Reflection

This website project was inspired by my own personal experiences as someone who is not exactly ideal or wanted by the media, by popular culture, and my own experience living in the West. I have decided to make this project after I was inspired seeing my university's vlogging and promotional media for the campus. I felt like it was.. too sanitized, too perfect, and that these kids were too well-dressed, well-spoken, and didn't seem genuine at all. Almost like a "talking head" on television, and that's how I personally feel.I wanted to interview these people and leave these interviews almost open-ended so you can understand how they feel about themselves. Their ethnicity, their sex, their sexuality, everything about them that encompasses who they are and why they see the world the way they do. I chose to let them have a choice in what they could and could not answer out of personal choice due to the nature of the questions. Through the medium of a website and a text-based interview, it allowed me to interview with confidence with a familiar setting and a way I like to do things, that is, code a website. I wanted to leave the interview pages mostly open-ended and not ramble on or draw my own conclusions about how they felt because I also wanted the reader to decide how they felt about this person in the end.

The main message of this website is to show people who are not exactly "marketable" or what is not typically expected of college students. These people are disadvantaged in one way or another, and it isn't a bad thing. It is just something that should be shown, and not cast away in favour of something more "attractive" and "marketable", because humans are neither, and that is the beauty of human nature, or at least what I believe. I felt like the best way to approach the audience in the interviews is to realize that they are people just like us, around our ages, with goals and aspirations to make you feel relatable to them. I chose to pursue this method because that is the method I feel is the most effective for an interview. While designing it in the form of a website definitely is a risk, I think there is some merit to the use of a website, which balances it off. A website engages your ability to read through a personalized digital space. It is also accessible to people as long as they have an internet connection obviously, but you can use text to speech to read out the interviews on your PC if you cannot read.

I feel like a website is the “universal” medium to reach people. It is accessible, only requiring an Internet connection. But those with disabilities can use a program to read my website by using a webpage viewer on a text editor, they can have paragraphs be spoken out with text-to-speech assistance, they can zoom in further if my design of the website is not for their eyesight or personal comfort. Thus, aside from my own personal preference, is why I chose to code and use a website. I chose to use an “A and B” style of interview on my web page alongside with their body of work such as programming or arts complimenting the interview so you can truly see these people as someone you would meet at the library, at the cafe, someone who is just like you. Despite their ailments and struggles, you could shake their hand and see that their lifestyle is perhaps compatible with yours. These interviews are meant to invoke a connection with you on relatable, common issues. For as long as I was talking to them, it was a public forum and anything was fair game as long as they were willing to disclose this onto me and my public website, but I chose to exclude and leave behind any discussions of trauma and sensitive information for comfort of the subject. I continued to pursue this body of work because I do firmly believe in giving these people a voice.

You may have seen that at the end of each interview, there was a statement and cited statistics on people who are also struggling with the similar or same feelings, but on a grander empirical scale. This was so I could convey to you that it is more widespread and common to experience or feel discrimination or derision than just one person.

The risks I took to make this website were not anything major, but they were still present enough for me to note them mentally. First off, real life really does get in the way of what you need to do. My headset broke while conducting this and I could not talk to them over Discord to conduct the interviews, I had to use text. This however shrunk down the number of subjects I could have due to accessibility. Second off, platforming it on Neocities has it so I cannot really do much in terms of design beyond simple skeleton formatting with images due to money. While I would gladly give Neocities my patronage, it will not be for this project.