30 May 2017
documentationcoursesnetworked-media
Marshall McLuhan writes about the idea that "the medium is the message," arguing that the medium itself needs to be considered in addition to the content it carries. Moreover, the medium - a particular way of communicating - influences the meaning of the content itself. For example, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has a different meaning when it was delivered as a speech by Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863 as opposed to the transcript of that speech included in a high school textbook.
I like the ideas the McLuhan presents, which have been very influential in media studies and the development of medium studies. Particularly when developing creative projects that are presented on the web, it is important to consider the medium of the web and how that influences how a user encounters a project, how they interact with it, and the types of meaning they might infer from it. This is particularly challenging with the web because the medium is still relatively young and rapidly changing, thus difficult to understand its content will be perceived.
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The other part of the assignment was to build an app with Express that receives data through a form. Here's mine.