I wanted to say that the class wasn’t really what I was expecting, but then I realized that I wasn’t really sure what I was expecting. I learned about it because someone in the CS department sent out an email about it and it seemed interesting. One of the reasons I minored in Anthropology was because my CS classes were always so devoid of any social discussion or politics, and I needed something that focused more on people. This class seemed like it would be more a combination of social issues and computing, so I took it. And in some ways it was, although I was a little disappointed by the lack of understanding of technology that most of the people in the class had (there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just that it would have allowed for more in depth understanding and discussion of things like privacy and games, which are influenced heavily by their underlying systems). I’ve been exposed to internet cultures my entire life, and I’ve become deeply entrenched in many of them over the years (I spend an unhealthy amount of time online). It was interesting to talk about things like games, which I’ve spent a great deal of time analyzing and critiquing, in class and hear what everyone else thought about them. I’ve been familiar with many of the topics in the class for a long time, and it was nice to be able to think and talk about them in an academic setting.

The topic I was probably least familiar with was web series, which my team worked on. I enjoyed finding and watching different series as research, I had no idea how many were out there and the range of topics they covered. I’ll definitely watch more of some of the ones we looked and, and look for more good ones. Most of the content on mainstream shows is just really boring to me at this point, if there are no lesbians I probably don’t care. So it’s good to have a source of series that in a lot of ways are breaking away from mainstream tropes and standards and creating wonderful original things.

Working in teams was something that I’d done before in at least one CS class, but this was a somewhat different context. It was frustrating that some of the people we tried to interview worked out badly, and it was harder to work on the final project with what little of the interviews we did have. There were also a few technical problems (the trial version of the skype recorder, Adobe Premier save files not being backwards compatible) but we managed to get everything done. Despite the problems with the interviews, I really enjoyed hearing what the interviewees had to say about what they were doing, it’s always great to watch someone passionate about something talk about it. I initially reached out to Amber Jones and watched a significant portion of the show that she was on, Between Women, so I was disappointed that I could only see 5 minutes of her interview, but it was good to see just that and I’m glad it went well.