This week the blog turned a corner. It ceased to be quite so much about automatic, machine-led, machine readable content, and became more curated. The human reader was brought slightly further back into the picture.
In many ways, the blog had become too post-human. It collected things automatically, in ways that made sense to the machine.
Since the beginning of this semester, I’ve struggled with that. It was ugly. It was hard to read. It was unfriendly to the audience I was trying to reach–primarily the rest of the MScECD cohort, who are humans… and me.
The machine reading was glitchy too. The tags didn’t work, there were no analytics. I had no idea if the bots are crawling over my text and finding useful metadata to feed into search engines and algorithms.
And there there are my very human glitches. I wear glasses, partly because I’m short sighted, partly because I have strong astigmatism. I’m also slightly dyslexic. And I get travel sick very easily. I usually have great coping strategies, but I can’t bear it when things flicker or move. Or when it’s hard to scan the text, and the text starts to move on its own (or rather it moves somewhere between my retina and my brain). That makes me feel ill.
So we have a truly embodied reading experience. A human reading experience. A flawed reading experience at the centre of this.
And so this week I moved to curation, to clickbait headlines, to careful selection of a broad stream of sources. I think that will help.