Comments for Digital Writing

Comment on The Decommodification of Academic Thought – Revision 3 by arbeez

arbeez — Sat, 02 May 2026 04:27:38 +0000

The inaccessibility of content in general has become a huge problem on the internet. The continuous search for relevant information becomes harder and harder to find due to the sheer scope of the internet. It seems like the only way of truly having access to content is through pirating. Even in the academic landscape, scarce information can call for ways to circumvent or replace it. All this tells me is that people will find a way to access content if they really want it. But even so, there is no reason for content to be that inaccessible except for the need to make a profit. When you’re being bled dry like that, it’s understandable to lose faith in academics.

Comment on Revision 1 by arbeez

arbeez — Sat, 02 May 2026 04:11:19 +0000

I think the most important thing you mention is how design determines a reader’s interpretation of the content. Not every design choice will resonate with the audience, but I think your awareness of the design choices is eye-opening. Having an understanding of what works in a design helps us refine our own designs. Even if you didn’t particularly like the style and thus felt disconnected from the content, you didn’t come away with nothing. These articles gave you a direction. That’s why it’s important to diversify the content you consume to expose yourself to what can be done differently.

Comment on Reclaiming Space: How Women Create Community and Resilience Through Trends. by arbeez

arbeez — Sat, 02 May 2026 03:54:15 +0000

I think you touched on something interesting with the creator, “sh3bulk.” Women are constantly finding ways to subvert expectations and troll the trollers. When it comes to the reclamation of these terms that have been used to denigrate women, I think showcasing accounts like this one is what prevents women from giving up hope. Existing on the internet as a woman can often be a very isolating experience. The second their content criticizes or satirizes male content misogynists start to appear in droves. That’s what makes this reclamation so necessary. It empowers women to unite against a common enemy: misogyny.

Comment on AI Generated Crochet by arbeez

arbeez — Sat, 02 May 2026 03:40:05 +0000

Speaking about crochet is an especially interesting topic. I’m curious if you’ve seen the lady crocheting AI patterns on TikTok to show how nonsensical they are. These AI “creations” are clearly a money grabbing opportunity to swindle some beginner. It’s sad to see creative fields get bombarded with AI content that only devalues the art form. Like when I scroll on Pinterest looking for some cool inspiration pics, the flooding of AI content has made what was once a joyful search into an endless dive into slop. It does concern me about what the future of hobbies will look like. For myself, as a baker, I see a lot of AI generated recipes that have the same flaw as the crochet instructions. Seeing as this seems to be a trend, it raises the question to what level of trust can be maintained on the internet.

Comment on Week 8 – Wikipedia by arbeez

arbeez — Sat, 02 May 2026 03:21:01 +0000

Wikipedia is definitely overly stigmatized within academics. Is it scholarly? No. But like you mentioned, it can provide key information needed to conduct one’s research. I find its bibliography feature to be the most convenient. It’s a great method to finding more details on claims. I think the reason its been so heavily stigmatized in school is because of its convenience. It’s easy to use it as a crutch and hinder the research process. As great as it is to acknowledge its usefulness, it’s also important to note why a non-collegiate student should avoid it. Not that I advocate for a full ban of Wikipedia K-12, but I think it does require some restraint that not everyone is willing to follow. Sort of like learning the rules before you break them.

Comment on Week 8 – Wikipedia by li_05

li_05 — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:15:00 +0000

I found it very interesting to read about all the discourse surrounding Wikipedia. I’ve had teacher that have threatened to fail an entire paper if Wikipedia was used. He wasn’t a bad teacher, or even a particularly hard grader, he was so anti-Wikipedia. Mentioning it or if he saw our tabs open to Wikipedia would result in a long speech for the class! I remember when I first found the reference section of Wikipedia without getting caught and I wrote a paper using some of those references and when I turned it in I was surprised to find that he never found out despite him guaranteeing he would find out if we used it. Looking back I do understand why there was hesitation to use Wikipedia, however, by the time I was using it an academic capacity those bugs were already fixed and the process of adding new information was completely limited. I had friends who tried and within seconds were flagged and their “information” was erased from the site. Its such a useful tool that has such a bad stigma around it unfortunately. I still love using it to this day.

Comment on Week 12 by li_05

li_05 — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:11:27 +0000

I really enjoyed exploring the various writing voices that I got to work with throughout this class. Understanding your audience is really the biggest part of it for me, however, for certain pieces finding who you’re audience is other than like “online reader” can be so difficult. understanding HOW you present the information can also be another side of writing voice. I remember in our class we read an article where the shift to digital media and online writing cause a student to shift her perspective of how she delivered her material. in that case she decided to deliver her work in person going door to door. It’s interesting to see how it can also work the other way!

Comment on Week 7 Post by LKSOC1004

LKSOC1004 — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:03:52 +0000

HTML is quite the rollercoaster. In the beginning, it seems really intimidating. Learning all of the tags and figuring out the formatting on pictures feels like information overload. Then, you get your first HTML doc working. You set up some headings and paragraphs and feel accomplished. You then realize that you missed a couple things in the header. Easily fixed.

You put in some images. You put in some hyperlinks. Then, you open up the document in a viewer to see your creation. To your dismay, it looks horrible. This is the point where you realize that all the work you’ve done thus far is only half the battle. Suddenly, you feel eyes on the back of your head and a slight caress of breath on your neck. You realize that CSS is looming over you. Watching. Waiting. Plotting.

Within a few weeks, though, you get your bearings. You start being able to change colors and fonts, lay things out how you want (with a LOT of trial and error). Then, you start having ideas about menus, popups, animations etc. You then begin the cycle of struggle again to learn how to do these things. And what do you find? The same feeling of eyes, breath, and horror. You’re being hunted and the hunter is known only as “JavaScript”.

Despite all the struggles to figure out HTML, the farther you go and the more you experiment pays dividends. It is just so freeing. While the HTML journey is still very young for me, it is an exciting one. Not because of everything I can do, but because of everything I haven’t yet struggled to learn.

Comment on The Lost Art of Verification – W4 by LKSOC1004

LKSOC1004 — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:46:53 +0000

This post is really good! I love the addition of color accents and pictures. I think that the layout is really interesting too. For me, a linear, vertical layout easily loses me past a certain point. If something is long enough, my ADD kicks in and I start to get lost. The formatting decisions really help hold engagement because there isn’t really a point where everything blends in.

I also think the length you’ve went for here works super well. You’re trying to show how quick using some of the strategies from Verified are, so the piece being short and sweet works well.

I think the content here is particularly interesting, too. The idea of doing small things like this as a means of training yourself to be less susceptible to misinformation is an interesting idea. I, too, have wondered what the effect of passively seeing misinformation is and how much it actually affects you, even when you pass it by and don’t really engage with it. The “training” really touches on habit the same way that Aristotle does in Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle basically says what you have said here. When you build unhelpful habits, you do unhelpful things. So, if you take a period to act purposively and build a helpful or good habit, your automatic tendency will be to do helpful or good things.

Comment on Agreements and Disagreements: What’s the Point?! by LKSOC1004

LKSOC1004 — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:17:37 +0000

What is interesting about cheap signals is interrogating why they work. I mean, think about it. The seeds for cheap signals have been sown long before our current moment, right? The implied conclusion here is that cheap signals were present in the past. This reveals something about how people trust (and used to trust) a given piece of media or source. I think that, in the past, we trusted things in a very similar way to how we trust them now. People looked for the aesthetic of professionalism and epistemological responsibility. Now, people look for it elsewhere.

We could use the ramp up to the Iraq war as an example. Why did people trust the claims of the United States government leading up to the war? Well, we had the president, his cabinet, the Pentagon, Congress, and mainstream media sources all reporting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Was that true? No, it wasn’t. However, most people believed that it was.

What I am getting at here is that the Iraq war period in America shows that people blindly trusted the official agencies of the government and official news sources. What people did not have was a means of investigating these claims for themselves. What other explanation do we have for why the campaign to convince Americans that the invasion of Iraq was justified other than that Americans blindly trusted these agencies? The reality is that Americans’ trust was gained through the same cheap signals as its gained right now. Our ability to find truth in general has been unstable for far longer than the last ten or fifteen years.

Cheap signals work, but I don’t think that the reason they work is because something changed in us; rather, they work because nothing changed.