As I began to wrack my brain, trying to think of all the seminal moments in my digital timeline, I realized that I had a problem. It was not that I was dealing with a dearth of dates, but rather the opposite. I had never really given the topic considerable thought, but as my mind wandered back, I began to realize just how important reading and writing, as well as their transition into digital forms, are in my life. I understand that that last sentence may seem obvious, but such activities have are so common place that I tend to forget how critical they are to experiencing life as we know it. Without them, I wouldn’t be writing this, nor would you be reading it. Without reading and writing, I do not even know where we could be, if we could be.
Getting down to it, my affair with reading and writing has been, like most men and women from my background, a life long affair. This narrative not only made me think about my past, but made me appreciate, deeply and truly, the opportunities that have been afforded to me. Without good schooling from pre-kindergarten to today, or, just as importantly, a family that understood and valued education, I would be leading a much duller life. From the fat pencil to receiving my first laptop, elementary short stories to twenty-page research papers, I marvel at how far I’ve come and how quickly technology has been running beside me.
Though we do live in an age of the ever faster, slimmer, and sleeker device, there are a few notable moments on my timeline when that trend had been reversed. Perhaps it is a unique version of simplicity, or maybe it is just want for diversity, but there are some aspects of my literary journey that counter what one might expect. Rather than type and print certain works, I derive a special pleasure from hammering them out on a manual typewriter. Instead of typing and recording all of my journal entries into a nice folder on my desktop, I scrawl them down with pen and paper. Unlike a larger and larger percentage of readers, I prefer to imbibe my words from a page of pulp, not pixels. And I am not alone. Though the wider trend is towards digital means of consuming media, there is also a rising push to preserve certain platforms, if only for the nostalgia or the novelty. I doubt we’ll ever dig back to the stone and chisel, but older forms of communicating, the letter for example, have certain personal, even romantic qualities to them that set them apart from the digital era.
Stories as well play an important role in my digital literacy narrative. From early picture-laden tales like Anansi the Spider, to text based adventure games, the art of story telling has always captivated me. Along the way, longer series of novels received large amounts of time that I was more than happy to give over.
Before flicking through this timeline it is important to understand one thing: this is but a small sampling of those moments in my life that resonated with me until today. Left unrecorded here are all the small moments where a single word made my day, or where bitter joke ruined it. Omitted from this digital timeline are all the late night Skype sessions with friends and those who were quite a bit more than just friends. Left out are all the times simple comments on youtube videos or news articles opened my mind to a new way of thinking. To include these moments would be to include the entirety of my life, and that is one thing technology cannot do. At least not yet.
What a thought provoking reflection. I truly agree with what you said in your first paragraph, although I have never really found the words to express it. Your reflection is very insightful and made me rethink my relationship with technology, reminding me of the smaller aspects of how I use technology and how those moments may be more important than the milestones. As you state in your last paragraph, we are not able to recall and present every Skype chat with our friends we’ve ever had but those moments are what makes technology so great. Thank you for the new ideas.
I very much enjoyed reading your reflection and your timeline! The description of reading and writing as a “life long affair” was very clever and well-said. I am excited to hear you express your ideas about the simultaneous development of digital ways to journal with the nostalgic want to preserve traditional pen-and-paper methods. In your presentation I would love to hear more about how your writing method changes when you use your typewriter versus your journal or a digital form of writing. I’m also curious about Anansi the Spider. Was that story especially influential to your relationship with stories?
Thanks for a great read!
– Alex Hanson
I love how thorough your timeline is. Your life as a reader/writer appears to have been very eventful. I personally enjoyed the bits about you receiving your first gameboy and the part about zork. Both entries seem to be very unique, and I bet no one will think to put those in their timelines. When you present your timeline, I think it would be a good idea to spend some time explaining those two instead of glossing over them. I think both have personal nostalgic sentiments to you that I personally can relate to. At some point in our lives, we all get a little nostalgic over something.
I found your reflection on your timeline incredibly interesting and moving. Off all the gifts in life literacy is one of the most undervalued and its close to impossible to even try to appreciate the immense impact it has on our lives. I loved your timeline a lot. After talking about it with you on class it was so interesting to see it in chronological order. What I found most fascinating was all the forms of regression in your timeline. Moving from high tech games such as call of duty to the lower tech Zork. Moving from texting to journaling. From laptops to typewriters. I think it would be really great to emphasise why you feel you made these transitions as you grew up and maybe even reflect a bit on the wider trend of ‘retro’ technology.
Also the image of you and your family reading together still brings a tear to my eye…
P.s. I read this timeline on my iphone and was super impressed by the Tiki Toki iphone interface, in case anyone was wondering…
I love how you describe the intimacy of letters and the idea of people reverting back to writing letters in order to connect with one another on a more sentimental and personal level. I completely agree with this statement because I myself attach a lot more personal weight to a letter than say an email, even though the material in both is the same. Maybe this has to do with the fact that when you write a letter you can’t just hit the delete key when you mess up, with a letter you have to think out everything beforehand and put thought, that you otherwise may not have put into your writing, into what you want to convey to the recipient. I really enjoyed reading your reflection and am excited to hear your presentation in class!