Poetics

I put together 4 pages using pictures, quotes, giphs, and videos. I first approached this by thinking about what things in life I have an affinity toward, whether it be food, tv show characters, music, philosophies, etc. Since my presence on social media is limited, I didn’t have much digital content to draw from it. Instead, I resorted to using Google images a lot to find pictures of those affinities of mine, and found lots of giphs as well. I made a folder on my desktop called “ScreenSelfPortrait” and spent a few hours just dumping usable content from the internet into the folder. After I felt I had collected enough “me” content in there, I scrolled through to try and imagine an organization I could utilize for my 4 (or more) pages. I noticed that there were several things that were probably commonplace affinities, like funny cat giphs and hiking pictures, and yet several other things that were more unique to who I am, like Christian quotes and physics stuff, so I decided to organize my pages from less personal to more personal over 4 pages. I chose the titles: “Touching the Surface,” “Knee Deep,” “Under the Surface,” and “Charles,” obviously trending from less personal content to deeply personal content. To avoid being overly concrete, I tried to sort of sprinkle this trend throughout the pages, e.g. putting a funny cat giph on the “Charles” page. After putting it all together in this way I noticed that there wasn’t all that much personal stuff, there was too much “Touching the Surface” type-stuff and not enough “Charles” type-stuff. So I began some introspection for a while to think about what I hold more dearly in life, and came upon the quotes and beliefs that are more “me.” I found more content and organized it accordingly. The page names didn’t come to me until later in the development. I knew of the impersonal to personal trend I was shooting for, but hadn’t put a label on it. So I thought of my digital self as a kind of Gobstopper, with some layers being more central to my mediated digital experience than others. The quotes I chose for the end were words I hold in high regard, and helped me think of my identity in terms of this digital, mediated experience. I figured the best title for the central layer of my identity Gobstopper was my name, Charles. I knew we were encouraged to be creative with our organization so I did exactly that.