Leo's Blog For Journalism

  As a skill, attention has always been important. It's what helped our ancestors catch prey and spot predators. Getting attention is just as important to societies, since all societies are built on a form of communication. You can’t collaborate with someone if they don’t hear what you say. And they won’t hear what you say if they’re doing something else. The attention economy has always been with us in some form, but the interconnectedness of the world-wide web has increased its importance dramatically. The internet is able to stimulate us faster than ever before. Since we spend so much time on it, we’re used to being stimulated fast and expect to be stimulated fast. Take this essay for example, I looked at my phone’s notifications or clicked on another tab every 30 seconds while writing it. And this is an assignment I’m having fun with! It's becoming harder and harder to hold people’s attention, so products and marketing become more stimulating more quickly, which makes us ev...

Hello, I’m Leo. I'm taking this course for my computer science major. My first programming experience was with Scratch, a software for making video games and animations. It was a very simple form of programming, but it's visual structure was very similar to Python, which was easier to learn as a result. When I first learned Python, I knew that I would love the computer science major. Since then, I’ve learned Java, HTML, Javascript, and Dart. Of these languages, my strongest is Python. I’ve written several personal projects with Python, such as a text-based game simulating Dungeons and Dragons.  I value my computer. I can use it for many productive activities: fiction writing, computer programming, playing well-crafted video games. My phone is useful for communication, alarms, and listening to music. It’s also home to addictive social media and purposeless video games. I have a toxic relationship with it. Roughly 75% of my computer usage is productive. Approximately 60% of my ph...