Week 1 Assignment: Hypertext Narrative
Link to project HERE
For this project, we were prompted to make a series of web pages that were linked through hypertext links and portrayed a singular narrative or experience. I decided to make a web page for an email I received from my dad on the first day of the year 2018. It was an email outlining his advice for me pertaining to certain aspects of life. I wanted to archive and memorialize this email for personal reasons as I would like to go back to it from time to time throughout my life and have a space that I could access it and experience the feeling of being comforted by his words.
Reading Response:
Olia Lialina, “Vernacular Web 2”
In this essay, Lialina discusses the fundamental elements that made up Web 2 and ‘homemade’ home pages that allowed users to create web pages that felt distinctly themselves. I found this reading to to be interesting especially at this point in time when the y2k aesthetic is making a big comeback in pop culture. The web 2 aesthetic is so identifiable and representative of the era that was the early 2000s and as Lialina says, such homemade web pages have been overshadowed by carefully researched and designed web pages by teams of web designers. I found a lot of what Lialina says to be fascinating, especially her point about the amount of control that users have in personalizing a web space disappearing gradually.
It made me think about one of the design problems designers must consider when making a tool for users- whether to give them more freedom in choices and gifting them with a sense of accomplishment and their own unique outcomes, or limiting the amount of choices they have in order to ensure that the quality of the outcome is even across the board. I think that this kind of thought process from designers and developers probably impacted the amount of user control on the web the most as the internet started to develop and professions regarding the industry progressed as well. The user experience and the guarantee of a fuss-free and easy as can be user journey seems to be the most important topic of conversation when it comes to mobile or web experiences nowadays. But as Lialina discusses, I do find the ‘handmade’ and chaotic aesthetic of web 2 to be endearing and nostalgic and I feel that there is a point to be made about preserving these sorts of historical artifacts. Now that I think about it as I write this reading response, it feels as though as a gen z individual who first experienced the web during the web 2 era, it feels as though these web 2 artifacts conjure up the same nostalgia and appreciation as does with the ‘analog’ wave. Although it feels strange and almost wrong to say, it seems that these earlier web pages and aesthetics are becoming historic artifacts not dissimiilar to that of physical objects displayed at history museums.
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