Tag: comic

It’s always a joy to walk around a building and look at all the little drawings and posters scattered around. Often times, the little notes that I find around campus are positive acts of kindness that remind me to take a step back and take a breath once in a while, although the hashtag causes me to take a double take in a different way. Either way, there’s something special about the anonymity of the sender, knowing that they took the time to leave the note for everyone else to see. And, the fact that the message resonates deep within you when you stop and take a look indicates a deeper understanding about a shared human condition. While this post may not be anonymous, I hope you all take care regardless, and I’m sending good energy your way!

2FA, or two-factor authentication, is both an amazing way to have that sweet, sweet additional layer of security and a nuisance that draws me out of my mindless routine of plugging in a password and username. As a whole, the process causes us to look elsewhere for confirmation and verification that yes, we are not a robot or a scam artist or someone who just happened to guess a random login correctly. I’d imagine that this process is typically automated since surely there’s not another person on the other side of the login screen waiting to send me a random keyboard smash (“dfghjk”) to verify my credentials. So, in a way, we’re speaking directly to the system by asking for access into a digital database and confirming our unique identity through providing a digital key. Even though this description barely scratches the surface, I’d say that all of this encryption and cybersecurity technology is super cool stuff to learn more about. After all, it’s only going to become even more prevalent in how we access digital spaces and store our personal information in both the present and near future.

Recently, I was messaged by a random number asking to catch up in a totally normal “we live in a pandemic and I haven’t contacted you in a while” setting. While I wasn’t the correct recipient and was later addressed as “sir”, it made me wonder about the messages we shoot into the dark and how we assume it’ll reach the right person. There’s so much context that is implied in these messages, yet when we aren’t in the know it can come off as quite odd. It makes you think a lot about the lives of people you’ve never met before and what is going on in their own heads right then and there. Are they nonchalant about making a simple mistake? Or are they on the other end of the spectrum and freaking out about disclosing potentially personal information to a stranger who could hold it hostage? Nevertheless, I don’t mind being sent a harmless message or two, it gives me something interesting to talk about for the next week!

Note: Welcome to Immersive v3! We’ll be making a lot more comics this semester and thinking about context within communications, so stay tuned!