Digital Literacy Invention

#assignments #digitalliteracyinvention

My experience with the Internet began early, but not too early. Nowadays you see a lot of very young children, like 2-4 who are already savvy with tech and know the ins and outs of tablets and could probably engineer an android to replace their parents, but I didn't get my own cellphone until middle school, and didn't have consistent access to the Internet for several years after that. But even before all that, I started off around nine or ten writing stories on my grandma's old clunky computer. I inherited it when she died, and it was...old. Like one of those giant box computers. I played CD-Rom games in there and used the NotePad to write stories. They were mostly incoherent and died soon after they were born, but there are a few that are still trailing around in the recesses of my memory.

(Like omg this one that was set in modern times where four kids go home from school to find their parents dead so they all team up and get on this old viking ship ((???why i don't know)) and sail to this random island.) (There's another one where this woman goes to an orphanage and finds these two kids who look identical to her sons who had died a year prior and listen man I don't know why my child brain went so dark so often but jeepers).

This was so far back on my level of competency that I didn't even know how to change the title of a document. If I named a story, I could never change it, so I would often keep an unsaved document open for days or weeks at a time until I decided what to call it.

I...lost many a story this way.

It's amazing how quickly children can learn how to use the resources given to them, yet how there are some who can never figure it out. I remember trying to teach my 90-year-old grandmother how to double click and she was just not having it. That's gonna be me someday with holograms, I just know it.

When I was around that same age, if I wanted to listen to a song I really liked from the radio, I either had to ask my sister to pull up YouTube on her computer (not laptop) or I had to ask my mom to buy me the CD to put in my Walkman. I specifically remember doing this with the Band Perry album because I was beginning my emo phase and I had a strong hankering for 'If I Die Young.' The only reason I know any of their other songs is because I binged that CD for all it was worth hoping to find more songs that would speak to my weary ten-year-old soul. (They didn't.)

Outside of my sparse computer time, I could only get on Facebook through my old Kindle (which was a PROCESS) or on my old-timey cellular device, which wasn't much easier. Eventually my sister went to college and I commandeered the computer in her room, and suddenly it was a whole new world.

It was these sort of things that really changed my hobbies and life at home. Before, when I didn't have constant access to the Internet, I did a lot more things like video games and reading. I won't go so far as to say I went outside, but I did have what many would consider "a life." Once I started gathering a plethora of tiny devices that shittily connected to the Internet and could get on a real computer, I started making connections online. My best friend didn't have a cell phone, so I talked to her exclusively on Facebook. Neopets was no longer a faraway dream that I dared to hope for. I joined an online role-playing site for Warrior Cats and found a community of writers (though I would eventually leave because as I got older I discovered that a lot of the members were very bad at writing and I could. Not.) that I could talk with. I had already by that point planted the writing seed, and that only helped to nurture it. I started finding lots of stories online to consume, and left many of my real-life books on the shelves.

The fact that every student in my high school was required to have a laptop was a game changer. That laptop became my life, as I used it to have constant access to many programs I'd never really dreamed of using before. I explored Audacity to make my sister a mix-tape, I learned the ins and outs of Word and Google Docs for classes, became a pro at Google Slides as a way to organize story ideas, and learned how to use free off-brand versions of Photoshop online (although my real editing began in Word, and let me tell you it's much harder to remove backgrounds in Word).

All of these experiences were stepping stones to becoming more literate in various ways. I may have started in Word, but the next starting stone was Pixlr, which led me to taking a photography class where I could actually use Photoshop and learn real tips on how professional photo editors do things.

I was caught in the in-between stages of two generations, and have memories and skills from both, but can't fully relate to either one. I was taught cursive in third grade but was told to never use it one grade later. I used VHS tapes in my childhood and now own a laptop without a CD drive. I loved Vine, but don't have TikTok. Things change, and all we can do is change with it.