Mission 2(Culture) - Working for the Web

For this mission, I decided to choose the topic "Working for the Web". The reason I choose this topic was because I thought it looked interesting and I knew not many people would choose it so it would be unique. I had some sort of idea was the topic was about.

Essentially, there are people that work to create the technology we use to access the web. On the other side, the consumers are also working for the web in a sense that we spend our hours on the web giving the companies our data, which they can use to advertise to us.

I was able to then find a partner interested in the topic as well. Fineas was the partner I chose to team up with and we both signed up on the Slack channel. We also used different ways to communicate instead of using Slack such as WhatsApp.

From this, we decided to figure out what topic we wanted to touch on. We brainstormed and did some research but ultimately we decided that we would dissect a broken phone Fineas had and we would find out where the phone and materials came from. The phone was from a brand named OnePlus and we wanted to find out about the phone. The phone itself would be pretty easy to disassemble as well.

First off, I wanted to do some of my own research on my own. I wanted to find out how to product is made and go through all the steps from where it's sourced up until it gets to the consumers hands. I found out quickly that this would be pretty hard as there is not a lot of information online to find out this topic. I guess many companies don't want this information out for a reason so I had to work with what I was given.

From the research, I had more of an idea of what I wanted to achieve. I wanted to show the process starting from the consumers hands and then the delivery, assembly and manufacturing. We found what components we wanted to go more in depth with which were the battery, the camera lens, the screen and the case.

The battery was a lithium-ion battery and it's made mostly from nickel, cobalt and manganese. The camera lens was made from sapphire crystal and it's also used to create the fingerprint scanner. The case itself is mostly made of metal and manganese. The screen is made from tin and indium. From all this research, I figured out that all the materials that are used in OnePlus phones mostly come from China because they can all be found there. It's also more cost efficient for OnePlus as they don't need to get any materials shipped to them.