Hundevad Productions

Did you know that there’s a gargantuan cord underneath the ocean and THATS what’s linking the internet to all the continents together. Not a satellite. Not smart computers, or frequency waves. An old school extension cord wrapped in plastic and sunk with rocks, connected from North America To Europe. Fucking bananas. The internet really put into perspective the fragility of all our communication, our grid, and our livelihoods. Just as the pandemic has shown how vulnerable our “system” is as a society, so too has the understanding and learning of the internet. As Einstein once said “the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know.” 

It’s like when you really stop to think about how long humans have been around. Then think how old the earth is before humans, then the universe. And the internet has been around for not even a nano-fraction of a nanosecond comparatively. And already its too big to handle, to tame, and now getting dangerous to explore for credible research (thinking about fake news, vaccines, and public health information, let alone books being banned, history being whitewashed or neglected, information censored or certain news publicized while other news gets ignored, on and on), yet it is inside every one of our facets as a society controlling something or providing some service. 

The internet is its own universe, hell it’s its own multiverse with all the different fabrications and run offs of different browser versions. The internet isn’t the same as it is for me as it is for someone in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, Antartica, Australia or even down the street with the 12 year old COD player with parental rights activated. Things are banned, blocked, censored, or straight up propagandized. Yet more so, things are so personalized now, even our ads aren’t the same. Back then, On TV, everyone would see the same ad in between the same show everyone else was watching on Prime Time. Now thanks to the internet, we get personalized ads catered by designers sold to them by the internet browser you’re using because they mined our data, based on what we searched for and what tv shows we watched on (name literally any streaming platform). I’m saying, what we search for is different, therefore our ads are different, therefore our realities are different when it comes to living a life, or even adjoining your physical and meta-verse lives, on the internet. The assignment, Understanding the Internet really opened my perspective on how people ‘receive their research’, especially in times of covid, because the Internet isn’t a research tool really, it’s a search tool, catered to you. Your searches and clicks and likes and attention all get tracked in order to provide more of what you want to see, what the psychologists call, ‘group polarization.’

To understand the internet is only to understand the complexity that we will never know all of it. Like finally settling with the fact, we won’t be able to see all the things in the world. 

I have always wanted to start a blog or a website and this course caught me by surprise. To have to have a website for an assignment was a win win for me and is what made finally bite the bullet to get a website. I think before, I was always procrastinating because I was busy doing homework assignments and reading and writing reports and papers and working and yadda yadda,  to have this website and blog posts be assignments really was a refreshing taste of education and what it should be about, growth, understanding of knowledge, and critical thinking skills rather than reading and regurgitating information into a thesis statement.

WordPress is alright, I love that we used a free domain to host all our assignments rather than just submitting them and forgetting them a week later in class. Having a website is like having a fruit plant we need to groom and feed and take care of in order to grow in order to nurture us. At first I just could not get around the mechanics of the website, editing and creating content was a nightmare. One day I spent a good four hours editing my home page with a them and getting my blogs posted, then I went to visit my site and nothing was as it seemed. I was very frustrated and ended up deleting the entire site and starting from scratch because I just couldn’t understand how all my content was there when I am editing mode but not have it appear as a visitor. Now I think I have a better control of it, but my website is nowhere near where I want it to be looks-wise, design wise, or content really. With content, just like everything else, I will just have to be patient and take it a day in learning how to edit and create a website. Five minutes a day really helps with just understanding the mechanics and editing on WordPress and helps keep the mindset of writing and creating on. This class has helped me with that and start again being a person who recreationally writes and reads again, the joy in learning re-found. 

This translates extremely well into my personal life as I plan to continue this blog and website. Learning is a life long thing and the tools and knowledge I have gained here will help propel my critical thinking and content creating to a new level. Professionally, being knowledgable and functional in the internet and media-space is crucial when it comes to branding, communication, and day to day operations. Today it is everything and this class really helped focus the attention of digital writing and technology in our lives, not as a ‘oh look technology runs everything now,’ but more of an opposite effect, back to the Einstein quote, that the more technology we introduce in the aims of simplifying our lives, the more it complicates the backend, that technology is in everything but inside of that is a whole team of humans to make sure that thing works in that machine. The internet is the ultimate nesting dolls of systems and networks plugged into each other to look like a coherent singular entity.

I digress, 

I’ve learned how to communicate with myself, to write, to podcast, to research, to question, to perform. Like an actor, rather than reading lines or a script, the inner self must conjure a narrative structure and this class really helped catalyze that. It’s a skill and a process like anything and as the professor said, “writing is a process in which we understand it only after we have written” and I find that totally true. A thing I heard about making podcasts is that your first take/recording isn’t going to be your first episode. And that’s the same with writing. And it’s important to learn that and keep that in mind when writing. Good Writing is a process that only comes from revising and editing. This will carry well into my professional and personal career as it will help me manage my time with writing assignments, to really take more care with my revisions, and allow more time on what I need to spend on be it writing, forming, or revising. Overall, this course has helped me be more experienced with my own communication styles, and comparing that amongst the internet. 

One thing, reflecting back on, that I think seems to work well, is to not set specific length guidelines. Unlike other courses, where the requirements are always something like 1000-1500 words, no more or less, or 6-8 pages double spaced, this course had assignments like write ten points, or create a blog about a topic. Having no length requirements put the quality and requirements of the content on the student, really opening the mind to what is good or bad content, because the standard and quality check is on the student now. Not having to focus on making the length requirements put more attention on the quality of the actual content, and that is how real learning is done, through quality, not quantity.  

Especially with the digital narrative assignment, this was a chance to combine intellect with creativity truly and really analyze oneself inside the sphere of reality today. The other blogs as well really inspire, me at least, to pursue a more creative and fulfilling engagement with the assignments and their content than I would have felt in other classes with other assignments. The variety of requirements for the assignments, from podcasting to writing, was great as well as it relieved us from doing things repeatedly, and gave us new chances to explore different modes of communication and internet posting. All of this cumulatively has given me an insight into not only digital writing but how an individual really partakes in knowledge, the internet, and the sharing of that knowledge on the internet. This may be become ever more apparent and inherently important to discern and to know, how the two come together, for both bad and for good, and how to divorce or marry the two when necessary.

I have learned my place among the internet. It isn’t this omnipresent thing. It’s an ever growing morphing entity created by our imagination. It may not be tamable, but it can waded through and minded for diamonds of knowledge. I’ve carved my little space of internet in order to exist in it and its ever so exciting.

 As always, “write and good things will happen.”