Therapy with Firebug

Martha Burtis posts an excellent assignment involving the use of a Firefox extension called Firebug to edit the contents of a website to create an interesting story. This is just genius, so much easier than photoshopping a site. I wanted to do something meaningful with it, mostly because the temptation is there to do something funny and fun, which is cool too, but I had bigger aspirations. Fast forward to earlier this week I came across a Tumblr blog called Ignorant and Online. The person curating that blog is finding examples of people basically being complete trolls online. Fair warning: Read too many posts and you'll lose all faith in humanity. The events of the earthquake in Japan are providing quite a bit of fodder for the ignorant among us apparently. It's enough to make me sick to my stomach. But the great thing is with this assignment I have the tools available to change their story. Is it fiction? Sure...but a story can function as ointment to a wound and while it might not change the world, it's the best I have for now. This is me making the web better, on my own screen, one pixel at a time. I think I'll do more of these.