Alexis Larsson
Draft: Digital Literacy Narrative
2/4/14

I don’t know what shared criteria exist for calling oneself a “digital native,” but I have followed the developments of new media with the feeling of being a “citizen.” I use the term “citizen” because it implies a limitation to, and unequal distribution of access to, and experience of its benefits—much like my US citizenship. No, I do not game; I fail to update my blog. When MySpace (in 2001?) allowed users to personalize the HTML on their profile I did not cross the Rubicon. Before there was HTML, there was “Hypercard,” a program that used database capabilities to combine elements of a word processor with the quasi-linearity of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel. It came loaded on the Macintosh Power Books that my elementary school received in exchange for a truckload of Campbell’s Soup labels and some grant money. Before then, we’d been among the first to buy the little Macintosh desktop computers. They replaced the IBM/DOS dinosaurs and their Oregon Trail. We learned how to write and format documents, but mostly we played games that involved exploring rooms, or building/destroying make believe cities. My best friend’s father worked for Microsoft—then in hot competition with Apple—and he took us to a couple of Microsoft parties thrown at one of its millionaire’s homes. They were well-catered events. We were handed software packages as party favors on the way out. I was asked to participate in a survey about one of them; it combined the satisfying theme of exploring rooms with a children’s word processor and desktop publisher. I used it to make promotional material for a nonexistent band. You see: I was lonely at twelve. I printed out band stickers and tried to hand them out at the local mall hoping that I could cloak myself in the fashionable aura of live music, and have an excuse to talk to strangers.
It didn’t work. The passersby equivalent to talking to a promoter is taking the thing the thing they hand out. Shortly thereafter, desktop publishing became less use-friendly. Digital scanners were tricky. They often necessitated troubleshooting via complicated file pathways and knowledge of pixels and “resolution,” and the only people who had a scanner in the first place were the copy shop and my middle school computer lab. In computer lab class, we were taught the basics of MS Word and Excel. The instructor announced, at the end of the class, that our digital education was at the frontline of the nation, and we would never, therefore, need to worry about getting a job. Ha!
Around 2004, I began collaborating on dance and music compositions with a noise musician in my college town, named Justin Smith, who I had met through another composer, Arun Chandra, who led my Frankfurt School reading group and who pressed me to compose a dance. Justin made digital videos with “dumb phones” that had low-resolution cameras. He made live pieces using pre-recorded material mixed with invented instruments; he re-programmed and re-wired children’s music toys—those kinds of things. He was deeply inspired by Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett. He tried to make people more intelligent by irritating them. Justin taught me everything I’ve forgotten about the workings of a computer, the open-source operating system GNU, how to make a .giff, and how to build an animated website. Most importantly, he taught me a lot about the mental habits and disciplines requisite to be a maker of things and compose with digital media. Our conversations weren’t only about composing methods of composing; they were also about how to think of these practices as mental habits with effects on our lives and our futures. For example, creating certain kinds of sound pieces trained our ears for a certain kind of awareness or hearing. Additionally, hours on a computer drastically affected my ability to listen to or tune out a friend. I was an extremely petulant student when he tried to teach me new media and composition. Justin made a game of getting me to make things and complete projects, and then he taught me how to make those games with myself. I trick myself into getting out of bed on those mornings when I don’t feel like it, and I tricked myself into becoming a doctoral candidate.
I became so frustrated in my attempts to build a website that wasn’t only silly and archaic that I dropped my digital life for a few years. Until recently, I kept myself to watching videos on YouTube and checking my email. Gradually I adopted digital tools for writing more and improving concentration. Then came time-management programs and budgeting programs and advanced capabilities for email, all of which I dabble in intermittently. My partner lives in New Haven, meanwhile, and we keep in touch daily by sending videos and pictures with our phones—mostly of our pets, who are geniuses at being cute. When we first met, he was involved in a band and used digital recording and editing equipment to write songs. It would go like this: Seth would record his friend, Brendan, playing around on the guitar for three hours. Afterward, Seth would “cut and paste” sound clips in different ways, making a rough draft of a song. Further drafts would follow a similar path. I frequently workshopped with him in his process. Until now I was never interested in making and editing my own sound pieces. We are both meditators, and recently I experimented with a meditation video game, written by Ian Bogost, that uses a simulated Atari game environment on iPhone to create an incentive for maintaining a meditation practice.
Now, my projects are about take me further than I’ve ever gone. My housemate, a computational linguistics student, frequently comes home with new digital projects, and we’ve begun drafting a collaborative project that would use topic analysis to build on the satisfying theme of exploring rooms. I’ve begun to explore online journals and websites connected to my discipline and the many fields (?) or scenes (?) within English/Comp-Rhet. We’ll see where this all goes. The transition to “Web 2.0” has made many things more possible, more user-friendly, than they were when mass use of the web began.