This project did not turn out the way I expected. My sketches idea flopped pretty quickly – the apps I tried made the photos I tried them on look weird and slightly creepy – like bad police sketches. I ended up re-structuring the narrative a bit around the photos I chose to illustrate it. That process was incredibly interesting and creatively resonant. The give and take between the photos and the words was something I suspected might happen but didn’t immediately predict.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42zpgvBE4Ps

I’m also including both my original narrative and my video script, so that you can see the difference. The video itself still needs work – I’m on the fence about including music, and the voiceover audio still has to much background noise – but you can see what I’m going for.

Original:

I am writing this essay on an iPad, in the Pages app. When I get to my computer, it will appear there, too, in the Pages program. My iPhone is a mere gesture away. Most transit trips like this one, I have headphones in and I am bopping along to something on Spotify. When I go running, I listen to music on my cell phone and track my mileage with an app. Sometimes I slow and jog in place to jot down ideas for an article or a story. The Notes app I use syncs with its cousins on my iPad and iMac so I can access them wherever I am. Ten years ago, I didn’t want a cell phone. Now, I am a digital native, plugged into a matrix of digital and corporate interests that, on a daily basis, I try not to think too hard about.

Though it is hard to remember, now that I am so connected, digital literacy didn’t come quickly to me or without interesting bumps along the way. When I was growing up, I always had my nose in a book. This was in part because my mother was a professor and also loved to read, and also because we didn’t own a TV until I was eight. I remember other parents’ horrified reactions, and how my mom would shrug it off and turn the awkward moment into a light one. It took some badgering to get her to agree to buy one; her argument often had to do with how important reading was. Mine probably had to do with The Fresh Prince. She lamented the incredible increase in my TV-watching when we got cable a couple of years later.

We didn’t get a computer until relatively late, either, for similar reasons. In eighth grade, my language arts teacher assigned a ten page research paper. Mine was on Eva Perón, and clocked in at thirty pages. I typed it in my mom’s office, my fingers pecking at the keys; she ended up helping me type it, and we wrote the accents in by hand. I started high school writing by hand, as well, copying over my rough drafts while sitting at our drop-leaf table. I remember being a little nervous but also strangely proud when I had to stay after school with my freshman English teacher so that I could type my submission for a writing competition for which he’d endorsed me. We got a computer the following summer. My mom had me research options first, and I gave her a handwritten report (my idea). I spent many of the following sticky days glued to its screen, siting for hours, abandoning my books.

Strikingly, I didn’t want a cell phone, and dragged my feet abut getting one. I wasn’t eager to be able to be contacted at any time, I remember. I got my first one in France, in 2004, primarily as a vehicle for text messaging. When I called home, I used the pay phone down the street. My grandmother as dying and I was homesick, so I’d cry in that glass box in full view of passersby. Ten years later, my cell phone is usually nearby. I kept it turned off at work until about three years ago. When my mother was sick, I never turned it off. My aunt and I convinced her to get one then, too – she who had formerly called herself a Luddite, not without a certain amount of pride. She learned how to enter numbers. A year after her death, I still have the first text she ever sent me: “Love you.” Now and then, I try to consciously leave my in my purse when I’m in another room, so that I’m not waiting to hear it buzz. The idea, however, of leaving it somewhere or losing it fills me with an embarrassing amount of dread.

Mom’s Luddite identification waxed and waned. She was an avid reader of the news, and when she started going online, she read as many as twenty different newspapers a day. She kept a Word file of quotes and articles that she would then use with her undergraduates. (Among other things, she developed a course on current events that used the front section of theTimes as its primary text.) We used to have mock fights: she’d say I never called, and I’d point out that the constant buzzing of the modem meant I couldn’t get through even when I wanted to. Sometimes I wonder if she got wireless to get me to visit more, and I also wonder how well it worked. She bought us both iPads shortly after her diagnosis. We sat excitedly on the couch together and tried to figure out the camera and its angles. In most oft those picture, we are concentrating very hard, and I always tell people that we’re not worried, just confused. We never had time to get a handle on FaceTime.

I tried to encourage her to bring the iPad to the hospital with her, on the advice of a former boyfriend who’d been in treatment for Hodgkin’s the year before. At that point, she was in too much pain to care. I spent days sitting by her bed, and I often had my iPad on my lap. It makes me slightly uncomfortable to think about, except that I remember it helping. When she was dying, it was my primary vehicle of communication with the rest of my social world. I decided early on to be digitally public in my anger and grief, both as a way to keep people updated without having to say anything and as an outlet. I think I came close to mastering the art of the live updated grief memoir, published via Facebook. Though I’d had a few online friendships previously, they were most important to me in the year of my mother’s illness. They were mostly all on their computers, and they would comment on angry status updates and reply to anguished messages almost immediately. Once we found out for sure it was cancer, Mom initiated a site on CaringBridge, where she too wrote to our family and friends in raw detail about her experience. She told me it was because she wanted to reinforce support for me.

My current digital connections are less emotional and more scholarly. I got my master’s at NYU in 2011. With my work habits shifting but still holding the shape of those during my bachelor’s, I did most of my work in front of a computer. I still, however, took copious handwritten notes, in pen, on looseleaf. Last semester, I decided to try going digital for my academic work. Though I feel slightly guilty at what it does to my deep attention, I love having my readings, paper drafts, and notes at my fingertips all the time. (Even when I’m not using them, it’s nice knowing they’re there.) I don’t think Mom ever would’ve moved over to digital for her classes, but then again, she often surprised me. I’m not sure how far I’ll go when I begin teaching at Queens in the fall. I’ll probably want papers emailed to me (in part so I can grade on the train), and I’ll want to blog with my students, but I’ll want to foster deep attention along with connectedness. As a digital note taker, I do really miss circling words and adding marginalia. It just isn’t the same with a stylus.

Script:

When I was growing up, I always had my nose in a book. Even before I could read on my own, I wanted to be read to. This was in part because my mother was a professor and also loved to read, and also because we didn’t own a TV until I was eight. We watched it at other people’s houses. Books were a place for whimsy, for adventure and awe, even for fear and uncertainty, and definitely for laughter. Whenever I was offered anything. I wanted it to be a book.

My mom and I did a lot of low-tech playing, too. Our tv-free household was a place of games and reading and running around and imagining. When I was in third grade and I finally wore my mother down and we got a tv, she lamented my abandonment of books and of outside play. Those absences were temporary, but things had changed.

I was excited beyond my own belief for kindergarten. I was eager for homework. I had packed my backpack, chosen my favorite dress, and donned the laminated frog name tag the teacher had made and sent to our house. Writing was the first technology I was fundamentally uncomfortable with, as I found out that day. My homework was to write my name 15 times. I cried in the kitchen, unable to master the lowercase a in Hilarie. I was better with vocabulary and grammar than spelling.

Mom’s Luddite identification waxed and waned. She was an avid reader of the news, and when she started going online, she read as many as twenty different newspapers a day. She kept a Word file of quotes and articles that she would then use with her undergraduates. She bought us both iPads shortly after her diagnosis. We sat excitedly on the couch together and tried to figure out the camera and its angles. In most of those pictures, we are concentrating very hard, and I always tell people that we’re not worried, just confused.

I didn’t expect this project to start from a place of relatively traditional technology. My mother took most of these pictures with her old Nikon. She always developed hard copies, and sent duplicates via snail mail to family. I’m interested in continuing to explore the nexus of so-called old and new technologies, and how they shape both my memories and my expression of them. I think my mom would love it.