In fall semester 2016, I taught an advanced web design course in the undergraduate Professional Writing program in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. The election coincided with the introduction to our final project—a team web development project to practice newly acquired skills in JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. At this time, conversation trended in the media that directly related to students’ work in the course as newbie web developers; specifically, the ethical role of developers who may have built features of social networking sites that contributed to post-election tensions such as strained personal relationships…
Author: Lucy A. Johnson
Dawn Opel
Lucy Johnson is a PhD Candidate at Washington State University who is deeply committed to critical diversity across all areas of her work. Her dissertation project traces the historical roots of visual and digital literacy practices. While she turns specifically to the emoji as a site for discussion, her work directly engages with the ways that any seemingly new digital communication tool is always already steeped in larger cultural contexts.