Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Twitter and Hypertext

1. Discuss what type of time most influences yours and others' lives based on TWITTER. Were you at all affected by what your peers were writing? Did anything unanticipated happen that ruptured your daily construct of living?
After several days of experiencing twitter, I notice myself enjoying “peeking” at others’ personal lives and find people are unconsciously affecting each other. At the beginning, I was hesitated about what should I write in that little word box until I saw a lot of students begin to complain how midterms and homework stress their lives one after another. I could feel the same way as they did but I didn’t want to make the twitter become a “complaining tool” that full of unhappiness and dissatisfactions gathering together. I do believe that in fact these students are having something happy to share with, but they rather choose to amplify the negative than the positive. Then I didn’t mention anything about midterm but my mood was affected by seeing all the words like “tired, lazy, sleepy…”. Moreover, Twitter as a media for people to communicate and share lives does help people to get to know each other and keep people updated with the majority. On the other hand, I found the stellar time has the most influence to mine and others’ that life doesn’t go in linear track and we can’t go in one straight direction in our life. By observing others’ life styles, we will find new directions to move on.

2. Spend about 15 minutes playing with the hypertext reading of Borges' text. What do you think the designer intended for us to learn through this hypertext activity? Did you find yourself running in circles? Were you attracted to certain words more than others? If so, what do you think this says about you?
I find myself running in circles and back and forth which is quiet frustrating and confusing and I also find I tend to click on the words I don’t really understand and sometimes I will click on the same word again which makes me stuck in the circle. Maybe it tells me about the problems of my life style and my personality. I am a typical Capricorn who is obstinate and always chose stay still in my own path. This hypertext activity illustrates the problem of my personality, and perhaps it is the inner purpose of designing it.

1 comment:

  1. I was actualy looking forward to reading the posts every day. I agree with you that Twitter's posts influenced my mood; but it was always in a good sense. I noticed that we are not alone and that we share some same and different problems. But at the end, after being tired, stressed, or lazy, everybody got their work done. Isn't that insightful ?

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