I have never really considered myself much of a technology wiz. I remember playing a few computer games on my dad’s old Macintosh and it taking a very long time to load. In middle school, I was in a class where we were supposed to learn how to type proficiently. I never learned how to do it though without looking at the keyboard. Later, when I was in high school and everyone was e-mailing and chatting with each other online, I was not. During my freshman year at BYU I was one of the few who did not own an IPod or a cell phone. When I returned from my mission, the only reason I started a facebook account was to stay in touch with people in Mexico that were already using it. My parents decided to buy me a cell phone when I went back to BYU because they wanted to stay in contact with me, not because I begged for one. Although I have never been much for technology, I have to admit that it has slowly but surely come to play a big part in my life.

Without ever striving to be up-to-date on technology and having always been behind the times, I find myself now as up-to-date as the next person and really trying to understand and use it better. Today, I own both an IPod and an ITouch. I completely depend on my cell phone since all the phone numbers I need are in there. I took out a small loan to purchase a laptop. I really appreciate facebook and how it keeps in contact with my friends in far away places. I love texting friends and I am trying to better acquaint myself with twitter and blogs. I still do not consider myself a technology wiz, but it has slowly and surely become a much-appreciated part of my life.

Digital Narrative

The majority of my life has been influenced by the digital world. I can barely remember a time when there was not a computer or a television on in the background. I remember very few papers that I had to actually write out by hand. Most of my teachers would have failed the paper if it was not typed. With the invention of computers, I feel as if my habits in writing and learning have changed with the invention of the computer and laptop. There are many aspects of these two activities that I could not imagine doing without my laptop like writing a paper or a story, taking notes, and research.

One thing that has been made easier by the invention of computers was how I approached writing a story or a paper. I have one hand-written copy of one story that I wrote when I was very young. I feel as if this is something that I need to save as an artifact of what the writing world used to be like. Since this one story, all of my writing has been done on a computer. I love being able to save my documents right to my computer; it saves space. I also like that I am able to add characters in between other sentences and characters. This saves time and leaves room for mistakes that can be easily corrected with a simple addition of a few letters or sentences. Another positive of the Word Processor is the addition of the Spell Check. However, I feel as if that has made me a worse speller because I get to rely on the computer to fix all of my mistakes. It has, in some ways, retarded my confidence in my own knowledge of grammar because the computer is not always right. And when that jagged green line shows up under one of my sentences I always have to question myself as well as the computer. Sometimes it is very difficult to decipher if the computer or my raw knowledge is correct. The beauty of using a computer to write papers or even stories is in the fact that there are so many other resources available. It is easy for me to pull up the internet and check a fact or select a name for one of my characters. The multiple resources available to me as I use my computer to write just make everything easier for me.

Computers have made writing and learning for me easier because I am able to take notes with my laptop. I have made a complete circle on this point. When I first arrived here at BYU the fact that I had a laptop, and I could bring it to class with me was very appealing. My laptop allowed me to take notes faster than I could write, but it also exposed me to the internet and other computer distractions like games. I found that I spent more time surfing the web rather than paying attention. This semester, I have made a conscious decision to leave my laptop at home and use spiral notebooks to take notes. I have found that I tend to pay more attention to the class discussions because I do not have as many distractions. I like taking notes with my outdated pen and notebook; I think that my notes are better because I only have enough time to write down the most important facts. I have found that by doing this, I am able to go back through my notes and recall the smaller facts associated with the more important ones that I had written down. I feel as if this challenges me to be more aware and awake in my classes.

My last point is about the ease of research that computers have made available to me. My mother always told me how lucky I was that I had the internet to do all of my research on. When she was younger she had to go to the library to do all of her research. I believe she called it the card system. Technology has changed so much from her time that I cannot even comprehend what a card system could even be like. I like it this way; I like being able to have information at my fingertips. It makes writing papers much easier. I learned the importance and my dependence upon my computer as I was forced to complete a library assignment this semester. I had to look through microfiche for hours before I found the article that I needed for my class. I was extremely frustrated and almost quit halfway through, determined that I could find the same article online somewhere. This experience made me understand my mother and her experiences with research and appreciate the ease of the internet when I research. I never want to have to look through another reel of microfiche ever again. When I am writing my stories on my lap top it is convenient for me to be able to look up information about places and foods so that I can better write a scene that I may never have experienced before. I am also able to pick out names for my characters by sifting through baby names websites.

In conclusion, I interact with the digital realm on a daily basis mostly for writing and studying. I appreciate growing up in my generation and being able to use the internet to make my life easier. My laptop is important, if not essential, to my ability to write papers and research for the same papers. I think that I would be lost trying to write a paper without a Word Processor correcting me as I wrote. Computers have changed the way that I go about my schoolwork when I write, study, or research.

Technology, Culture and HIstory

Being much closer to baby boomers then to the NEXT generation, I do remember life without computers or the internet.  Because my father liked having the latest thing, our family had the first microwave oven in the neighborhood; we were the one of the first families to get call waiting and the voice mail--my dad said with all his daughters, these were a necessity.  (Not surprisingly, he went on Face book before his daughter.)  I wrote first longhand, then I typed, and then word processed (on a glorified typewriter with memory, i.e. not a computer), and I was finally forced to use a computer in college.  While I can't seem to go a few hours without email, I remember waiting for days and even weeks for mail (good old fashion snail mail).  I, at one time, could not image why students "needed" a cell phone, but this summer I bought a prepaid cell before I would head home--a 700 mile drive--after my cell died on vacation. On my return, I bought an IPhone.  

In the 19th century, my fellow blogger noted, we went west, in the 20th century went to the university in record numbers; and the the 21st century we went online en mass.  The first decade of the 21st century saw the broad migration to 24/7 connectivity. What will this latest migration mean for our culture?  

Oregon Trail Syndrome

You Have Died of Dysentery

It was always some disease that did it. Either that, a rattlesnake bite, unfriendly indians, a fire, or a drowning during an unsuccessful river crossing. It was never starvation when I was on The Oregon Trail in third grade. Don Rawitsch's classic video game was meant to teach me something about pioneer life in the 19th century. I don't think I learned anything he intended to teach me. I didn't even bother to learn the pronunciation of the diseases which killed me—I just shrugged my shoulders, wrote something juvenile like "I.P. Freely" on my tomb stone, and started over. All I really learned was that oxen, wagon wheels, and axles had to take a back seat to ammunition if you planned to shoot every squirrel, buffalo, deer, or bear on the trail west. None of my friends had much interest in making it to the coast at all; we'd travel only in search of more game, shooting far more than we could ever fit into our wagon every chance we had. Those yellowish Apple II's were nothing but weapons of aimless, vacuous conquest in our young hands.

Hunting the Future

Technology was rapidly changing in 1991, the year my dad relocated our family to start the Utah chapter of Futurekids, a franchise of computer training centers for kids. While my classmates at Brookside Elementary were learning to play the piano and karate chop one another, I was learning the anatomy of a PC and how to run programs through DOS. Because no one wanted their kids trained on obsolete technology, Futurekids was always on the cutting edge. While my school was still swapping floppy disks mid-game, we played dozens of them on CD-ROM at Futurekids. Mario taught me to type, Reader Rabbit taught me to spell, and Carmen Sandiego taught me geography. We even had one of the earliest touch screens- a clunky nylon screen that clipped to the front of the monitor.

When we started Futurekids, we believed the digital world would bring more prosperity and freedom than we could handle. I remember going to a convention in Los Angeles where we met Brazilians who made millions doing it, and I wondered when the same would happen for us. My parents worked long hours for six years trying to make it happen. I remember my dad coming home long after sundown, exhausted and disheveled, only to leave again before I got up for school. He even started working another job to keep things afloat, but Futurekids finally went under, and our dreams became a thing of the past. The great digital beast we had hunted was nothing but a bunch of empty zeros and ones.

After the Future

One Halloween, I was "The Karate Kid." Maybe you where too. Or maybe you were a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Maybe you were just a regular ninja because all ninjas are cool. If you weren't a ninja but wanted to trick-or-treat with one, you'd have to be a pirate, a super-hero, or a cowboy with a six-shooter. Ninjas don't hang with just anyone.

You can bet no one was trick-or-treating with a Bill Gates mask on; he may have had a more enduring and successful career than Ralph Macchio, but Bill Gates is no ninja. Maybe Futurekids had too much in common with Bill Gates to make it. Maybe it was too much like school and not enough like karate lessons. Maybe we only cared about hunting bear-shaped pixel clusters.

The Boxee Animal

Lately, I've been squandering a lot of my time on Boxee, a free program that aggregates the internets vast multi-media resources into an interface similar to satellite TV's menu. It let's you surf the net the way you channel-surf, with an infrared remote from the comfort of your couch. A mini-DV to VGA converter was top on my birthday wish-list so I could hook my MacBook up to the TV, click on the frog-shaped Boxee icon, and blow entire afternoons watching video podcasts, YouTube clips, and old TV shows on Hulu. Once again, I find myself hunting for far more than I'll ever need or be able to use, aimlessly collecting every app, clip or download that crosses my screen.

Sometimes it's Viral

Dysentery is actually a disorder, not a disease in and of itself. It's basically an ultra-intense form of chronic diarrhea which often contains blood and/or mucous. It's disgusting. According to the World Health Organization, dysentery may be caused by "chemical irritants, bacteria, protozoa, or parasitic worms." It's most often contracted as a result of poor hygiene or sanitation. Dysentery-linked pathogens enter the digestive tract through the mouth, usually in the form of food or water contaminated with feces. Once one member of a household or community develops dysentery, the underlying disease spreads quickly. No one plans to contract dysentery; it happens when they get careless or impulsive.

Catalytic or Cataclysmic?

Viral ad campaigns are every companies dream. Who wouldn't want to throw a cheaply produced video on YouTube and sit back as it gets passed around and around, generating buzz and awareness for your product. As a student of advertising, we've occasionally had companies ask us to create a "viral video," treating "viral" as a noun rather than an adjective. Though there are things you can do to encourage viral distribution, messages and products only become viral when a chord is struck with large segments of a population. Like Twitter, MySpace, or Facebook, they're an outgrowth of a social phenomenon.

I loved Facebook at first, but the unmitigated proliferation of contact points (apps, groups, fan sites, pokes, messages, instant messages, walls, supper-walls, etc., etc., ad nauseam) has made it intolerable. Becoming everything to everybody is a good way to end up nothing to nobody. The steady stream of self-indulgent, narcissistic, drivel it facilitates has diluted it's social utility.

But the technology is merely the catalyst. It doesn't create para-social behavior, it cultivates it. It's like feces—not a bad thing in and of itself, it just passes on the toxins once they've entered the system. The digital dysentery on Facebook, Twitter, and the like is merely an an outgrowth of the verbal diarrhea that's plagued societies since the dawn of time. It seems the majority of those who refrained from voicing or enacting every vapid thought banging around their skull did so in fear of impending consequence. Once a digital wall had been placed between them and the world around them, fear and any sense of social responsibility disappeared.

I guess what I'm really saying is let's not get delusional on our digital trail. Every social and personal flaw will follow us onto the frontier.

What is our history in digital culture?

Post your stories of your first experience or most significant experience in cyberspace.