Digital Thoughts
A prompt from Joy Sullivan
One of my favorite people I have discovered on the Internet is the Poet and author, Joy Sullivan. I love her poetry and writing. She is a great teacher and I enjoy learning from her as well as following along on her journey. She has been putting out monthly prompts for her paid subscribers. This month the prompt asks us to consider our relationship to Social Media and digital spaces. I was prompted-get it- to write an essay about being a part of the last generation to know what it was like before we had the internet. As an Elder Millenial, I think it is so interesting to be teetering between people who had almost no technology growing up and now raising people who have so much technology they don’t even know what to do with it all. We are called the Sandwich Generation. Sandwiched between aging parents and our young children. Becoming caregivers for both at the same time and navigating a vast array of world experiences. The need to be connected online for things like work and news and social engagements, and the need to be present in our daily lives that are full of a lot of responsibility. It’s all a lot. Our parents can’t fully help us, because they didn’t have the same problems parenting us. We feel a bit out to sea and the thing that isolates us also connects us-the Internet. Para-social relationships are both very real and very not real. It’s an endless paradox.
With all that being said, here is my essay reflecting on the digital space and my relationship to it.
Survival in the Digital Age
I think it is truly something unique to be a part of the last generation that remembers not having the Internet.
I was born in 1984, I just turned 40 this year. I lived long enough in my home as a child to remember not having a computer. We got a computer from someone else who had an “extra” one and asked if we wanted it. I could not even comprehend how someone could have something so extravagant in excess. “Extra” felt like an impossibility in my large family with little money. But that was how we landed a large, boxy, tan-colored computer screen and tower with black keyboard on my parent’s desk in their bedroom.
This computer became a rallying ground. A gathering place for the family. Like the island in a large kitchen, (also not something I was aware of until much later), it became a central place for us all to commune. Someone sat in the chair staring at the screen and playing Solitaire. Another person sitting on the bed behind them and watching them play. Minesweeper was also a huge hit. We would sit and press the tiny gray squares surrounded by other tiny, gray squares and then strategize how to press the correct one so we wouldn’t hit the little bombs that would end our level and start the game over.
The most fun game we had was a skiing game. You were a stick-figure like person with a scarf and coat and hat on skiing down a white, snowy mountain. You had to use the arrow keys to get around various obstacles. Trees, rocks, other skiers. Eventually, a large Abominable Snowman would run out and pick you up and eat you, picking his teeth with the ski pole. My older sister in particular was determined to beat the snowman and she would scream and yell loudly when he would, inevitably, eat her avatar and laugh up at her.
I was part of the Oregon Trail Generation. We started having a class at school just called ‘Computers’ and we learned skills like typing using home row on the QWERTY keyboard. The QWERTY keyboard never stood out to me as interesting until I read John Green’s Essay about it in “The Anthropocene Reviewed” and now I think it’s so naïve to think that something that feels so “normal” was actually a thing that many people decided on through long years of debate. We may have had a totally different keyboard setup but we don’t and I can use home row confidently now because my muscle memory knows where all of the letters are and which fingers to use to press them to get the words I want. I highly recommend that essay if you haven’t read it.
My parents had an old typewriter in the basement that we used to play on. It didn’t always have ink and we would set it up in our games and play on it. I loved the sound of the clicking letters and I loved watching the metal arms reach out and stamp the page in front of you. The arms were all different lengths, and reminded me of a piano with their delicacy and dance. Typewriters and so expensive now because they are “vintage.”
By the time I was in middle school we had dial-up internet and I sat at the computer screen clicking the button to get me online and waiting for the dial-up sounds to start. We took over the phone line when we were online and I remember siblings yelling at each other that we were expecting phone calls and can you please get off the internet??? I need to talk to Erin about our homework assignment for tomorrow!
We had AOL and when we were able to chat online Live with someone else it felt like a game. We were tricking the universe somehow. We could almost pretend like we were together even when we were in different places.
We started finding music online. Napster was super popular and blew up before we all stopped and thought that maybe we should make sure we could still compensate artists for their work and not just steal it all for free. Whoops!
I was a teen with a large collection of CD’s in the car and I would keep them in a zippered notebook and slide them in and out of the CD player while I was driving. I had the holder that velcro’d onto the visor and the zip up case on the floor of the passenger seat.
All of these things made me feel so modern. It’s laughable now. CD players on the floor of our rooms, Discmans with black cords attached to black, round headphones that were so obvious you couldn’t hide them from your teachers or pretend you were paying attention while listening to your music.
I didn’t have my own cell phone until College. A flip phone. I played Snake and another game that dropped numbers at an increasingly fast pace and you had to push the buttons to stay in the game.
I started texting people. We paid .10 per text. I used the T9 texting and got really fast at it. I would have to go to the library to do research for papers in College. I didn’t have a computer in my dorm room. I had a land line phone on my desk. Dial 9 to get an outside line and you had to pay for long distance. My parents sent me calling cards to use to call home. I was 4 hours away but felt so inaccessible. I had to be in my room at my desk in order to talk to them. I sent letters home.
Saying this out loud brings to mind angsty couples in World War II but it was 2002. 22 years ago.
I started a Facebook page in 2007. It was all just words then. We would jump on and put our relationship status up and type out little lines of our thoughts. We all started to discover that people were funny. We found friends we hadn’t seen in a few years. People from High School who we weren’t even friends with back then but we remember them and now we know what they are posting or thinking and it felt strangely, connecting.
When I moved from my home state of Colorado to Nashville, TN in 2009 I knew I would be an active Social media person. It was the easiest way to stay in touch with many people at once. A one-stop shop for family memories and connections. It was a place for me to journal. To post about my new baby and my adventures with my husband in a new city. I used it like a blog then. Wrote about our trips to Chattanooga and posted cute pics of my toddler. Swimming and hiking and exploring our new Region.
I posted baby bump photos of my second pregnancy and then my 3rd. I posted about a business venture I started and asked people to buy clothes from me. I posted about struggles. Home renovations and miscarriages.
I started an Instagram. The first picture on my Instagram is the first photo I took of my 2nd daughter the day she was born. When Privacy became a thing we thought more about, I changed my profile to private. I posted pics of my tiny children in diapers and wearing no shirts and didn’t think much about asking them if it was okay. They were my kids, so why not post them?
I remember the tone changed in the election of 2008. People I had known growing up were starting to talk about politics. Not that I was surprised that a lot of them were pretty conservative. I did grow up in a Conservative Religion, after all. But they started posting outrageous claims that were obviously rooted in Racism and misinformation. When I realized that what seemed obvious to me wasn’t obvious to them I started thinking that maybe I didn’t need to have everyone from my childhood as a Facebook friend. I curated my friend list a lot during those years.
As the years have progressed, so have I. I use Social Media a lot for news now. Updates and articles. So many articles. I have found beautiful authors and artists and poets and it makes me feel so happy and connected.
My kids are older now. I don’t post photos in non-private spaces of them and I ask their permission first. I realized along the way that their childhood was theirs too, not just for me to curate.
I vacillate back and forth a lot with wanting to go completely off the grid and get away from the crazy world that is the online space and diving deeper into it so I can monetize it and help earn a living for my family. I live mostly somewhere in between these 2.
Maybe I should live here.
I do not think we are supposed to have so much information available to us as individuals. AND, because we are able to listen to so many perspectives, a lot of shifts are happening culturally that we have desperately needed for so long. White people are waking up to the evils of White Supremacy. Women are able to feel seen, heard and supported by other women and have left abusive partners and saved many lives by knowing they are not alone and don’t deserve to suffer. Marginalized people have been able to band together and form groups full of humanity and activism.
I can see real-time photos and videos of Paris. Sydney, Madrid, London, Lesotho, Nairobi, Gaza, Jerusalem, Darfur… you get the idea.
Holding so much paradox is exhausting. THE WORLD IS AMAZING!! The world is TERRIBLE. It’s all true.
So, what is my relationship to the digital space??
I draw on my 2008 Facebook Relationship status for my answer:
It’s Complicated.