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Reading Response: "My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?"                 by Laurel Schwulst


Article Link: https://thecreativeindependent.com/essays/laurel-schwulst-my-website-is-a-shifting-house-next-to-a-river-of-knowledge-what-could-yours-be/

1. Why does Laurel Schwulst advocate for individual websites over social media? Do you agree with her? Please explain your answer.

Laurel Schwulst advocates for individual websites over social media because she claims that the World Wide Web is meant for individuality instead of only for big social media corporations such as, Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and Google to make profit. By creating individual websites, the web becomes more of a space to express creativity independently rather than follow the algorithms and trends of what surfaces on large social media sites. While I do agree with Schwulst’s message about the advocacy of individual websites, at the moment, it is still more simple and efficient to create one or multiple social media accounts than to make handmade individual website pages. Creating a website is not a simple task, there are plenty of syntax and code to learn about making an individual website. Sure, there are applications that could help to create a website, such as, Wix and Google Sites, but there are still paywalls to get a personal domain and to advertise the website, so it is known by the world. In comparison, making a social media account is free, more accessible for everyone, and easier to share anything to anyone in the world. Thus, social media accounts are faster and easier to manage than personal websites for the regular person who do not have previous knowledge of web programming.

2. In this article, Schwulst outlines several metaphors defining the behaviour of websites. Write a paragraph describing your own metaphor for a website. Put that text into its own simple website designed to extend that comparison.

Metaphor for Website