Technology Narrative

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had developed a profoundly adamant yet incorrect opinion that I was from a very wealthy family. In reality, poor would have been generous. My grandmother, a nurse, worked midnights to support my mother, a grad student, and myself, a voracious eater. Mom drove a barely blue Buick with a flaking, illegal tint job that was being eaten by rust and smelled like vomit. Grammy’s house was huge, but it lacked many of the basic necessities, like heat on an entire side and real flooring. And in her early twenties, mom was still living in the bedroom she had kept as a child.

But as a preschooler, I didn’t see the faltering sedan, the third-rate paint jobs, and the plywood flooring. All I saw was the bag phone, the computer, the printer, and the VCR. My friends didn’t have these things, and so I assumed that because my family did, it meant that I was “richer” than they were. Of course, now I realize how faulty my logic was and how ridiculous it was to be evaluating my wealth against my friends’ in the first place. But this incident does show that, even from a young age, I took special notice of technology and realized that it was a tool that some embraced while others ignored. Today, I am grateful that my family was the technologically embracing kind.

 A New Computer

We may have been big on technology in my family, but we were short on heated space, so, for some reason, the computer ended up in my room when I was in early elementary school. This was one of the earliest computers whose screen looked more like a mini television than an actual educational tool. It had a blinking green icon on a black screen, and there were a few games that looked as if they’d just come from the Atari, but I loved it all the same, that is, except when my mother was using it late into the night typing her papers for grad school. I was in about the third grade when mom received an extraordinarily large box that I was told contained a new computer. And this computer, to my nine-year-old mind, was top-of-the-line. It came with seven, that’s right seven, CD-roms, which contained pictures of the world’s seven wonders, games, and an encyclopedia. How much fun I had browsing and playing with them all. And then the best part—this computer could PLAY CDs! That’s right! We didn’t even have a CD player, but when we got the computer, mom bought me two CDs—the soundtrack to Aladdin and a “fun in the sun” mix that featured “Walking on Sunshine.” I was able to play them while I sat in her office chair that was still crammed into her old bedroom, and I was in heaven.

Little did I know then that I would come to spend many hours on this and the various subsequent computers my family purchased throughout my childhood. Struggling to make sense of my place in our family, I often found the computer and Internet a reliable escape where I could disappear into other worlds, through reading fanfiction, connect with people outside my immediate circle, through the chat rooms that were all the rage of the 1990s, and learn, through the informational web sites that I browsed, though I admit they were mostly related to my favorite TV show, The X-Files. When AIM became big, my “secret boyfriend,” whom I later married, carried out a long courtship in front of our forbidding, but technologically illiterate parents’ eyes. A child of the computer age, we had computers, games, and the Internet in school, but when it comes to the “cool stuff”—Napster, video slideshows, forums, and chat rooms—I taught myself.

Educational Technology

Unlike the partying my friends did, my evenings and weekends online prepared me for a campus life that had gone digital. Upon entering college in 2004, I was immediately tasked with Blackboard assignments, Power Point presentations, and hyperlinked documents. While my peers struggled to make it through, the work was second nature to me. I increasingly went above and beyond my instructors’ requests when it came to technology, and for the effort I was always rewarded. Though, again, I took only one, one-credit-hour class on “educational technology,” I taught myself to make professional looking slideshows, utilize discussion boards and make tear-jerking musical slideshows to augment poetry presentations. When I taught my first course as an undergrad—I was a peer instructor for a freshman experience type course—I had changed the curriculum to integrate the use of forum posts and film.

Turning to the Future

Though my perceptions about technology and wealth have certainly changed—the iMac, Macbook, and iPhone I keep in my budget apartment are necessary tools, not toys—I am grateful for my technologically literate upbringing. Through it, I not only taught myself to use the latest digital tools, but I also learned how to quickly adapt to new and changing technologies. This is how I’ve been successful teaching, writing, and serving as a webmaster online. The concepts are the same; the tools are just different. And thanks to Web 2.0, my emotional reasons for turning to and being satisfied with technology are the same. Able to live an authentic digital life through Facebook, IM, and other applications, I enhance my reality with the constant presence of my real, tangible, though digital, support network.