For this week’s blog post, I chose to respond to Lev Manovitch’s Visual Semiotics, Media Theory, and Cultural Analysis. In the essay Manovitch mentions how  text became relateable to how we study visual arts and media, based off a work that he read. He himself found, through his own study, that certain ways of readin texts ina computerized way, is impossible. From this I realized that even when we want to progress, and keep doing so, we will have stumbling blocks. We live in th age of computers, and therefore we think we are invincible in that field, but this shows me otherwise. As much as we live in the year 2018, and we already have self driving machines, and computers, and anything that comes after that is just a continually fixed or progressed edition or version. With that being said, we need to keep ourselves in check. We aren’t invincible. We cant play higher powers that can from the impossible overnight. We are humans, who hit bumps in the road, and this paper really showed me why.

For this weeks blog post, I chose to write about “I’m an Addict” and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.” After reading this article it made me think about how much technology has changed over the years. I remeber having a flip phone when I was in high school and having free minutes after 9PM and free calls on weekends. I remember when dial up internet wouldnt work when someone was on the phone or when the phone wouldnt work when someone was on the internet. These small annoying things made you not want to use the internet or phone. It’s so weird how now we are all glued to our phones. Before I got a car I used to be the girl that sat on the bus and train glued to my phone to make time pass and forget about how long it would take to get home. I am married to a man that loves technology he always wants the latest phones, apple watches, go pros, fastest internet, eventually it rubbed off on me and I love technology. My husband purched the “nest” and now I can see whos at my door, I can hear everything, I get notifications etc.

All my life I was never good at speaking in front of people. I always get nervous, I turn red, I forget what I want to say. The hardest part for me was standing up in front of the class and talking, especially about something so close to my heart. I spoke very briefly about my families history in Albania. When I wrote about the story it was much more meaningful. I feel like I was able to write more then I thought, it just flowed much better. I wrote a lot more but I erased a lot because it would be a long essay. My uncle wrote a book on my families history and he is currently waiting for the editors to finish their part so that the book could be released. I get very emotional when I think about everything my family has been through and everything they have sacrificed for a better life. God Bless America!

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=c0a0a3ea74e2ded3f229055db1dc1244&panels=cirrus,reader,trends,summary,contexts

The story that I told in class was the story of how I decided to start my own online company. In class, I felt that I was not able to go into as much detail as I would have liked. In this assignment, I plan on elaborating more about what essentially brought me to the idea of starting my own e-commerce clothing brand.
Rewinding back to a few years ago, I suddenly got the idea of trying to start my own company and essentially wanting to sell a product. I don’t know how exactly I came to the realization that I wanted to start my own company, but I knew that it was something I definitely wanted to try. I knew that I wanted my name on a product and that I wanted to create something that people used on the daily. The first product I was trying to sell was my homemade hair masks. I was in love with anything beauty and I wanted to try to make my own product that people could use at home to enhance their beauty overall. After buying a ton of mason jars and mixing both egg, olive oil and mayo together, I decided to use my boyfriend as a guinea pig and test my hair masks on him. Not only did it make his hair extremely greasy, but it was horribly messy. I had the feeling that my hair masks were not the route I wanted to go down.
After some evaluation, I decided to try making body scrubs. I put the mason jars that I purchased to use and started concocting. I bought a heaping abundance of body lotion, sugar, food coloring, fruit extracts and started getting to work. I came up with names for my body scrubs that sounded appealing like “Creamy Coconut” and “Orange Creamsickle”. I even made an Instagram page and a Tumblr page for my body scrubs as well. I tried selling my products on Etsy, however I started getting the feeling again that my body scrubs weren’t going to work out.
I knew I had to think of a different approach but I really had no idea what else to start selling. One time I took my old hair extensions and dyed them different colors. I tried to sell each of my funky hair accessories for fifteen dollars each, but that idea soon came to an end as well.
Finally, I came up with an idea that I knew that I wanted to invest in. After coming across a friend’s Instagram page, I noticed that she was selling crewneck sweatshirts. After doing some investigating, I noticed that she had a YouTube channel with over 17,000 subscribers! It was at that moment that I decided that I wanted to start a YouTube channel and work on being a beauty and fashion influencer. I created my channel back in 2016 and I worked at it for over two years. I had the privilege to work with several beauty companies and help advertise their products. I noticed that for a little while I had stopped worrying about selling my own products and I worried more about branding myself on the internet. However, after many sleepless nights due to spending hours editing, my channel became more of a chore and a complete stress to me. I noticed over that time I developed severe anxiety. Although I suffered with anxiety before, my anxiety had never been this out of hand. I knew it was time to sit down and reevaluate again.
After taking some time off of YouTube and just focusing on enjoying myself and my life overall, I knew I was ready to jump back into another project. One day at work, I thought to myself how I wanted to start my own company. I came up with the idea of selling loungewear and channeling my style into a project. I wanted to see myself in something that I created. I contacted a friend of mine, who has had a ton of experience in creating online companies, and we got to work. My mentor had asked me what my purpose in starting this company essentially was because we needed to get down to the nitty gritty about what my company was going to be about. After much thinking and much accessing, I noticed that I was the type that always kept grinding and wanting to work on something that I could call my own someday. I noticed the reason as to why I wanted to create a company was because I am happiest and less stressed when I am focusing on a positive project. I felt like working on a project was a way of coping with my anxiety. It was at that moment that I decided I wanted to start a clothing company that raised anxiety awareness.
Until this day, I have been working alongside my mentor and I have been watching my company come to life. I have finally found the project worth working on. In starting this business, I am learning all of the steps to starting a company properly and slowly I am watching my dreams come true. I am the happiest I have ever been and my anxiety has been moderately low. We are hoping to launch my company, Nova & Skye, sometime in February! I am so happy that I am able to channel my anxiety into a positive project as well as help raise awareness for anxiety and mental health!

My story was a personal story about how I convinced my parents to let me move to New York. Telling it out-loud was most difficult because I do not personally like talking about personal things in front of people I do not know. Writing it down felt as if the story was true; I felt like since it was written down, it now has more validity. When thinking about how to tell this story with computers, I really was unsure of what to do. To me, just seeing it written down on a computer screen felt technological enough. Then I came to the conclusion of making the story through gifs. Gifs influence the way people talk to one another. You can send someone a gif and they will understand what you mean through the context of the conversation.

This story may not make sense to anybody if they do not understand the pretext, but that is the whole point of computers. It simplifies communication, but only if people understand the way you are using it. No one understands the coding behind the websites we use, but people do because they created it and that’s what matters.