Technology Literacy Narrative
Transcript:
I see technology as an opportunity – a tool but also a means to create, manipulate, and remix. I enjoy taking something – an item or a program – and repurposing it, using it in a way that is perhaps different than its originally intended purpose.
There is a certain amount of fear I have had to overcome to do this. I’ve had to learn to be comfortable making mistakes, to see opportunities in those mistakes, to even further remix beyond what my first vision might have been. I’ve learned to give myself over to the process of experimentation, knowing that sometimes the tech is at my will and sometimes I am at its will.
My father, in the first few years of my life worked for Simplex Time Recorder Company, the fire protection services corporation, doing testing and repair work for systems in universities, grade schools, and businesses across Ohio. His training in computers and technology as a Marine prepared my father for this work as well as for his future job as a technology administrator at the university in our town. Beyond the couple of years he attended Bible college did not receive secondary education. He was and is a self-taught specialist in too many hardwares and softwares to list. His early influence awakened the self-starter in me.
Although he had work machines long before, he brought home our first family computer when I was three, unboxing the Styrofoam and bubble wrapped beige tower in the living room of our tiny duplex apartment. I quickly became one of the machine’s earliest adopters, installing games from series of floppy disks and writing thorough Christmas lists in Microsoft Word. We started using America Online when I was seven, my instant messenger account and email closely monitored as even then parents were warned incessantly about the dangers of online predators. From the start, privacy but also skirting around rules and regulations was part of my relationship with tech.
I moved from consumer to composer quickly, working in many spaces – Paint, PowerPoint, email threads, instant messenger. In school, I often spent more time on assignments than was necessary, creating original artwork to embed in an essay on Mark Twain, designing unique book covers for my eighth grade attempt at a mystery novel, crafting rhetorically significant transition animations for PowerPoint presentations on the Middle Ages. When personal blogging became popular with my school friends I created both public and private spaces – to share and to protect my ideas. I learned about modern concepts of privacy settings first through the obsessive use of my Xanga account. I learned that my passion was unique when I was the only girl in the first iteration of a programming class my senior year. I learned that tech was everything – my computer and my drill when I made a self-portrait from a digital map of my face and painted tooth picks that eventually won Best of in the school wide art show.
In college, I discovered breaking down conventions and flouting rules was something that writers did. Writers tested boundaries and investigated new methods. In a class on E-Literature I experimented with video poems and shared my work for the first time at an academic conference. Like in high school, I started spending more than the required time to get a project just right – I could spend hours at my laptop editing and reediting until I was satisfied.
In graduate school, I started to use these skills for more than just creative work – and quickly realized that all the work I did was creative work. My assignments for the first-year writing class I taught, the technical documents I made for the information technology department, and my thesis project became quilted works of different mediums and different kinds of writing.
I continue to experiment, allowing myself to fail – like my father taught to me do. Together, he and I tinker – at times forcing technology to bend just before the point of breaking, to test the limits, and see what else we can do. My relationship with tech is complicated, but I am never not excited to try something else, something new.