The Post Secret website was interesting because it was much lighter in terms of trying to promote an altruistic cause. When I first started reading it, it reminded me of the Missed Connections ad that was circulating around Facebook last week. They’re both forms of information that serve to say something that the person would not or could not say to another person at one point in time. It’s an interesting, voyeuristic site that encourages participation in a less socially-conscious manner than what the class has been discussing recently.
I also checked out The Good Life website and watched several of the videos where people from several different Latin American countries were all asked the same questions in regards to the U.S. and democracy. I was surprised to see their responses to some of the questions about them not knowing of a US intervention in Latin America and that their feelings of US monopolization.
I really wanted to like the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank website, but I didn’t think the site was well-designed. I would have liked to have seen the photo galleries done much differently where you didn’t have to click on every single one and wait for the page to slowly load. However, it did have a lot of user-generated content which was interesting to view.
Overall, I had a hard time looking at these sites as databases because they’re not traditionally what I think of when the term “database” comes to mind. Also, I view databases as maybe more of a place where you would go to find actual quantitative data to convey factual information. I had a really hard time trying to figure out what sort of paper or project I would be doing that would make me go to these sites to look in these databases and grab solid content.
Leave a Reply