Ring Ring...

The earliest memory that I can recall of in terms of using some sort of digital new technology device would have to be my first cell phone. Being the eldest and attending a school that wasn't in my district my parents decided that the best way to keep tabs on my would be to get me a cell phone. I still remember what it looked liked, this blue/black box of a thing with a green screen. I think it even had an antenna., it was a hand me down type of phone that my father had owned.

The purpose of the cell phone was so that my mom wouldn't freak out as much about me taking a long time to get home. My high school was located in Downtown LA and I have to take the city's public transportation to get home which took about an hour in total. Typically my mom would call me as soon as school let out, I would then proceed to walk and talk to my bus stop. After riding for about 25 minutes to stop number 2, I would have to call her back to assure her that I was still alive and then as I boarded the second bus tell her I was on my way home.

My mom was always calling me trying to find out where I was, if I was on my way home or just trying to catch up with me on how my day went she used the cell phone as a way to keep tabs on me and make sure that I was where I supposedly said I was going.

Another first memory with the cell phone would have to be texting. It was a faster, simpler way to inform my mom that I forgot my soccer cleats for practice or a project for a class. Texting was also a discrete way to talk to so it became a new way to communicate not only with my mom but with other people as well. I would text friends to avoid homework or text my dad to find out information I may need. Texting was a whole new world that opened up to me and allowed me to communicate with friends when I was bored and exchange ideas on papers or something of that nature.

I still text a copious amount each day. I actually prefer texting than actual phone calls. The things is I run out of things to mention or talk about with her after about five minutes. My mom and I text more than we talk. In a typical week we will have texted over 50 messages and actually have talked on the phone for less than 20. Same with my dad. Texting is a preferred way of texting being that each of us lead busy lives and live in differed time zones. Texting just makes life that much easier.

The idea of the cell phone still plays huge role in my life today. I am updated about certain news ongoings, sports especially (I am a huge sports fan and continuously get updates about my favorite teams and any other sports news happenings), twitter updates, google and of course normal people. Having a cell phone that was the size of a brick to a smaller size brick (blackberry) which helps me keep my life a little more organized being that serves not only as a phone but an organizer. The advancements of cell phone technology make it difficult for us to live without them. The changes and further developments of the cell phone not only as a phone but as a constant companion one that we feel naked and abandoned without.

The early years

I came home one Saturday after spending the night at my cousin’s house to find my own home abuzz with excitement. I went into the back room and found my parents and siblings gathered around the newest addition to our family: a big, boxy computer the color of grandma’s support hose. It was 1994; I was eight, almost nine, years old and didn’t know anybody else, besides my techie uncle, who had a computer at home. I must have spent hours at that computer, mostly waiting for pages to load, printing off pictures of my favorite ice skaters and reading about Outer Space on Encarta. Encarta, more than any other program or game, was by far my favorite. I spent a lot of time devouring facts and new bits of information and it was because of this program that my interest in space was fueled into an obsession. I was 11 years old and I remember sitting in my grandma’s computer room in her basement and telling her about my dream to go to Space Camp. She suddenly turned around, connected to the internet, and after the familiar dial tone and beeps of the modem connecting, she went to the Space Camp website and signed me up.
The following summer, when I was 12, my dream of going to Space Camp, a dream that had been burning since the first time I read an article on space travel on Encarta, was realized.
I’m nearly 24 years old and most of my life has involved some sort of technology. When I was little, I got to go to work with my Grandma while my parents made hospital visits with my little sister who had some health problems. I would watch my Grandma work for hours on her computer, marveling at its magic screen. After a few years, my family got their own computer where lots of time was spent learning and playing instructional games. One of the best days was when my dad brought home “Flight Simulator” for the computer, complete with a joystick that looked like the ones pilots use. I remember multiple instances where my siblings and I would be gathered around as my dad ‘flew’ over computer-simulated landscapes, marveling at the technology and begging for a turn. When I got to elementary school, going to the computer lab became a part of our weekly curriculum. In my younger years at school, we mostly played with Paintshop, but as we got older, our teachers started making us do typing exercises, with the occasional reward of a game of “Oregon Trail.” When I entered the 9th grade, I took a typing class. I hated that class with a fiery passion, but in the end it helped me become a fast and proficient typer and ultimately, a better computer user. Over the course of high school, I became very familiar and comfortable with computers and began exploring what the Internet had to offer. During my senior year, I started a blog on Xanga. My friends and I would update our posts pretty regularly and even began collaborating on short stories. I think it was at this time that I really became aware of my identity in the online sphere and where I fit in. I was no longer just an observer of Internet activity; I was taking part in a growing discussion, creating new texts and adding information to the web. I learned how to navigate the web and how to determine the credibility of a site. I don’t know if there was ever one day where I woke up and realized I knew the Internet; instead, it feels like something that is an intrinsic and instinctual skill. By playing around and exploring the functions of my computer and various programs, I learned how to identify problems and fix them. The sharpening of these problem solving skills have, more than anything else, made becoming familiar with other technologies amazingly simple.

DRAFT: Back to the Future

Back to the Future: A Non-Traditional Student

When I returned as a “non-traditional” student this year after an 18-year absence, I didn’t expect to feel particularly advantaged. I’d logged a lot of time in the small-business and business writing world, so I knew I wasn’t arriving entirely unprepared. The fascinating fun part is the sudden view that has opened for me: a crystal-clear contrast of my own digital “then-and-now” is unmistakable in a student context. In every other life aspect, the gradual, thorough digital saturation has been so steady and uninterrupted that it feels seamless. In school, today becomes juxtaposed with how I did it before—and the chasm is revealed.

Thankfully, business (as well as my own interests) has kept me technologically engaged, so I haven’t struggled to bridge a basic skills gap. I have a theory that the only way we get out-moded is by being so attached to how we are used to doing something that we forfeit the opportunity to explore anything else—new things and old alike. They say the old railroad owners went bankrupt because they believed they were in the railroad business, but they had customers because they were in the transportation business. They were unwilling to evolve as a transportation industry. But I wonder if out-moding can go either way: an unwillingness to move forward surely stymies us, but discarding an earlier human skill-set because we think we’ve “evolved” beyond needing it may be just as treacherous. My first child is almost old enough to be my classmate, so it’s interesting for me to hear young adults talk about their grandparents sympathetically, that it’s sad how they have no life, given how severely digital-communication-impaired they are. I’ve often been reminded of a great quotation I once read: When I was a youth, I was impressed by people who are clever. I am older now, and I’m impressed by people who are kind. [cite speaker] (complete this thought.)

Of course, I’ve had a couple of Back to the Future moments, like when a student employee noticed that I’d written down an office location incorrectly. She helpfully explained, “Um, FYI, I’m pretty sure there’s no building on campus called the ELWC.” I told her that when she was in pre-K, the WSC was the ELWC. And BTW, BYU used to be in the WAC, before it was the MWC. But that was even before the MOA was TBA.

I’m not usually unsettled by change, but for nostalgic reasons, it was still fun to discover that some things are the same: the carillon bells, the Tuesday devotionals and the bookstore candy counter remain as constant as planetary fixtures. Other things have changed so much they are almost unrecognizable. The re-engineered Harold B. Lee Library is remarkable in every way, but the most notable difference in the HBLL since 1991 is easy to spot: Today, it has about 350 more computers available for student use.

My first season at BYU was from 1988 to 1991, on the cusp of the digital tide. We were just beginning to glimpse that new communication technologies would soon become an all-access party, but even then, the idea of universally connected communication seemed destined for entirely practical purposes—people and organizations doing business more efficiently with each other. Entertainment and social interaction of any kind was solidly in another category. You had a computer because you were a student; you had a Nintendo because you needed a break. There were plenty of computers on campus—but 99.9% of them were for faculty and administration purposes. The only people I knew who used e-mail were executives with tech companies and university professors. My dad was a professor at BYU at the time, and he got a big kick out of exchanging electronic mail with his brother in Logan, a professor at USU.

The computer lab in the library, to my memory, offered maybe a dozen PCs and 3 or 4 Macs. You had to pay to use a computer in 15 minute increments, so most students didn’t do any real writing there; they’d bring their work to the lab on a floppy disk just for printing. Most students still didn’t own a computer, and many who did hadn’t invested in a printer yet. Before my husband was even my fiancé, he bought his first PC and dot-matrix printer—an Epson 8088 with a 20 MB hard drive. (My iPhone stores about 400 times that much.) His father, a CPA and investment advisor, was alarmed at this ridiculous extravagance. What kind of a student needs to have his very own computer? Not every student apartment had even one computer, so there was a lot of borrowing and bribing going on.

Being the token almost-40-year-old in some of my classes presents an interesting mixed bag of perceptions about the digital literacy of “older” people. Overall, assumptions from young students seem to be roughly divided into two categories: (1) patience and compassion for this mom, who is probably doing something that’s totally new and hard for her, or (2) over-crediting and respect for this woman, who has probably been doing this for years and is just making it official now. Both are partly true.

I’m a prolific texter. I have two teenage sons with a full roster of extra-curricular activities, and family texting keeps the wheels on the train. But I am aware that this is not (yet) totally typical for mothers. In one of my summer classes, we were divided into groups to create oral presentations. In arranging for collaborative time, we exchanged contact info and I asked one male student, “Do you text?” He said he does, and then using his best Eagle Scout manners, he politely offered to teach me how to text on my phone. I laughed, and without thinking, said, “I’m guessing your mom only uses her phone for actual calls.” I apologized and thanked him for the offer, but assured him I already knew how.

My dad retired five years ago, but before then, there was no point in trying to reach him on his cell phone. It was never on. Church callings have kept him busier since his retirement than he was before it—a fact that I believe has contributed to his being fully conversant with cell phones. Before, Mom and Dad would head out for a destination with the plan to meet up with grandkids later, cheerfully calling over their shoulders, “We’ve got the phone with us.” And I’d holler back, “Remember it only works when you turn it ON!”

This little point of discussion got a lot of airtime: Dad didn’t see why the phone should be turned on when he’s not using it. Answer: So we can reach you. But he knows when we’ll be trying to reach him, and he’ll turn it on then. Besides, it wastes the battery. It’s like idling your car. When I told him it consumes a great deal less energy than idling your car, he said fine—it’s like a flashlight, then. Why would he turn on a flashlight and then put it in his pocket? I needed another angle. Dad’s a fisherman; maybe that tortured metaphor will make more sense: Keeping your phone ON is like having your fishing line out, even when you aren’t hungry. Something nice might happen!

Shortly after the flashlight exchange, I overhead my younger son’s scout leaders (one newly married) talking about a similar frustration with their mothers. “You have to turn the phone ON, mom!” He laughed. “Old people are funny about cell phones!” I almost started to share the flashlight story when he turned to me and said, “Oh—sorry—I hope you weren’t offended that I said that.” (Um, I wasn’t—but I might be now!)

[conclusion]

From flip phone to iphone

I’ve had more cell phones than lovers. 5 cell phones; 2 lovers. I use lovers in very strict terms, as I always have. To me, lovers are boyfriends, nothing else. Not a one-time date, or some guy I kissed once. They are guys that have fixed my car or my computer just because they wanted to. They call me or text me late at night, and early in the morning. They add me as a friend on Facebook. These are the guys you don’t want at first, the ones that talk you into liking them. I’ve never been talked into getting a cell phone. Those I’ve always sought out with great purpose and determination.

Back in the day it used to be AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I spent middle school weeknights in front of a computer screen “talking” to my friends. Since we were only between the ages of 11 and 13 during middle school, we were confined to our dens on school nights after being strapped to the kitchen table for hours doing homework. I’m sure my mother would have liked to attach some sort of apparatus to my head that detected off-topic brain waves and shocked me whenever one made its way into my thoughts. The digital realm was our only way to get together and defy our parents. Sure, they wouldn’t let us out, but that wouldn’t stop us from stoking the coals of our flaming teenage love affairs. I once started “going out” with a guy on AIM and broke up with him in the same 4 hour conversation.

That’s when I first came up with my killer break-up pitch. “Do you ever think we were just better off as friends?” Who can say no to that? I would never have come up with that on the spot. Were it not for the fact that you can take minutes to respond online rather than seconds in person, I would never have had the thinking time to come up with that winner.

This was all pre-cell phone of course. If I’d had a cell phone I would have undoubtedly sat on my bed or in front of the t.v. texting, like I do now. We did have a family cell phone when I was that age, but it didn’t text. We got our first Motorola when I was about ten. It was the size of a small clock radio and had the same digital numeric screen. It’s hard to recall the time when cell phones didn’t have cameras, let alone an actual LCD screen. My parents shared that phone with me sometimes, like when they let me go to the mall with my best friend who was also a Mormon, whose parents were almost as strict as mine. After all, I’d need it to call them when I was done so they could pick me up in the family SUV. I must say that even the embarrassment of the roof of my mother’s Tahoe sprinkled with Teenie Beenies Babies (they were sewed to the ceiling, my mom thought it would be cute) even that humiliation was somewhat balanced by my hip cell phone. Sure my mom was decorationally and socially challenged, but I had a cell phone. It helped a little.

Then, my friends all got cell phones, of their own. Talk about being shown up. I still shared the brick with my uncool parents. So, when I began high school my parents decided I needed my own phone. My own phone !!! This phone had a little screen with an address book, and text messaging. It was probably one of the first text-able phones. It was another Motorola. It pictured a cute little envelope flying in from invisible cellular space every time I got a text. I still remember the first text I got from my friend Leah. She asked if I was going to meet everyone at the volleyball game.

In those years I was lucky to get more than one text a day. Even better, if I got one text from a guy in a day. Between my braces and raging acne, I was better off in the digital realm. So I continued to develop my texting finesse. It was easy because I grew with the trends. As emoticons and shortened words made their way into text vernacular, I was on the forefront of the movement.

“Wat r u up 2?”

“n2m, jc, u?”

“hw, bball game l8ter”

“k ttyl l8ter”

That’s what my life consisted of. After a couple years I wasn’t happy. I needed a new phone because mine was broken, or because my mom had dropped it in the toilet. Mostly, that’s what I’d tell my parents. In reality, I hated the fact that all my friend were now getting flip phones. I wanted one badly. The level of poshness in high school when someone looks at their phone’s screen and flips it open with their thumb is comparable to having the “Rachel” hairdo in the 90s. You wanna be the Jennifer Aniston in your high school you better get a flip phone and a pole to lean against in a very public place. It’s best if someone calls or texts when you’re in the middle of large circle, from which the conversation will take you. Otherwise, your popularity will go completely unnoticed. But if you’re truly popular, this will happen so often that inevitably some large herd of lemming will be present for a few of them.

So after my flip phone got me no popularity and no more texts than usual, I got another. I put my SIM card in a friend’s old phone and used it for at least a year. It was a fatter Motorola, but it was cool at the time. It had the air of the Nextel phones that could walkie talkie people. (I think it even had that function, but I never used it.) It was the same shape, almost the same size, and it was like wearing Target jeans and trying to pass them off as Sevens. A little obvious.

I'll Pray For You

This is short I know it will be longer in the final format:


I was the only person left on the planet who didn’t have texting. I would come home for vacation and spend countless hours texting people from my dad’s work phone hoping it would annoy him enough to add texting to our family plan. There were times I came very close to accomplishing my goal but every time my mom walked into AT&T she would back out on me. I would come back to Provo without a texting plan and without any true sense of who I was. Ok, maybe this would be true if I were in middle school but I still tried as hard as I could to get texting added to my phone.

“You want me to be social in school right Mom?” I would try to use my lack of social skills as a push toward texting. My mother has always criticized me for my school, work, then bed schedule. My logic in this was only people who have texting get invited to parties. I didn’t say it was sound logic.

“You can text me anytime you want Mom.” That should have been the deciding factor. She could get a hold of me no matter what I was doing with my new found social life. In class? No problem, just send a text right?

“Everyone else has texting.” Bottom line I was desperate.

I begged and pleaded for a year and finally decided to give up or get my own cell phone plan. I wanted to do all I could to have my parents pay for it but texting was that important. My mom and I were sitting in the foyer at church the Sunday after Christmas talking about my desperate need for texting when the first counselor of the Bishopric came out of one of his meetings. He stopped dead in his tracks, spun around on one heal, and looked straight at my mom.

“This girl doesn’t have texting?”

Laughing my mom said, “No, she doesn’t need it.”

“Tina, every girl needs texting. Heck, I need texting.” He then opened a door to another meeting and paused to look at me, “I’ll pray for you and you will get texting.”

My mom and I just sat there stunned. Did he just say he would pray for me to get texting? I was pretty sure I had miss understood but the look on my mom’s face confirmed it was true.

“There’s no way that is going to work.” My mom looked at me as we both tried to hold in our giggles.

A week later I sat in the airport texting my mom. It would take her 30 minutes to respond but I did it just because I could. I could text anyone. Moral of the story? Prayer works.

Progressive Reluctance

Burns 1

Grant Burns

Professor Paul

English 326

9/23/09

My Digital Evolution: Progressive Reluctance

My experiences with acclimating myself with the endless wave of digital advancement has been a slow and steady climb to say the least. I have always viewed technology as something of moderate convenience rather than absolute necessity. I do feel that I have grown accustomed to a few select advancements that I enjoy on a daily basis. However, I must say that my use of technology has been a reluctant one on my behalf. Furthermore, I firmly believe that my feelings toward the digital age stem from my belief that technological advancement has caused a regression of interpersonal communication skills, all the while masquerading as its beneficiary.

The first time I ever encountered something completely bizarre and different than I had ever seen before was in kindergarten when I first used a computer. I could mark this as the beginning of my digital advancement as I played addition games on this box with a keyboard in front of it. When I think about it, those computers didn’t even seem like computers, just machines used for a few simple tasks. I really didn’t see the point in them personally, but as the years went on in school, computers began to play a major role in my education.

I really don’t think it was till high school that I felt the pressure to truly know how to use a computer. I don’t know if that sounds shocking, but that’s how the situation went. I was probably in my junior year of high school when my teachers had said that papers needed to be handed in by way of printed page. I thought to myself “Why is that necessary?” I couldn’t understand why

Burns 2

they wanted our assignments in such an impersonal way, all typed up in the same format, like ducks in a line. I felt that I was so use to writing things by hand that to type something up would be foreign to me. I must admit it truly was. I didn’t become apt at typing till my freshman year at college. I simply didn’t spend any time on these machines. I mean I didn’t even have an email account until I was a junior in high school and my cousin showed me how. For me this transition was very difficult and I was still attempting to turn in papers handwritten, which had mixed reactions because I have always known my handwriting to be both quick, thoughtful, and a bit untidy to put it lightly (few can translate it).

In my senior year it was truly expected to turn in papers typed and in a certain format. This caused me to be forced into learning how to better use my grandpa’s computer which had dial-up by the way and this was 2005. When I got into using a computer regularly, I did enjoy the professional manner in which information could be presented. I also understood the plight of teachers to be able to grade quickly without showing favoritism to handwriting styles (too personal perhaps). It added up to me that to make it in the professional world, there has to be a standard everyone needs to abide by. This was something that was very important for me to learn as college quickly approached.

I received my first personal computer the summer before I began at BYU. It was a Compaq M2000 which I had been using for four years straight until it met its demise this summer. It was something special to have a computer all to my own, something that expensive that could do so many things. It was an upgrade over my Grandpa’s model and there is much truth in the belief that the things you own arise a certain defense of their merit because you are now associated with them. I learned how to type mainly through instant messaging and it is my belief that many

Burns 3

others would say the same. I enjoyed the speed and efficiency I could now work with and found handwriting other than for class notes a thing of the past.

My reception of a cell phone was one I partook of with great enthusiasm. As compared to my transition into the computing world, my transition into personal phones was considerably smoother. I felt left out that everyone else around me had a phone while I did not. I felt that in case of emergency or simply for convenience a cell phone was a must. I also attribute my eyes opening up to the world of technology through computers to be part of how eager I was to own this new instrument. I adamantly state that my need to feel accepted socially, especially to the fairer sex, was a major reason why I needed a cell phone. Having one makes you feel connected to others and accessible. I must admit that I received that phone on my 19^th birthday and I still use the same one today, four years later.

This I feel is a point at which I hit a plateau of technological advancement. I later bought an IPod in order to have songs at hand and eliminate cds. However, I still find myself making cds as the IPod runs out of life and I have to resort to older methods. I do like my IPod, but as far as technology is concerned mine is far out dated at this time. I haven’t really kept up in the phone race as you now know. The Razor passed me by, the Sidekick, the IPhone. I own none of these nor have any desire to. I have a quality phone that has never had issues and that’s probably because it’s a function model rather than something sleek and breakable. I don’t have a digital camera and don’t see the need for one really. I think people take too many pictures if anything. Tell me you haven’t seen the endlessly useless photos of people on their facebook pages and you’d be lying. I just now got a new computer for rental at BYU. It is an older model with windows XP on it which I prefer anyway since I hate vista. I really have been set in my ways for

Burns 4

a number of years and I think that’s how I’ll always be. I don’t think I’m a step behind at all, on the contrary, the wanton spending of money on every new thing that comes out when next month they’re going to put something better out doesn’t make sense to me. In my opinion, we have too much technology. The time we spend caught in the tech companies’ nets of commercialism, causes the loss of deeper and more important skills. Whatever happened to talking over the phone? Younger people can only text each other and can’t seem to formulate full sentences. I was just at a group job interview the other day, competing with high school seniors and college freshman. Tell me eloquence and quick thinking doesn’t have something to do with the fact that I pride myself on face to face relations and almost never text anyone, preferring the direct impact a phone call can have? I believe that the more personal the contact, the bigger the impact the massage can have. Thus, I have tried to remain true to what I believe in, in the face of advancement.

It seems to me that my position in regards to technological advancement, this digital culture we all live in now is one of reluctant acceptance. I will do what is necessary to fulfill what has come to be accepted as forms of information exchange. However, I still prefer and will uphold older forms as better suited and more impactful in regards to interpersonal relations. I have enjoyed the fruits of technology through my few years of experience. Yet, I haven’t forgotten that for so many years I managed just fine and in some cases better, without. Technology in the sense of its current advancement is a luxury, but is something we have been led to believe is a necessity. I for one am sticking to my guns and along the way am hoping to at least have others recognize how communication has been affected in a negative way. It may be a futile effort, but it’s a theory I have seen much validity in.

What is truth? My experience finding out....


When I was 14 years old, my family had gotten a brand new computer. It was an HP Pavillion with Windows 95. Although such a computer is a “dinosaur” compared to today’s computers, we thought it was top-of-the-line at the time. We had had another computer that just ran DOS and some word processing; moreover, if our new computer could be considered a “dinosaur” by today’s standards than our previous computer could be considered as having been present for the “Big Bang”. As I helped my dad hook up and install drivers on the new PC, I couldn’t help but notice the CD-ROM drive. “Whoa!” I thought as I put in my first computer game into the drive. “This is perhaps the coolest thing I have ever seen!” Later that week I had a friend of mine come over and show us how the computer really worked, he helped us to truly see what this new PC was made of. Sure enough, I was introduced to AOL online chat as well as ICQ (I Seek You). Right before my eyes, my friend and I were chatting to someone whom we had never met and probably never meet. I thought to myself, “what a great way to socialize.”

It’s true that online chatting is a great way to connect with other people, but could such an invention be possibly too good to be true? As I chatted more and more on ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger, I learned more and more about the lingo of online chatting. I had learned early on that there are predators out there thanks to my parents informing me. I found that you could say anything you wanted to over the internet and there was no way of proving your statements to be right or wrong! I began chatting with females about how great I was at wakeboarding and how much I loved to skateboard. In reality, I did none of these things, but in my fourteen year old head, did it matter? It’s not like these people I chat with truly know who I am and there’s really no way they can find out.

Soon afterward, I began to even accept anything I read online as truth. One night I was chatting with a friend of mine from Michigan. He brought up how some guys came to his doors and wanted to talk about the Bible. I could only imagine that it was the missionaries. He began to tell me he wasn’t interested in what they had to say, because he felt the Bible contradicted itself. “It does!?” I gasped allowed. I began to wonder what my parents were hiding from me. Perhaps my friend was right. Shaking, I asked him what parts of the Bible contradicted the whole. He gave me a few verses and I looked them up, but after reading them I couldn’t find the contradictions. I soon realized that he was reading everything out of context. I realized there and then that I was somewhat taking everything I read online to be true. I believed what everyone was saying on online was true. But my experience in this matter didn't end with my friend in Michigan.

Technical Difficulties

The digital realm has surrounded me for as long as I can remember. I still remember the first time I used the Internet at my father’s office when I was nine years old. I remember the first time we had a computer in the house and how I would play all sorts of games on it. I remember when the Internet took over the world and how suddenly, AOL Instant Messenger became my best friend. As time went on the new “toys” that I received began to become more progressed: laptop, cell phone, GPS, cell phones with keyboards, wireless internet, the iPhone, etc. Being engrossed in the digital realm always kept me keen of what was coming out next and which product would help me the most in my life. Throughout all of these experiences, the one that had the greatest impact on my digital life happened when I applied to be a technical commissioner my sophomore year for the student body. I applied for this position because I had heard it was the easiest way to make it on the student body but through my responsibilities I would learn to rely on technology to help me accomplish my goals in ways that I had not had to beforehand.

My responsibilities as a technical commissioner were many. At first, I was simply doing all the grunt work: moving speakers, carrying cords, fetching various items, etc. As I learned more about how to do my job my responsibilities became much greater. I now was running the pep rallies and all sound for any major event. The success of the event relied on me and making sure that everything digital involved in the event was working properly.

These experiences as a technical commissioner taught me to respect that digital realm and the possibilities that it provided others and me. The stress involved with having a huge event rely on my technical skills and the technology being used helped me in other aspects of my life as well.

The Old School Anthem: Doo-Doo Dah Doo Dah Dut!

When I was around eight years old my family lived in Oklahoma in a house with a log exterior and twenty acres of land. Although this might sound like a lot of land, I know my family wasn’t rich, per se—we just benefited from the fact that next to nobody lived out in the woods in our little corner of the state, and land was cheap. Our nearest neighbor lived a quarter mile down the road and had a home-made smoker built from an old refrigerator. We spent our summer days either digging holes in the dirt, swimming in the “crick,” or tromping through the woods.

We also had a fairly large garden, and after picking the ripe veggies, we had the chance to earn some extra money by catching all manner of beetles and grasshoppers and dropping them in jars of rubbing alcohol. When we decided to pool our money to buy a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), our parents agreed to meet us halfway. The system cost $50, and we had to earn $25 on our own by embalming garden pests. We got something like 1 cent for potato beetles, and 5 cents for grasshoppers, so we actually grew fairly expert at catching those cash cows from the air, or pouncing on them as soon as they touched the earth.

When we bought the NES (pronounced “ness” despite being an acronym), it came with a single game cartridge that had two games on it—Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt. In Super Mario Bros., you play either as Mario or his brother Luigi, differentiated only by the color of their overalls (Mario wears red and tan, Luigi green and white). Throughout the game you defeat monsters by either jumping on their heads or spitting fireballs at them, which ability you gain from ingesting a fire-flower, but only after you have eaten a mushroom to get big. All the while you are in pursuit of Princess Peach, whom the evil dragon-like monster Bowser stole. You have to play through all eight worlds before you find her, of course. Until then, you find again and again that “We’re sorry, but the princess is in another castle!” If you’re lucky you can find an extra guy mushroom, which gives you another chance to play the level should you die or fall down a hole. Or you might find a bouncing star that makes you temporarily invincible, and run with it until the music changes back to normal.

The music in Super Mario Bros. is distinctive, repetitive, and maddeningly catchy. Four basic musical themes accompany the twenty five or twenty six levels in the game, depending on whether the individual level is above ground, underground, underwater, or in one of Bowser’s castles. I remember lying in my bedroom (upstairs and at the other end of a hallway from where the NES was kept) wondering whether someone was playing downstairs, not sure if I could hear the music, or if I only imagined it. Both of my older siblings have reported the same thing—that after playing for several hours, they thought they could hear the music even after the game was turned off. As an adult I have come across several remixed versions of those same themes, including an a cappella version that took me right back.

We also used to get what I could only describe as thumb fatigue. The NES controllers were rectangular, with a cross-shaped directional pad on the left and two round, red action buttons (labeled “a” and “b”) on the right. If you played for long enough, the skin on your thumb-tips grew tender, to the point where playing any more became painful—although we were tough enough to play through the pain. Unlike the Nintento Wii controller, the NES controllers could not sense motion. However, this did not stop us from “jumping” with our controllers by lifting them up and over while guiding Mario over one of the many, many holes in his world. If we ever had to explain to an adult why we liked Nintendo games so much, we always claimed something about how they “improved our hand-eye coordination.” Unfortunately, I have never found the job that requires me to push little buttons at the right time depending on what I see on a screen, in order to succeed.

Even if Super Mario Bros. hasn’t prepared me for a career, it did teach me how to play video games. At a young age I got used to playing, or watching someone play, for an extended period of time. The game itself is more challenging than many later games, because you do not have the option of saving your progress part of the way through. As a result, any time you start the game, you have to be mentally ready to play it all the way through. Furthermore, when school started, or if we fought over it too much, my parents usually put the Nintendo away, so we learned that you have to get your playing in while you can. Unfortunately, these same habits have come back to bite me since becoming an adult and managing my own time.

Even though I can, for the most part, choose whether I am going to play a game or not, and for how long, I still get the feeling that once I start playing, I “need” to play as much as I can, because I can’t be sure whether I’ll get to play tomorrow. Furthermore, I don’t like to stop and save, unless I’m at a natural break in the game, even if the game allows me to save at any time. As a result I sometimes struggle because I want to play computer games, but I know that if I play, I will probably abuse the privilege.

Also, I have noticed that if I play a game too much, to the point that I feel guilty about it, I usually want to delete the game the next day. The problem with this tactic is that by deleting the unfinished game, I never get the sense that I’ve completed it, so it is likely that a few months down the road I’ll want to play it again. Once again, this leads me to feel that I can’t be sure how much I’ll be able to play a game, so when I do play it, I’d better play it to the max. This sort of binge/purge behavior is frustrating to me, but since I started playing so young, it is also deeply rooted.

Super Mario Brothers is unique because it was the first video game I played, and it created the interest and desire to play more, different games. It is as firmly entrenched in my ideas of childhood as is playing in the dirt or swimming in the “crick,” or running through the forest with sticks as swords. Unlike these other activities, however, Super Mario Bros. is one I can have again. All I have to do is download an emulator, which allows me to play old school NES games on my computer, and I am back. Interestingly to me, but in this context perhaps not surprisingly, I find that the old school games I played as a kid are more alluring to me than the newest, hi-tech, hi-graphics computer games available today.

All your base are belong to us

As much as I hate to reveal my ugly past, I feel that it would offer the best material for my digital narrative. One of my earliest memories with the digital world was a green screen that depicted a rugged, even scorched landscape. Single 8-bit pixels would show a line from which a pixel would shoot to the other side of the screen at the opposing tank that would subsequently fire back at my line. The object of the game was to hit the other line with my pixel before their pixel hit mine. Eventually I figured out that it was a simple matter of trajectory and it was through this game that I learned my multiplication tables to 12 in preschool. Around the same time, my dad introduced me to the Atari gaming system.

The Atari was a pre-Nintendo home gaming system that included games like boxing, depth charge, and a host of other primitive games previously only found in arcades. The joystick was natural to me until I was invited to a friend’s house that had a funny gray box called a “Nintendo.” The Nintendo had an orange gun hooked up to it. My friend’s mother must have seen me eyeing the gun because she asked if I wanted to play. In all its grainy, pixilated glory, I killed duck after duck, even the fast one. Later years would lead me to the running pad on the Nintendo and later to the first gaming system given to me by my parents, the Super Nintendo. A few years later my brother and I were given a Sony Playstation, the newest in gaming innovation. It played black-backed discs called CDs that were barely becoming mainstream. Our computer had a CD drive but in order to use the CDs we had to put them into a case and then put it in the computer.

About the same time that the CD became mainstream, the internet was introduced to me. My dad was way into technology. I remember for a fifth grade project I went to an online encyclopedia and copied information into the geography section. That was the first and only time that I ever plagiarized. I really didn’t think it was bad at the time. I needed to put down information and there it was. The teacher wasn’t savvy enough to catch it and it was only afterwards that my parents scolded me. At least I learned my lesson early. But I should get back to video games.

The first experience that I had with gaming as it is now thought of today was with the early real-time strategy (RTS) Warcraft II. Now, in my defense, this was not the Warcraft that is an online epidemic today. At best, this game was a bunch of bitmaps that moved around the screen. You built up a base (either good or evil), trained units, upgraded them, and then went to war with the enemy. It was fun on its own, but as I found later, even better with friends. During my seventh-grade year, a group of friends got together after school and played Warcraft II, not separately, but against one another. I wondered how this was possible. The lab was set up on the same network and allowed for human players to play against or allied with friends. This was incredible. Instead of playing against an albeit competent, but wholly uncreative AI, playing a peer provided a connection that was previously absent in gaming previous to this moment. With my bus leaving after school, I was only able to play on special occasions, but I always wanted more, which I eventually would.

Two years after my Warcraft experience, I began to play an upgraded version of an old favorite called Age of Empires (you guessed it) II. I first played it as a “trial” that I downloaded from the internet. I later purchased the whole game and effectively “beat the game” on every mode possible; until I found the new online mode that is. The first time I went online I made a new name for myself. Unbenownst to me, I was forming my digital identity forever. I called myself “ace_elite.” I had recently seen a Discovery channel special on snipers that shot the ace of spades after training and the best units in the game were labeled “elite,” so it only made sense to combined the two coolest things in my life. This became my email address, username, and callsign for anything that I experienced in the digital world and the “ace” still hangs around in some ways today.

Online play opened me up to an international experience. I played the game with real people all over the world. I was introduced to new ideas, new cultures, and a new vocabulary. I knew all the swear words. But through gaming I learned how to use them. Words like noob, ping, and lag became regularly used in my online vocabulary.

Older and Interactive

As Barbara Warnick argues in Rhetoric Online, the world is quickly changing and adjusting as new media forms come into general use. In her book, she suggests that critics of rhetoric should adopt new methods of critiquing when faced with rhetoric online, because the nature of rhetoric online is so different from that found in traditional media. New kinds of rhetoric is only one small example of the vast amounts ways digital technologies is changing our world. As digital technology becomes more and more available to the masses, we are in turn forced to adapt to them and learn to use them. In this essay I will show my own progression in how I interact with the digital culture. To accomplish this, I will share three stages in my life in hopes to illustrate the dramatic change I have undergone. First I will share my exposure to television and music as a little child, then my obsession with video games as a youth, and finally my recent discovery of academic and social opportunities available in the digital world.

As the age of five, digital culture was already a big part of my life, though I did not realize this. To use Sally J. McMillan's terms, my interaction with digital technology at that time was almost completely “user-to-system” (75). What I mean by this is that, for the most part, digital technology was used solely as entertainment. When I was bored, I would sit on my couch and watch my favorite cartoons. I would also enjoy listening to songs on the radio. This was the limit to the digital culture that I was exposed to at the time. Though these two mediums—the television and radio—I had no meaningful dialogue with the system or other users. The system, however, had much influence on me. Television instilled in me a love for Kellogg's cereals and superheroes, because this is what I was exposed to. McMillan says that user-to-system interactivity means that the system “will 'present' information to learners who will respond to that information” (75). I did respond to this information. I had superheroes on my clothes, lunch boxes and bed sheets. I ate Kellogg's cereal. What I was seeing on TV was affecting my reality and shaping my character. The same can be said about music. I used to enjoy dancing to my favorite songs in the living room, something my mother enjoyed very much. One can say that this exposure to television and the radio helped me to discover my interests and helped me to become comfortable around digital technologies.

As I grew, I found that I was invited by the digital culture to interact with it in fun ways. With my discovery of video games as a youth, my digital experience changed drastically. I no longer was satisfied with absorbing the digital culture, but I wanted to contribute to the entertainment I was receiving. Video games allowed me to do just that. Games such as “Zelda: The Ocarina of Time” allowed me to plunge into a new world and to go on adventures that are impossible otherwise. Unlike cartoons who's plot is pre-determined and fixed, video games gave me the power to make the characters do what I wanted them to do. If I wanted Link (The main character in “Zelda”) to ride his horse around for hours, I could make him do it. If I wanted him to practice his bow-fighting skills, I could certainly do that as well. In retrospect, this was a giant leap in my online experience. No longer was digital technology only influencing me, but now my interests were affecting how the main characters acted in their respective video games. On the other hand, despite my progression in digital interactivity, I still limited myself to entertainment as digital technology's primary use. I had access to the internet at the time, but online experience often was limited to finding cheat codes for the video games I played.

As you can see, though I did have some progression in my interaction with the digital culture from boy to youth, it was not very significant. It has only been in recent years that I have tapped into many of the uses available on the World Wide Web. Digital technology went from being purely entertainment to helping me with my academic and social life. Learning to use search engines effectively has afforded me new methods of finding information that would take me much longer to find in the Library or elsewhere. I have been able to e-mail drafts of essays to my professors before the due date in order for them to review and critique them, helping me to get better final grades. Also, I can keep in touch with virtually all of my friends through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The interactivity I experience now is not only user-to-system, but also user-to-user. Just today, I had a meaningful conversation with my brother who lives in Barcelona through Instant Messaging. I also get onto Facebook and look at pictures of events my friends have been going to. In short, my experience with digital technology is a lot more sophisticated.

In conclusion, you can see that my use of the digital culture has changed greatly throughout my life and has gone from a recipient mentality, to a user and contributor mentality. I was able to tap deeper into the potential of what these technologies offer. Needless to say, I still have much to learn in this regard. If I were to take computer programing classes and learn more about how things work on the Web, that would open so many doors for me! I Would be able to create my own websites, write my own programs, and if I wanted to, I could even learn how to steal peoples' identities on the Web! The possibilities are endless and, as Warnick argues in Rhetoric Online, we need to adapt quickly.

Narrative: How Digital Culture Spilled Into My Life

Hands up if you remember the mono color green-screened IBM computers? This was the first computer I can actually remember in my life—and I hated it. All the way back in Kindergarten, there was this new curious ‘computer time’ slot in the schedule which ironically took up the time normally used to play with toys. And it involved these green monstrosities. I found all of the programs boring and too simple. Some kind of math game. Something about a duck? I didn’t care. In fact, I sometimes opted to just stay back in the classroom and play with the toys instead.

Fast-forward to 1996, my dad purchases a windows 95 computer and installs…games! As the original Nintendo had already proven the enjoyment to be had by pixilated representations of an alternative reality, this wasn’t a mind boggling experience—playing games on the computer. But the thing that really made it stand out was how much more true to life it was; the images were more realistic, there was a soundtrack that was comparable to a good quality CD of the day, not just some random blips and beeps that were meant to imitate music. No. This was different. I was hooked and played wildly. But this didn’t last long.

Eventually, something dangerously addictive and much better captured my attention. Yes, I mean the inglorious Sega Saturn that few ever owned. I guess that makes me special. Maybe you had a different experience with that system, but I loved it. There was a game featuring a toy solider who held a huge key that he used as a weapon to defeat enemies and advance in the level, this game was more fun than even the original super Mario on the Nintendo we had briefly owned previously.

Needless to say, my ‘digital life’ wasn’t very vibrant at this point in my life. I even tried to improve my typing skills by failing a basic typing class offered in middle school (consequently the only class I have ever failed!). The internet for me was limited to Netscape Navigator at school strictly for school projects. And at home we had dial-up internet, however it was exclusive for my dad to be able to check his email and some other business-related items. In fact, because of this, the internet was intimidating to me, with the alienating dial-up tone, and text everywhere. It seemed like something designated only for adults that kids weren’t allowed to ever touch unless the computers were lined up in neat rows at school with a teacher watching. Besides, all computers could do anyway was run games like SimCity and Dreamweaver.

As game consoles improved, I found on the internet ‘cheat codes’ that could be input into the games to add additional playing elements and even make the game easier to play. While perusing cheat codes one day, I stumbled across a gaming‘forum’ and moreover, it had a ‘chat’ feature. Now, I’m not an avid gamer, and probably never will be, but the social aspect of it enthralled me. What did ‘lol’ and ‘XD’ mean? Who am I even talking to in this chat? These people really share my same esoteric interests? I found myself wanting to be on the internet more and more, the internet transforming into something more approachable, even useful.

I found other forums that catered to my interests, the most influential being a car audio forum. I found myself going online during class sometimes in high school so I could check back on my posts, and reply to any new ones. This led to my post count reaching an excess of ten-thousand unique posts. In nearly any forum that is a significant amount of posts, and before I had achieved it, only thought those with no social life could accomplish such an ostensibly silly feat. Perhaps I’ve demonstrated my lack of social life?

Of course the online time did not cease there, people started linking me to other sites; I found ebay, where I was online constantly to monitor the sales of broken electronics that I could purchase and fix. Incredibly, I ended up with more than forty broken car stereos. And the know-how obtained to fix them was all snatched from the internet as well. Eventually I found my interests expanding to reparation of all sorts of consumer electronics as the car audio forum was just a subsection of a bigger consumer electronics forum.

Learning so much about computers and electronics online led to my first job as an electronics technician where I repaired computers almost exclusively. What’s more is I had no formal education with fixing computers, it was all learned from the online realm. The older technicians where I worked had all obtained some type of technical certification as a means of proof that they were knowledgeable in their respective areas (televisions, DVD players, camcorders). I soon realized as well, that many people that repair computers professionally often have no formal technical education; it is almost solely experience based. And many solutions to computer problems can be found, as you’ve probably guessed, online. For the first time, my digital escapades had culminated to producing money!

Returning home from a full-time mission, things on the online world hadn’t changed much. The only thing that really seems to have changed is I created a facebook account due to perilous amounts of peer pressure. Facebook initially seemed useless, one just updates the status of their life, and others observe. But the checking of other’s lives, digital-stalking if you will, seems to be an enticing way of spending my time, and others seem to agree. Just ask the student on their laptop in the back of class. I must admit, I am grateful to facebook, though, as I have a way of communicating with those I taught in Russia, and it has been an excellent tool for organizing get-togethers with my friends. Indeed, ‘real life’ events seem more and more influenced by what happens online. It’s an interesting balance. Should we be scared?

Narrative: Monsters to Manuscripts

There it sat: the mysterious beige monster with the large square black eye. The beast was asleep… for now. But soon it would awaken and growl at the room, occasionally emitting angry squawks of displeasure. Next to it was an equally frightening monster. The beige cousin gave even more terrifying growls and shrieks. Luckily it liked to sleep more than the other. But when it was awake it would consume a long, white, lace-edged sheet, and then spit it out again covered in grey blood.

These terrifying monsters were kept in the spare room. It was a small cave that only Dad was allowed to venture into. He would come home from work, eat dinner with us, and then he would go into the room and wake the monsters. Barring a hockey or baseball game on the television, I wouldn’t see him again until it was time to go to bed.

But then one evening I was helping Mom make cookies. She asked me to take one to Dad. Taking the plate with shaking hands, I went to the cave of monsters to see if Dad wanted a cookie.

The two beasts were awake. The one big eye was no longer black; it was glowing blue and had white markings moving across it as my Dad made strange clacky noises on the desk. Then the other started growling as it started to eat the sheet. As the sheet came out the other end Dad tore the piece away and then tore the lace sides off. I gave him a cookie and he gave me the good news.

We were getting a second computer to put in the living room so everyone could use it.

Dad worked with computers. That’s why he would spend his evenings working on programs and other things I didn’t understand. But Mom wanted to keep family history charts, and my older sister wanted to play games. So using the unwanted spare parts from work, Dad brought home a second computer just for those two purposes. And then I saw that the computer and printer weren’t monsters after all; a computer was fun.

It seemed that just for me, the daughter just entering the first grade, there were a few special games. Thinkin’ Things was one I played often. Mostly I spent my time in the section for assembling puzzles, and I loved to assemble just one. It was a dungeon scene with cobwebs and a chandelier. And then there was Reader Rabbit—the original Reader Rabbit. It was quickly followed by Reader Rabbit 2. I spent hours sorting words into a trashcan or playing in the Word Mine. Due to almost constant playing I was above average in reading and spelling at school.

I got my own PC when I graduated High School. From experience with my older sister, my parents knew that a college student could not share the family computer. Mom didn’t want to give up time on the computer for the girls with ten-page papers and research reports. While I did use my computer for homework, I quickly put it to use writing stories as well. It made my early attempts at fiction writing much easier than it had been with a notebook and pen or pencil. The ability to delete rather than erase or scribble was the most important. Editing became simple and easier to read afterwards.

It wasn’t long before I discovered ways on the internet to post my work, and then have other people read it. Most important, they could review it as well. All of a sudden I had people that weren’t my parents or sisters reading my writing and actually liking it.

When I scribbled out stories in notebooks, it was purely for amusement. I came up with stories all the time. Some were good and others were bad; however, I was often the only judge of my work. As I grew older I didn’t want to show my family my stories—I didn’t want to give them a silver platter with hand-wrapped ammunition for teasing me. I immediately latched on to the idea of having total strangers read my work that I submitted with complete anonymity. As more and more different people read my work, and more and more liked it, my ideas about my future changed. Dreams of becoming a forensic archaeologist faded and visions of becoming a published author took their place. What once seemed a silly notion was a new possibility.

Now I use my computer to bring my hope of being an author to fruition. I’ve searched for publishers and their criteria for submissions online. I have been typing the manuscript for my book. Since I am currently working on an illustrated children’s book I’ve been using Photoshop to get the illustrations just right. And on top of it all I’m blogging about the whole experience.

It was only because I watched so much Star Trek that I could possibly imagine that one day I would have not only a computer of my own, but a portable laptop as well. Yet I never would have guessed that I would use my computer to write stories and books. Or that I would have a tablet to draw with straight to the computer. The instrument I used for learning to spell and read became the instrument for creativity. Who knows what I’ll be able to do with it next?

Search Friendly Isn’t Bad Writing

In Mrs. Dennison’s sixth grade class, she gave us extra credit to analyze a website and present our analysis to the class. I did the assignment to get the extra credit; at that point the internet did not interest me. I had trouble inserting the new Internet vernacular into my vocabulary and I certainly never thought the Internet would amount to anything of importance. Now, thirteen years later, I work full time battling the complex algorithms of Google geniuses. The internet went from being a miniscule part of my life to the primary source of where and how I spend my time. In deed Mrs. Dennison opened my eyes to the digital world but, my most eye-opening experience has come recently, while working for a personal injury law firm.

I started working for Kramer Law Group in February of 2009. Before being hired, I considered myself a “casual internet user”. I had a Facebook account, email accounts, paid my bills online, but a majority of my time on the internet was for leisure. I knew the internet was a great tool to keep people connected and a great avenue to do business. As days passed I became more acclimated with my job and began realizing working how competitive and important the internet is to the livelihood people worldwide. I realized that the internet, for many, is used for something more than leisure. It literally means the difference between having and not having a sustainable income. In addition to a different appreciation for the internet, working at the law firm has helped me see the way the internet has changed the way I read and write, and the way I hope to run my business in the future.

My first week on the job I was introduced to a term called search engine optimization or “SEO”. I knew of the importance of getting adequate placement within search engines but I wasn’t sure how it was done. I was put to work developing “search engine friendly” content for a website and two blogs. SEO friendly writing is quite different from normal technical writing. I had to insert phrases like Utah personal injury attorney or Salt Lake accident lawyer in locations that didn’t seem natural in normal writing. I questioned the professionalism of that sort of writing because I thought people would hate reading a blog entry rich in search engine friendly terms. My boss told me that although it may look and sound funny, it gets to people to the site. It doesn’t do any good to write correctly if know the site has no traffic. The purpose is to drive traffic to a developing website, not to write absolutely perfectly. Learning this, I started to notice that many blogs and websites are written with search friendly terms. Perhaps, the internet generation does not realize the writing is different because we have become so accustomed to reading blogs and websites.

Yet another way my job has opened my eyes to some of the nuances of digital world is the articles and types of things I read. Most everything on our websites is short and sweet. Likewise, internet writing follows that same format. We, as browsers, choose what we want to read so those articles must be aesthetically pleasing, clear and concise. People want to read a short article then travel to the next. Writing on the internet is much different than developing characters in novel, writing on the internet requires wording to catch the eye and keep interest for a few short moments.

Perhaps the most eye opening experience that has come from my work at the law firm is the realization that internet based marketing can really put the little guy on the map. Large corporations spend millions of dollars on advertising. Internet marketing, although still not cheap, allows for the little guy to better compete with the big guys. Internet searches are becoming the way people find businesses

Technology has changed the way they world operates in more ways than I can put on paper. I can’t imagine going to college pre-computers or working without the internet. I often ask, what or how would I do this if I didn’t have the internet? My time at the law office has opened new doors in the digital world.