Although I started using computers when I was about six years old to play a Little Critter game, my digital literacy really developed when I started middle school and was exposed for the first time to instant messaging. This was also when I got my first cell phone: no texting plan, just a basic flip phone with a camera that took very grainy pictures. Truly a phone for emergencies only. Gaining access to the necessary tools—a PC connected to the internet being chief among them—and joining a social circle that necessitated also joining online communities are the two keys to my digital literacy, and the continuing evolution of these two aspects is what drives my continuing development in digital literacy.
I got my first PC toward the end of elementary school to feed my burgeoning interest in computer games. It was a used Compaq that my step-dad bought from one of his employees. It had a pen jammed into the disk drive, but everything else worked fine once we replaced that. I used it to play video games. I also spent a fair bit of time editing photos taken with my first real digital camera, doodling in MS Paint, and processing words for school. But this computer sat in our attic guest bedroom, where it didn’t have internet access. I used to do research at school or on my mom’s computer in my parents’ shared home office and bring the printed materials upstairs to do my writing. Talk about a separation of research and writing into to two exclusive processes (McClure 315-316). It was during middle school that my computer migrated to the basement and got connected to the internet. I can’t pinpoint the exact cause of this migration, but I think it had something to do with the dissolution of my step-dad’s carbon brush plant and the adjoining office. We got a lot of new stuff from that: a whiteboard and office furniture being the key items added to our unfinished basement that made my computer’s move possible. OK the whiteboard wasn’t that important, but I got bored waiting for the computer to boot up (it made some intense and worrying noises during this lengthy process). In those early days of internet access, I frequented webpages that listed silly newspaper headlines and asked the hard-hitting questions like, “Is a turtle without a shell homeless or naked?” I printed out the ones I found most compelling. They’re still taped to my desk back home. Sadly, I failed to save a link to their point of origin and I can’t recall the URL.
In the cafeteria at some point during seventh or eighth grade, I heard people talking about chatting on ICQ after school. I had a personal email account already, and I used it mostly to communicate with family in Austria and a few of my friends from elementary school. Instant messaging, however, was new to me. It remains a mystery to me how all my classmates knew of this technology while I had no idea. It was the prompting of one of my new middle school friends that led me to download the instant messenger onto my computer. Over time, I added a bunch of friends, many of whom I talked to more on ICQ than in person. I would bundle up in a sweatshirt and fluffy socks and spend the afternoon in my Bat Cave, as I called it, (the computer was dubbed Alfred, and my digital camera Walter because calling him Commissioner Gordon would have been disrespectful to that character) chatting with whoever was online about all sorts of trivial things. A couple of times, I even used instant messaging to ask important questions about school, but mostly, my conversations were about, well, nothing. This probably had something to with the fact that, as I said, I didn’t talk to these people much in person. I just got requests to add people, and I never turned anyone down. I have since learned to be more selective on who I connect with, though my Facebook friends list still far exceeds the number of people I regularly interact with. But I also don’t chat with those people on Facebook. I keep them around because they share interesting links, which I like and share in turn. Sometimes they even like a post of mine in return. These highly mediated[i] interactions share little in common with the typical instant message exchange of, “sup?”
“nothing much. sup w/ u?”
“not much.” Followed by a string of nonsensical emoji.
Eventually, for a reason that escaped me, all my friends slowly graduated from ICQ to AIM. I hung onto ICQ a bit longer than most. I didn’t understand the point of switching, but because I used instant messaging to keep in touch with people, I needed to use the same messenger that everyone else was using. I added AIM, and when I switched computers, I didn’t even bother to install ICQ on the new-to-me reformatted computer that was my mom’s before it crashed and she got a new one.
A little while after I started using instant messaging, I also got a Myspace account because one of my friends encouraged me to get one. I continued to use Myspace until I finally deleted the account during my first semester of college (more on that later). During the summer between eighth and ninth grade, my good friend Elyse, who I’d known since I was in first grade and she was in kindergarten, got me to create a Facebook account. She claimed it was better than Myspace without saying why (again, someone had discovered a new technology and encouraged me to switch to it because… reasons). I obliged because she had moved south and was up north visiting for just a little while. I wanted to stay in touch with her, and since she wasn’t using Myspace or personal email anymore, it made sense for me to join Facebook. Gradually, more and more of my friends joined Facebook and abandoned Myspace. My step-siblings and friends in Austria were the outliers for a while: Facebook wasn’t available to them. Once they made the switch, I felt free to delete my Myspace. Stay tuned for more details on these shifting preferences.
[i] In the first chapter of their book Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction, Jones & Hafner claim that the “tools we use to mediate between ourselves and the world can be thought of as extensions of ourselves” (304). While I never thought of my instant messenger as an extension of myself, I do think about how my Facebook profile, this blog, and other social media profiles communicate who I am to the rest of the world. The things I “like” and the links I share demonstrate my interests in much the same way as a conversation with another individual. It’s like a conversation between me and the rest of the internet, mediated through my social media account.
Works Cited
AIM. AOL, Inc. 2015. Web. 8 Feb. 2015.
ICQ. ICQ, LLC 2014. Web. 8 Feb. 2015.
Jones, Rodney H. and Christopher A. Hafner. Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introdction. London: Routledge, 2012. Kindle.
McClure, Randall. “WritingResearchWriting: The Semantic Web and the Future of the Research Project.” Computers and Composition 28 (2011): 315-326. SciVerse ScienceDirect. Web.
O’Reilly, Tim. “What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models.” The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking. Ed. Mark Bauerlein. New York: Penguin, 2011. 215-229. Print.
“Theresa Hoffmann.” Facebook. Theresa Hoffmann. Web. 8 Feb. 2015.
Stuck under a Cat 
