Round green shapes of varying sizes glow against the black background. The text reads, "Immersive."

Immersive #18: Verify Your Identity

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.

Round green shapes of varying sizes glow against the black background. The text reads, "Immersive."

Immersive #17: Texts from Random Strangers

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!