Hypermediacy and Daniel's Public Secrets

After examining Daniel's Public Secrets, I found myself not only confused, but overwhelmed as well. I think is what Bolter and Grusin would call a "technological overkill" She really has injected an overwhelming use of media into this, and I don't mean that in a good way. Honestly, I think this project of hers is too overreaching. Who exactly is her audience? Who is supposed to absorb this message?  I know her mission is to "dispel popular misconceptions about the nature of prison and those incarcerated within them," but again, whose popular misconceptions? A man, a woman, the old, young, elite, poor? The "interpretability of her critique" is extremely hard to grasp, unless I'm just being really obtuse.

I found the whole black and white, negative space thing really kitschy, an attempt to be dramatic and unique that's been done so many times before. (I also really didn't like her name dropping the famous artist Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors painting in her opening statement. I've studied that painting, and it really has nothing to do with what I think she's trying to portray, but I digress.)

Anyway, while the female inmate's stories were very interesting I found that the way Daniel created this site to function detracted from by ability to easily navigate around the site. Every time I would find something I wanted to listen to fully I would move my mouse and then something would annoyingly disappear and then it would take me forever to rediscover it. Terms I would use to describe this layout and site would be unwieldy, disorganized, and scattered.

But- maybe that's the whole point. Maybe she made the layout so user unfriendly in an attempt to show us how disjointed and separate these women are from a normal society outside prison. I mean, when do you ever get to hear unfiltered stories like these? You certainly won't hear these kinds of things on an edited version of some reality "life in jail" show. I think another thing that makes it hard for me to connect with these stories is that I want to see a human face. We can hear the voices, hear the emotion, but we're all probably wondering what these people look like. Hearing just only voices puts us in a weird, separate space.  I think it's like when Bolter and Grusin describe the client who can't visualize the house from just a blueprint, that the client wants a walkthrough of the house to get a real feel for things. I feel like "Public Secrets" is big blueprint with lots of intersecting points that will eventually "build" a certain something, but I'm not sure what.  I don't know what Daniels really wants someone to take away from this. Does she want us to examine the prison system, the women, how laws work?  What really needs to be focused on?