Technology and Personal Idenity

Technology has a great impact on personal identity. In the current culture people are defined often by what they do, associate with or their hobby. One who works with technology is strongly defined by what they do. A computer engineer is often defined by their specific area of specialization. People who often associate with musical instruments are defined as such or use musical instruments as a hobby will also be defined as a musician. Many people often do not take a step back and look at how technology affects the personal identity of a person. These are just examples of how people my be defined by technology, although I believe technology can go much deeper and affect a persons identity.

Personal identity can be portrayed through technology. People are connected today like they never have been before. from text messaging to facebook. People often have less and less face to face interaction and more interaction via technology. An example of this would be someone walking to class and on a phone or sending messages in a class. We care less about our surrounding peers and more about those in our social groups. This is prevalent due to advanced communication technology. In reference to facebook many people may take pictures specifically for others to see on facebook. These may include binge drinking to playing guitar. People who put these pictures to be seen by others are shaping their identity in a way they would not be able to with out the technology.

An effective Website?

Faigly makes references to the importance of credible, appealing visual and upload time in regard to the importance of a website. These all are important to people when searching websites but they are also relative to each other. Simplifying effectiveness of a website into three specific categories is a problem. I believe what ultimatly makes a website effective is the trust gained by its audience. The reasons I feel Faigly may be simplifying is all the categories relate to each other. People understand this. Credibility is important, especially with places where you purchase using a credit card. Although, a way of establising crediblitiy would be to have a fast loading page that is appealing. Many websites would not be trusted even if they have a strong crediblity with out the other two. Also, no one will feel a website is credible if it is unappealing and may take for ever to upload. In conlcusion these factors are to simplified and are related.

The Penguin handbook analyzes a website into five categories. These catagories include audience and purpose. This in my opinion the most important to a websites effectiveness. If you are not sure on what your audience wants it will be impossible to have an effective website becuase will break down all the other categories which include: Content, visual design, readablity and navigation. By this I mean you must think of the audience and purpose when designing all the other categories.

Analyzing Images and Visual Texts

As humans we constatnly are analyzing images along with visual texts. Examples of this are looking at what others wear to advertising. In advertisments we view what an advertiser is trying to sell us and then analyse the message and image to come away with a final result. The advertising project is an example of using imagest along with visual text to send a message. A lot of the time in advertising the images are viewed in the way that the advertisers wish. This is due to constatnly doing research and using correct colors, text and image. Many times we are unable to completely understand an image. In advertising we may not understand what an advertiser is trying to portray. There is no one to blame for this because often do not fully understand other people and other discourse communities. In conclusion analyzing images along with text is something we do often and we all come away with a particular message from these images in which use for further judgement.