Individual Post #2

Mitchell Cox

Bradley

City as Text

Individual Blog Post #2

Walkabout #5

slcgov.com

For our “virtual walkabout,” our group looked at slcgov.com, the website aimed at informing Salt Lake’s citizens about their local government. The website uses scrolling slide shows, many tabs, and other features to interact with the reader in a way that creates interest in Salt Lake’s local government. A major portion of the website, for example, is a news tab titled “Latest Salt Lake City News.” This news tab, as the largest portion of the front page, jumps out of the reader in an effort to grab their interest with a list of headlines. Also, a scrolling slideshow of key issues, such as tenant programs and the Red Butte oil spill, use pictures, as opposed to headlines, to grab the interest of the reader.

As a whole, the slcgov.com website attempts to display Salt Lake as an active and involved urban community. It focuses on programs that affect the middle class, the largest economic demographic the city. This portrays Salt Lake as a family oriented community. Oddly, though, the website seems to focus much of its information on an urban lifestyle, something that Salt Lake is not known for. The local government has been attempting to revitalize downtown recently, giving Salt Lake a more urban feel, but a large percentage of the population lives in suburban areas that surround downtown; few actually live the classic urban lifestyle.

Overall, I felt this website taught me a lot about Salt Lake. Even though I have lived here for my entire life, participation in local government has never been a major portion of my life. The information on the website, including new laws, issues, and other information, brought much of what we learned through the walkabouts and discussions full circle. The website had a lot of good information on the Downtown Rising project and downtown’s relationship with the surrounding suburbs. It also, though not explicitly, discussed certain nodes and boundaries, citing downtown as one node, and using transportation such as TRAX, Frontrunner, and freeways to cross boundaries of the city and the surrounding areas, such as I-15, the point of the mountain, and the Gateway.

One thing that stuck out was that the website seemed to use white individuals in their pictures. Rarely, if at all, did you see any ethnic minority in the website’s pictures. As a city, Salt Lake has had a history, particularly because of its association with the LDS faith, of being unfriendly towards minorities. It seems odd, then, that a government website would seem to support this stereotype; I would think that it would want to refute these types of stereotypes.

Overall, though, I believe the website portrays Salt Lake as a family-friendly city that emphasizes an urban community. While this may not accurately represent actual life in Salt Lake, it represents our local government’s vision for the future of Salt Lake.