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2/25/2004

From one blog to the next: Usability review 

For this review on website usability, I decided to visit a site that you’d think would have to be pretty darn usable considering its subject: the George W. Bush Official Blog. This is only one section of the many-layered georgewbush.com but I will use the blog page as my starting point.

The first thing I noticed, using Netscape as my browser, was that the links to different sections of the website looked all squished together and were difficult to read. Reluctantly, I switched to Internet Explorer to continue my search. Ah, much better.

Now, where to begin? There are a series of sections listed at the top of the page which link to other sections in the site, but I think I’ll stay put for now. I read a few lines of the first post, easily distinguished from the next by clear, red text… fight against terrorists, economic reform, blah blah blah. There is a list of previous posts on the right oranized by subject, title and date. How convenient! I click on ‘Environment’ and the page refreshes with a series of posts all relating to healthy forests, clean air and the like. There are some highlighted sentences within the posts linking to different sources but they all pop-up in different windows, so I can click ‘em closed and be right back at the GWB blog. Plus, the links on the right are still there so I can easily switch topics to something like ‘Homeland Security’ or ‘Compassion’.

Also on the right, there is an image of the official logo of the Bush Blog which links to a section where you can download news feeds and campaign countdown markers to put on your own web page. Sounds fun. Click, click. On this page, the links on the right are gone but there is a new link on the top which will take you back to the main page of the blog. No need for the browser’s back button here!

In the column on the left, there is a little search button where I can search within the blog and right under it there is a nice little link to search within the entire site. I type in ‘Patriot act’ and six results show up. At the top of the page, I can decide how I want to view the results (by title or by date) or I can limit my search and only look for a result within a certain time frame by clicking ‘Advanced Blog Search’. There is also another nice little link to view the results for the same query if I had searched the entire page. Isn’t that thoughtful.

Hmmm, I wonder how this site has changed over time. Let’s take a trip to archive.com to find out, shall we? Well, first of all, back in 2000, during his first election campaign, George W. didn’t have a weblog, but his official site was up and running nevertheless. It was somewhat simpler, mostly because there was a lot less content, but it followed basically the same format his site does now, that is with unchanging words along the top which link to different sections and an easy to use search button which creates a clean and simple, user-friendly website.

P.S. I tried to include screen shots of the web pages discussed but my iMac is being uncharacteristically un-usable at the moment and won't let me. I'll try to add some later.


***Disclaimer: The ideas expressed in this post or on georgewbush.com in no way reflect the political views of the owners of this blog.


Boo-urns 

I just checked our blog in Internet Explorer and none of the photos work. what's up with that?

2/12/2004

once upon a time... 

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Mira and she had to make a self-portrait with a friendly little program named photoshop. Now, she and photoshop were no strangers. You might even say they'd been around the block a few times. But FTP-ing? Hmm, this could be tricky, she thought. But, undeterred, she whipped together some images of her in a nutshell, captured them onto a cd and away she went. A layer here, some cropping there, lots of "lets see what'll happen if I click this" and ta da! A self-portrait emerged.

plugged

But how will this picture of mine ever be seen if it's stuck in my computer? she thought. Where is the "upload" button? How the heck would an upload button even work?

Looking for answers, she found a conveniently placed FTP-ing tutorial in the mac lab at school. After trying a gazillion passwords (aparently Qwert6 is too close to a real dictionary word), alcor was finally pleased and let her do her thing. Following the simple steps broken down on the hand out, Mira's photo was online in no time. Easy! But, hmm, does it look duller to you on the site or is it just me, she asked? Is there any way to un-upload it or is it stuck there for good? Just switch the command put/ to del/, TA Eric said, and you're all set. Goodie! said Mira. A few touch ups later and her self-portrait was ready for its close-up.

Now it's living happily ever after on her alcor account and her beloved blog, too.

The end.

2/02/2004

Video Game Misrepresentations 

Nina Huntemann's documentary Game Over: Gender, Race and Violence in Video Games is, as the name suggests, a look at the problematic representations of race and sexuality within violent video games. By now, most of us have heard these issues before. In such an imperfect world as the one we live in, almost nothing escapes the critique and finger pointing of a culture looking for someone (or something) to blame for its flaws. ("Surely the Columbine shooters must have played video games and listened to death metal", etc, etc.) But, as was pointed out by a few individuals in the film, video games and the technology they spawn from are not inherently evil. So have they become increasingly gory and violent because somewhere down the line that's what the consumers, in this case usually young men, have asked for? An escapist, fantasy world in which they are aggressive, hypermasculin beings who have total control over their environment, including the women who inhabit it? Perhaps.

Now I don't mean to be a stick-in-the-mud and I'm certainly not saying we should burn every game in sight (heck, they're kind of fun). But I do think that the producers of these games have a responsibility to move away from their representations of women as mere sexual objects and towards a more fair and accurate portrayal of empowered females. And I'm not talking about Lara Croft, either. That's hardly an improvement.


However, what I found even more offensive than the representation of women within the video games themselves, since those are obviously not real , was the objectification of women in the video game ads. Girls tied to beds and standing around in bikinis? Give me a break. Talk about alienating any female gamers who might have been interested in the game otherwise. Apparently 35% of video game players are now women and I'm sure that number would be a lot higher if their were some strong, independent and healthily proportioned female characters out there.

But what I find most frustrating is that, during our discussion after the film, while most of the girls in class said they didn't agree with the gender stereotypes being presented in the video games in question, no one was particularly outraged or even all that offended. We've gotten so used to it that it just seems normal. We're comfortable with our place in society and don't feel oppressed or objectified in real life, so we've given up on fighting for the same equality within media representation. But why should we have one standard for reality and another, more lenient one for representations? If a young boy is playing x number of video games a day in which all he sees are scantily clad women, then seeing similar images in ads around the city and on tv and in mainstream films and just about anywhere you look, isn't that eventually going to ad up and affect his views of women in real life? I would think so. As one man said in the documentary, there is no clearly defined switch from reality to fiction and I would tend to agree.

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