Leave a Message for Nitsa Mc
Carthy?PSY. 409
Oct. - 03 - 1995
W/ DR. LEON JAMES
Week 6 Report
Assignment:
Catch up
with all the tasks left undone; beautify your Home Page with icons and other methods you can copy from others on the
World Wide Web.
Self-assessment ratings
How difficult was this week's task (lumping all the sub-tasks
together)?
Circle one.
Very easy 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Very hard
This week's rating = 8
How much Negative emotions did it cost you, in all?
Very little 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Very much
This week's rating = 8
How Valuable for later use is this knowledge or skill going to be for
you?
Not useful 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Very useful
This week's rating = 10
How likely is it that you'll be getting good at this week's tasks?
Not likely 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Quite likely
This week's rating = 10
How satisfied are you with the computer and Internet systems?
Not satisfied 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Very satisfied
This week's rating = 5
How hard did you try to get through this week's tasks?
Gave up easily 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Refused to give
up
This week's rating = 10
A straight-forward, yet, tedious
task...
This week's task allowed me to catch up with composing and publishing
my team-reports, and to modify or "beautify" my Home Page. I felt great since
the task was very straight-forward and wasn't difficult. I decided first to
write my team-reports and felt fortunate to have my oral presentation notes,
including links, to the various locations that I had found. Well, it was a
tedious work to write all the reports and it took a while, but I felt great
satisfaction once I finished to write them all. I do not know why I let these
team-reports accumulate in such a way. I usually do not tolerate
procrastination. There is a saying in Hebrew that I often heed: don't put off
until tomorrow things that you can accomplish today (translation).
After I finished writing my team-reports I decided to beautify and modify my Home Page. Subsequently, I linked from my Home Page to Dr. James' Home Page and then to his selection of icons. He has an interesting great selection: you should check it out. I reviewed each image in his five icons' indexes and wrote down the addresses or links of my favorite.
An interwoven
hypertext?
Next, I decided to make some changes to my Home Page. I wanted the first page
of my Home Page to include only major links such as links to my weekly reports,
my team-reports, Dr. James's Home Page, and links to Generation 1 Home Page. I
didn't know how to do it so I opened several Home Pages of my classmates and
viewed their sources. Then I opened my Home Page file in Pico, copied all my
week's reports to a new file in Pico, gave the file a name, pasted what I had
copied, and added a title and other things to it. I followed the same
procedure with my team-reports file. Left in my Home Page file in Pico were
only the higher links in my links' hierarchy.
I felt really good about myself because I used some logic while modifying my Home Page. That is, when I opened my Home Page file in Pico I saw the list of all my documents but I didn't know how to create a link within a link. The students' sources that I reviewed didn't show it. I thought for a while and decided, through trial and error, to create a new file for each higher link. It does feel good when you can wipe the dust from your brain and use it.
Oh Mighty fossilized errors...please leave
me alone
Now that I had accomplished my goal, I wanted to view my modified Home Page in
Netscape. I clicked on the Netscape's window and on Reload, but the alteration
to my Home Page didn't appear. I decided to quit Netscape and to reconnect;
again nothing happened. What is happening!? What's happened to Netscape? No!
Don't tell me that it is those fossilized errors again! Think about it: just
when everything works smoothly and you naively feel so great and confident
about yourself, those (yes! those...) mighty, senseless, tiresome fossilized
errors just lurk from around the corner, bombarding you like a pain in the
neck. Wouldn't you freak-out, scream, pull your hair in agony, or be
overwhelmed by frustration? This is how negatively I felt at that time. Yet,
things did turn out OK in the end. It took Netscape one and a half days to
accept my changes. Maybe Netscape decided to close its system for the day and
go to church. Who knows!
Who are the people behind those
pages???
In sum, I think that communication on the Internet is fast becoming one of the
great methods of social-interaction in our times. But, it happens in a very
sterile edited environment where the identity of the person is contained in a
two dimensional representation that is open to much manipulation. Is the
person that is writing on the Home Page the same person that we would meet in
person? I don't believe they are. Several reasons make me arrive at this
conclusion. First, with personal interaction we are also absorbing the
unspoken body language of that person. This sensory data provides us with
information about that person that we cannot get from a computer screen.
Secondly, people behave differently with others when they are in contact with
them. A person that would otherwise be painfully shy can hide him/herself and
adopt a new image in this so called cyberspace because in virtual reality
nobody is watching them and no one really knows him or her if s/he does not
reveal his/her true identity. Finally, there is a sense that in cyberspace one
can create one's own reality that has no basis in fact. In conclusion then,
"netting" is a sterile, safe method for techno-nerds or techno-addicts, unlike
me, to interface with their brethren.