Blog Post 12: Final Blog

This final blog is an opportunity to reflect on the blog posts and work I’ve done throughout the year, and where I’m off to next.

Re-encountering My Work

The most interesting and educating blog I did was the first blog for society and tech. For this blog, I listened to the Databite podcast on Red-Teaming AI. This was such a different topic from the others, and I was able to chose the one that stood out the most to me, so it ended up being the one that I liked the most. I specifically enjoyed the different perspectives all of the hosts brought up, and I think that is a factor that is missing in the other blog posts, and made it stand out.

The most eye-opening blog was the most recent one on privacy. To me, this one touched on something that I have been trying to avoid thinking about for a while, so it really opened me to the idea that way more than we think is permanent, and we have no regulations that determines how your data is deleted, or who can access that private, deleted information. In addition, I appreciated how open-ended the conclusion was, as there was no ‘optimal’ solution. Instead, there were several different options, all with pros and cons.

I never ended up doing a blog revision for this course. However, I did fundamentally change the way I completed my blog posts. I started completing the blog posts as a simple to do list - I went through the guidelines, and tried to write a couple sentences on each question. Whilst this did technically complete the assignment, I was missing the whole point of these blog posts. After receiving feedback on my first couple of blog posts, I realized I shouldn’t be worried about hitting all of the marks. Instead, I needed to focus on developing my work for myself. I started to treat the prompts not as simple questions on the reading, but as things I needed to reflect on myself. This created a giant change - my responses got longer, and I started putting my opinions and thoughts into them. This transformed how I read the case studies. Instead of simply looking through them, and taking them as fact, I started to analyze how I felt about them, and how I could see their findings and datapoints in my own life. It elevated the way I was doing the assignments, and how I was thinking about the case studies in general.

Understanding The Writing Process

These blog posts were a perfect opportunity for me to develop my writing skills. Through their completion, I’ve gotten better at writing about how I feel, and not how others think I should feel. It has also gotten significantly easier and quicker for me to write - the words flow much smoother, and I’ve not had to find the right word nearly as often. I think the biggest help to this was simply the open-ended questions, that gave me space to synthesize new ideas for myself, and put them to words in the same breath. In addition, structuring these as personal blog posts, with creative liberty on how we choose to display them, allowed me to enjoy the writing more, and feel like it was much easier for me to impart my own personality and choices into the work. My only gripe with these was the length of the case studies we read - while they were very informative, having to read a website that long got difficult, as it was hard to save my spot in the reading, and I couldn’t easily mark it up.

As a format, I greatly appreciated the blog posts. As I mentioned previously, having the freedom to structure my writing however I wanted made it much more enjoyable, and having some sort of ‘CS-ness’ to the writing assignments helped me keep up my knowledge of the git software and have some fun with the work. I was able to play with the markdown, formatting my blog posts in a fun way, that isn’t there when you write simple essays in a google doc. The audience also helped this be easier. Since we weren’t writing just for our professor in a classic environment, I found that I was more comfortable writing things in a way that made sense to me, instead of in the perfect ‘optimal’ writing that I would use on a classic assignment.

Using this better format, I found myself falling into a routine for the blogs that I found the easiest. I would read the case study one day, and then on the next, write up the blog. I always structured the blog the same, following the topics we needed to cover in the assignment, and just write. I found that having a separate day to do the writing meant I wasn’t already burnt out by the reading when it came time to start writing, and I was able to spend more time on each question. As the semester progressed, I made the change to using obsidian for all of my post development. I’ve used obsidian since the start of the summer for some quick notes, but transitioning to using it for the blog posts allowed me to simply pick up where I left off on any device I had, and not have to worry about setting up my codespace, or anything like that.

Connecting to the Course

I had the most fun writing about the ecological topics, as they focus more closely on my desired area of expertise. I love learning about the hardware side of CS, so it was very interesting to learn more about how tech affects our environment, and what we can do to stop it. They also are generally more accessible and actionable topics, which means that I can suggest changes to people around me that will have an affect on the situation as a whole. It also meant I was able to come up with my own plans for how I will change, which again made it a more interactive and enjoyable blog to write.

Throughout writing these blogs, I also was able to understand the material in class more. There were countless times where I could cite the case studies as we were discussing things in class, and use the information I learned on the blogs to have a broader perspective on the issues discussed in class. In the same fashion, the topics we covered in class allowed me to connect the individual cases we saw in the case studies to the global problems we saw in class. One moment that stood out to me was when I was listening to the podcast on Red Teaming AI, and was able to draw on the previous discussions we had on AI policies and companies to really understand the greater context for the issues.

Going Forward

After this class, and this final blog post, I want to continue to use my website as a tool to showcase my work. I plan to update it to include the projects I have done, and discuss the paper I have written. I don’t think I will continue these blog posts, as they take a lot of effort and time to complete, but if I find myself terribly passionate about an issue, I will most likely use this website as an outlet for my concerns.

I do, however, plan to use my writing skills and habits I gained through this course to be more intentional with writing down my thoughts, and do more active reflections on what is going on around me. I don’t plan on becoming a novelist or a journalist, but some journaling just for myself will be a great help.

Along those lines, I aim to write down a reflection of my thoughts about an assignment before I start it. This will most likely just be a paragraph or set of bullet points about how I will complete the assignment and what I aim to get out of it, but it should help me be more intentional about how I am completing them, and not spend time developing something that won’t be useful for the assignment.

All in all, I really appreciated the opportunity to create this website, and these blogs. I have had an great time in Computing Ethics and Society!