I’m an enthusiastic supporter of a free and open internet. Beyond joining other netizens in standard avenues of political activism, I also independently created an interactive, branching scenario to illustrate the importance of net neutrality. My work started in Adobe Captivate 8; I had used it before, but the net neutrality exercise was my first project with multiple, sub-branching tracks. It was an excellent hands-on learning experience.
While I was mapping the scenario, I quickly learned that every branch in the story line exponentially increased the amount of work required to finish. Simply adding a third choice to one slide required an additional two slides, multiple interactive elements, and a redesign of my original branching map.
It was important to me that the scenario should show the potential consequences of repealing net neutrality laws, but I also wanted to explain the circumstances that led to those dangers. Narration was an efficient and engaging way to present that information, but I made the narration optional so it wouldn’t interrupt the flow of the scenario for those who weren’t interested.
Via Fiverr, I hired a talented voiceover artist named Tamara Fritz to narrate. She did a fantastic job enlivening a script that could otherwise have seemed like wooden writing with dry subject matter. Witnessing the transformation of my writing to her narration taught me a lot about how to write a better script for my next project.
“The internet is a vast and interconnected network of funny cat videos.”
Although Captive 8 publishes to HTML 5, it’s difficult to make it work across browsers, and problematic even when it does. That’s discouraging for any piece of software, but especially so for one that costs $1000. However, I did eventually get it to work, and the functionality that HTML5 offers is superior to SWF. For example, publishing the project as SWF would render YouChoose unviewable by users of mobile devices that don’t natively support Flash (most of them).
On December 14, 2017, the Federal Communications Commission gutted net neutrality laws, allowing internet service providers to halt, slow, or otherwise tamper with the transmission of the internet. You can help fight to bring back net neutrality by donating to the ACLU or the EFF, by contacting your congresspeople, and by voting!