User:Peach/year-2-thoughts

Welcome to Peach's Year 2 Thoughts. This is a page dedicated to writing down ideas and opinions related to Peach's study. For a documentation of the sessions Peach attends, please go to the Year 2 Journal page

September 18

I have a general idea on what interests me and what I can focus my study on. It lies somewhere at the intersection of online culture, social media, access to information and politics. I'm interested in the way social media is used as a news outlet, especially in situations where mainstream news outlets are censored by authoritarian governments or the companies that buy their ads. I'm also interested in how fake news, as well as conspiracy theories spread. And I'm interested in the ways information is distorted on the internet, by government trolls, brands, people themselves. If I had to summarize all this, I think I would say "I'm interested in censorship and propoganda." This interest, started around the same time I started university. When there were nationwide anti government protests in my home country, the biggest news channel of the time stopped broadcasting news and aired a documentary about penguins instead. These protests taught me the importance of media literacy and fact checking in an online context. In the next seven years I witnessed the diminish of civil liberties and economic mobility for the public, and the rise of media suppression and propaganda campaigns. And during my study in communication design, I wanted to focus on doing design that was "good" for people. I struggle a lot with the concept of usefulness regarding my design work, and this motivates me to explore social, economic and political subjects through a lens of design.

September 21

We teamed up with Anna and Clara, and also talked about possible formats of the Py.rate.chnic session today. Among these I'm really interested in treasure hunt (can be online or offline), gaming session (can also be online or offline) and design challenge. I think treasure hunt (and maybe gaming session but I like the idea of treasure hunt more) can really combine the interests and motivations of all three of us. Exploring interactivity and storytelling in the process if this session can be nice for me, additionally, I've been studying processing and arduino and I would like to also get more practice on them.

I'm thinking about possible mediums to work with and games are one of them. Interactivity can be a useful tool to get a message across. I really liked Depression Quest for the way it uses the medium of a text based adventure game to give the player an understanding of living with depression, and achieves this primarily through manipulation of basic principles of text based adventure games. Another game I like is 2:22 AM. It evokes the feeling of watching TV past my bedtime when I was a kid. It's not that related to my study but I think it's cool which is why I want to write it down here.