I really like the introduction to the first essay about privacy on the internet. The author explains the importance of having a privacy space in order to produce writing of substance. My experiences lead me to agree that it is absolutely necessary. I cannot write unless I am in private, door closed, with minimal distractions. With how prominent online learning has become, there is a constant need for privacy.
There is an importance to understanding the difference between spatial privacy and information privacy. I feel it is very hard to keep everything about yourself and your activities private on the internet. The concept of algorithms and bubble filters is interesting, but at the same time scary. She talks about how difficult it is to write when we are all using different kinds of information from our search results, which is something I have never thought about.
These days I see the prominence of algorithms and cookies every time I use my phone. Everybody talks about how when you discuss a product or idea with someone, your phone hears you. Soon after, it pushes it to you the next time you go on it. In the end, the author encourages us to understand how, why, and what websites are doing with the data we share with them. Last semester Professor Friend explained to us what cookies are, and since then I have blocked cookies whenever given the chance.
The Fish Wrapper article was very intriguing. When the author made the analogy of imagining a world where we have to have face to face discussions under a standard set of rules and regulations, it all started to click a lot more.
I have been learning online a ton since COVID. I graduated high school back in 2020. The pandemic affected my senior year about halfway through the school year. Prior to the pandemic, I quite literally never used a computer in high school. I would only use my school issued Chromebook to write an essay if need be or look answers up. Once we transitioned to online learning for the second half of the year, and then I drastically learned a lot more online in college, it was very overwhelming.
As of today, I really hate learning online. After experiencing the horrors of Zoom and Blackboard, I don’t ever want to learn online again. The prominence of online learning really miss my high school classes where damn near nothing was online. These days, some teachers just throw a bunch of material on Canvas and we go learn on Canvas, come back to some pointless discussion, take a test online, and repeat. It is exhausting and lacks substance. There is no challenge to think beyond the material.
All in all, the second article was a lot to digest. I got confused at several points, but from what I understand, we need to take control of the web in order to create more individualized experiences and make learning less robotic, predictable and stale.
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