Interactivity has been put in the forefront when it comes to online screen making (as seen in the online projects presented in class). It’s engaging, it gives the audience freedom to roam on their own, and also allows media makers to exhibit more in their work.

Our project allows people to click on specific items they wish to find out more with regards to the person, like how online retailers let shoppers click and navigate through their website to purchase an item right from their bedroom. And since it’s hyperlink driven, it spread across multiple platforms from Facebook, to Instagram, to Youtube and more.

However, since we are not IT students with much knowledge on how to create our own website, we are not sure if it’ll be practical and it could be applied into the real world. Which brings me to the next point, unfortunately, our idea of using Youtube to embed links to our Resume, social media profiles, into the video has been disabled unless you are part of the Youtube Partner Programme.  I guess this serves as a safety feature by Youtube to protect against people embedding sensitive, explicit, or just straight out illegal websites onto their youtube videos. As far as I know we are only able to embed links to subscribing, other exisiting Youtube videos, and other Youtube channels (talk about network literacy). I have, however, uploaded the different elements of the mock video to the shared folder in Google Drive, if anyone is actually interested.

I guess the only limitation I encountered was myself, actually. Like how Manovich describes “To understand new media, we need to turn to computer science.” And I have almost close to zero knowledge on computer science or software theory, other than how to operate a computer. The computer language part of new media is still an abyss I’ve not set foot on, and I do not think I might anytime soon. However, I think it’s worth noting that these two ideas of what Manovich calls, “human-computer interface and the interfaces of software applications used to author and access new media objects” definitely go hand-in-hand, ever evolving parallel to one another. Maybe if I had some skills on writing my own application or website, the result might be something different where I could work and improve on the interface and see how much more, or less, interactive we want the platform to be. I think it is also worth pointing out that some people might feel uncomfortable exposing themselves so much on the Internet, as the saying goes, what goes up in the Internet, stays in the Internet. And I actually sit in that camp of being more conservative on leaving my virtual footprint, or leaving my information out in the world wide web.

This might bring me to my next formal quality worth exploring, is the freedom that people have on the Internet compromises our privacy and personal information compromised when we upload stuff onto the Internet? And how do we protect ourselves from people attempting to steal these information? We might say it has lesser censorship rules, no form of fact checking, and controversial. But is there some way we can govern the Internet, like how a democratic society votes for a ruling party to govern the country? Can the Internet by regulated?