English 5365 - Internet Writing: Week 7 Blog Assignment

As a user of visual media online, what aspects of interactivity and visual presentation have you come to expect in online publications and Web sites?

I may be slightly strange in that I do not like a lot of visual whirl-a-gigs. Flashing bits here and there drive me to distraction. Overambitious Flash menus make me queasy. So I may be a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to visual presentation. I expect a clean display with easy to read text. If something on the page flashes or blinks, I expect it to do something or be a link to something important. If it just sits there, flashing, it annoys me.

If I watch a video online, I expect it to be no more than a couple of minutes. Though I have occasionally watched a television show on Hulu with my husband, the rule generally applies that I will stop watching a video if it is too long or if it is boring or poorly made.

In most websites, interactivity is represented by the comments. I expect someone to read the comments, although I do not necessarily expect a reply. That said, I rarely look at the comments on news stories. Those leaving the comments seem to take advantage of their anonymity to be divisive, dismissive, and downright rude. They seem to be more the type of thing one would expect to see on a bad day time talk show.

CNN recently addresses the issue of negative comments. The result is that no one quite knows what to do about these types of comments on the larger blogs or news sites. It is easy for me to moderate comments, but sites that get many comments struggle with the task. They also struggle with the representation of free speech; they cannot be perceived as favoring one side of an argument over another. It is a difficult position.

Since we expect interactivity, we have to take the good with the bad and perhaps find a way to police ourselves.