ENC4416 has been an interesting experience. The course managed to cover a wide arrange of topics which were surprisingly relevant in today’s era of evolving online rhetoric. The course touched on topics such as scope and effect of online media, brought attention to both the developer end and user end of technology, and the various etiquettes of online interactions. The course not only touched on these topics, but also explained the implications thereof and provided relevant examples of the topics. The course also managed to incorporate current events into the course, which only reinforced the releventness of the topics being discussed and taught. For example, one day we discussed the Johnny Cash Project, in where country artist Johnny Cash gave fans the ability to submit their own art to replace frames of his music video for the song “Ain’t No Grave”. The project gave the user the ability to ‘contribute’ to something larger than them, which is a reoccurring theme that came up in the course. For me personally, seeing a project like this was especially interesting. While I was aware of large projects or movements that were brought about by communities of people on the internet, they were always somewhat dehumanizing: regardless of how big the group is and what they set out to accomplish, the group itself is normally represented by the number of people within the group, and a list of the accomplishments or goals they set out to achieve. However, this project in particular was different for me. While viewing the video, it graphical interface gave the user the ability to view the artwork that was submitted for the project. More specifically, the artwork submitted for each individual frame. Given that the music video is about 1300 frame long, and there are 10+ pieces of artwork per frame (with other frames having a significantly higher amount), that gives us a minimum of 13000 different pieces of artwork that were submitted to this project. UPDATE: A quick google search revealed that the project had over 250,000 unique pieces of artwork as of 2011, 5 years ago, meaning the number is higher now. The project not only bolsters impressive numbers, but also managed to not make the individual member a statistic by showcasing the work that they had contributed to the project. The combination of sense of scale, impact, and the overarching product made this particular example stand out to me, as not many other projects or organizations that I knew of at the time were able to create such an balanced impact. It is for this reason that this project in particular really made an impression on me. Likewise, toward the end of the course we covered web auditing. I found this also to be particularly interesting. I like to liken this sort of topic to that of the relationship between an average person and a musician, in that while the musician has a background in what makes things sound ‘good’ ultimately the average person has the final verdict on what ‘is’ good regardless of what background they hail from. In other words, they have the ability to say whether something is bad or not regardless of if they actually know anything on the subject. This leads to a bit of a gridlock between creator and consumer, as the consumer doesn’t like it (and doesn’t know why), and thus cannot tell the creator what to fix. This is when a third party can be called in, a person who is neither a clueless consumer, nor the creator of this particular piece of content. It is these people who can provide constructive criticism for the creator in order to improve the product. Prior to this course, I was a simple ‘clueless’ consumer, that could only tell what was good or not, but not necessarily state the reason as to why it was good or not. The section of this course that involved web auditing allowed me to attain a deeper understanding of what makes or breaks a website, which is was something that I found particularly interesting in this course.