating stories. However, even being a fan of this kind of work, sometimes people do not take the time to think about the history of comics or how people have used images to effectively tell stories for hundreds and even thousands of years! The fact that we have even used images in such a way is so interesting, yet how we have evolved in using them is even more so. For instance, McCloud references the Egyptians who used images to tell stories of their lives. Over time, we have gone from recording events with drawing to creating fictional stories, in which there are endless imaginary worlds and people with powers that exist, such as the ninja in Naruto or the superheroes in the Marvel/DC universes. Nonetheless, there are still authors who use comics in other genres, like “Persepolis” in biography and “Maus” in history. This, in fact, shows that comics are a very good way to convey really anything if techniques are utilized correctly. Like McCloud said, comics are truly a form of media.

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~op531/week02/my-portfolio/portfolio.html

The following is the portfolio I made using the prepared layout 🙂

I think this reading was particularly interesting, because it gave a lot of insight into things that most of us have grown up knowing about or knowing they existed. For instance, the remarks on modes of transportation such as train and plane. We grew up knowing that these vehicles existed, but we not around to see just how much of an effect on people they had when first introduced so many years ago. The fact that it is these “mediums” that act as an instigator for change (forcing people to use them to discover other things) is something that not many people actually think about. They give people a means to think more, and to use their intellect to further develop the medium. Another good example in this reading  is light/ electricity. Once this was invented and perfected, there was only one thing we could do to it: continue to change and develop it. Seeing as nowadays we live in a technological boom, we can trace all of these innovations back to when the craft was first perfected. How interesting is that! Knowing that anything could potentially be a medium and force humans to continue to grow and develop it opens a plethora of doors to what could exist in the future. An exciting thought is the internet as a medium. People have been building upon it and creating new things using it, so one can only imagine just how much more great things can come out of this one medium alone. It’s so fascinating to thing about these possibilities.

In “Long Live the Web”, the advancement of both the web and internet is discussed, but the fact that the web and the internet are both separate from each other is what is mainly emphasized. Berners-Lee compares the internet to an electronic network, and the web can be compared to household appliances that feed off of the electricity brought to them via the electronic network. This analogy is important because, while the internet exists in the background, the web can continuously be changed and altered. As we progress into the modern era, there is constantly new web pages, sites, or other phenomenons being created. In fact, it is miraculous to look back and see how far we have come. However, with the positives of advancement comes realities that some may not want to face. This stems from how much is on the web, and how some items are not full deleted forever as users may think, or that there are people out there with potential access to hundreds of thousands of pools of personal data and a mind that could think of equally as many ways to use that data. This article brought up this reality of web security, and the connection to human rights (personal information being stolen, and the worries of snooping in general, etc). It was interesting to read through, because most people look at the internet and the web with excitement, without actually knowing what any of it means, or what the reality is. As we progress with development of internet and the web, we also need to progress with the protection of human rights on this platform, as well as educating people about it as much as possible. 

When reading “The Room Where the Internet Was Born”, it was just so interesting to picture a single room where the first breakthrough message was sent out via ARPANET. What is even more interesting is that this happened exactly 50 years ago this year in 1969! I think that a lot of young people today, including myself, don’t fully understand how young the phenomenon of the internet really is. For most of us grew up knowing about the internet, mobile devices, and a general idea of how to use those things. In reality, it was just when we were growing up, that development began to pick up speed. I remember when iPhones started coming out, and when wireless options were becoming more and more popular. But, reading this article and realizing that the breakthrough of all of this came from a single message being sent, gave me a bit of a shock. It is so cool to think that, from that one message (and who knows what that message was) we are able to use the internet to complete every day tasks from school to work, and even at home. it almost reminds me of the rapid urbanization of cities such as Shanghai, that massively grew and changed over a course of only 20 years from the 80s to the 2000s. Just as Shanghai changed into the global city it is today, the internet also grew in a similar fashion on its own. It is so cool to read this article, and look back to see just how far we have come.

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~op531/week01/aboutme

This is the “About” page I created using the techniques we have learned in class so far!