Tawn's Trail

Tawn provided me with a list of clues to follow online. Her digital trail took me through Barack Obama's wiki page, the white house site, flickr, yahoo, Hana's personal site, and finally the Neighborhood Narratives site. The part I enjoyed most about the experience was the unexpectedness of it all. When you follow directions to a place you've never been too in real life, there is always a great sense of satisfaction in having navigated to your destination successfully. I didn't expect to have that feeling when I finished following the clues, but I did. Another thing that caught me off guard was how linked together everything was. Since I'm not a big blogger or tweeter I've never paid attention to "share this" links on websites before; now I'm beginning to see that they are everywhere. To tie this back to the idea of public space we discussed in our first class, I think that the more content we link together the greater "digital public space" becomes. There is no doubt that this digital public space links communities and people together who otherwise could not interact with one another, but at what cost to the individuals privacy and rights?