The Virtual Self & the O'Neill Website
In the last sections of the Remediation book, I contemplated some things that I think are important in our work on the O’Neill Website.- In the section on the WWW, the authors discuss how the web borrows from so many forms of media that the real discussion on remediation on the web is about ratios. What ratio of remediation will we use on the site? I think based on the desire to go back to the roots of theatre, starting with the script, that the O’Neill center would like a modern site that is still understated. They want to be professional, intense, and promote the work they are doing. However, I don’t think they would want us to remediate film, radio, and even television. I think they would like some interactivity but they’re focus on the basics could indicate how we focus on doing the basics well online. I think there is more here we can explore as far as how much remediation we’d like to explore.
- “We employ media as vehicles for defining both personal and cultural identity” (231). Therefore on our site, how would we like people to define the O’Neill culture? How do we want them to identify themselves in this environment? What are we trying to get them to understand in the content?
- I also really liked how the authors discussed that by giving users options and letting them use their mouse to explore that we are giving control of the digital online media back to the user. This made me think about how our site is going to work visually and information architecture wise. We want our audience (donors, past institute participants, and future institute participants) to feel like this site is for them and that they can control how they understand the content. I think a big question is how are we going to take advantage of this virtual self? Do we do research on how users best navigate sites? Do we try to think about our users’ goals on the site and work backwards on how to help them achieve them? I think making this site really easy for people to control the information flow is imperative. By doing this we can then show our audience how much we value the role of the individual.
- Then a key thought I had is how we can make this website value the individual and yet make it “individualized” for all who come? Are there things we can do to make our audience feel like this is an individual experience that they are going through? Can we do this without getting into too sophisticated web technology and applications? I don’t think we have the time or the ability with this large of a group to accomplish anything too sophisticated but perhaps putting our minds together we can find innovative methods of accomplishing the same thing.
- And lastly, I really digged the section on empathy. The authors talked about how through empathy the self can see the multiple points of view online and thus self-reflect and not self-reflect. It made me think how we are always trying to gain as many perspectives because it gives us great understanding of reality and meta-cognitive awareness. Thus, I was thinking we might be able to do this through the pictures. Right now there are so many on the site and hardly any cohesion and how when looking at “good” websites they used less pictures and made them bigger. I wonder now if we liked them because we could focus on one at a time and empathize with the picture. I think if we can take some of the really good pictures we have and make them bigger we can get our audience to empathize with the pictures especially those with people. I have heard from professors before that pictures of people online have better rhetoric than those without. So with these bigger, more cohesive, and well chosen images we could try to get our audience absorbed in the picture and to empathize with what it’s like to be in that experience. Perhaps that would promote the center better from the perspective of a potential participant but also entice donors into giving money because they could live vicariously through others experiences.
So these are some of the ways I connected the readings to the website. I think the readings really allow us to challenge our thinking on the website far deeper than just the surface visual and information level. I think it challenges to dig deeper into the rhetoric on the site.
posted by Anonymous @ 3:16 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home