Core One

I was only sixteen years old the first time I taught a design program to a group of thirty of my peers. I gave them a five hour crash course in everything they would need to know for the next year in my high schools yearbook class. It was also the first time I realized the digital divide between my peers, who only needed those five hours to be proficient enough, and my teacher, a woman in her forties who I would end up spending the rest of the year slowly teaching the application to over and over again.


The topic of Digital Literacy has become quite an issue. There is such an emphasis being put on the importance of teaching children about the computer in the digital age. Because of this, there is growing debate about what we need to do or what we should do to prepare the youth for a functional life in the technological era, but unfortunately, many are not taking into perspective that today’s children, unlike many of their teachers or parents, are starting as toddlers with technology at their fingertips.


I can remember as far back as elementary school playing on the computer, not just for fun but also with learning based software. Being part of the generation that grew up with computers, learning computer interface was as commonplace as learning the alphabet. It was just part of growing up. For the most part the internet’s success and place in the world had already been established by the time I came around to learning it, unlike Danielle DeVoss in Literate Lives of the Information Age. DeVoss had to work to establish and prove what the internet was capable of; in fact this became the main point of her dissertation as a PhD student at Michigan Technical University. (186) By the time I was in third grade I was bringing home PC Games from school that were aimed at teaching kids everything from grammar to geography. To me, it seemed like the coolest thing in the world, my parents however, who were still adapting to the amount of time computers were playing into their lives were still a little sketchy on the idea.


Personally, I can’t remember ever really struggling with adapting to computers like my parents did. I have been able to teach myself virtually everything about computers that it has been necessary for me to know, ranging from basic Microsoft Word to completely uninstalling and reinstalling an Operating System onto my personal computer. I took a class in the sixth grade that taught me how to type on the QWERTY keyboard without having to watch the keys, how to navigate without a mouse and the professional applications of Microsoft Office. I taught myself Online Design and other publisher’s version of online yearbooking, programs where you had to design layout within a digital media. I have also taught myself ACDSee, a off-brand Photoshop, and have been able to do everything from basic color correction to completely reworking photographs.
I don’t claim to be a digital genius though, there is still plenty more that I could learn. For most people there is plenty more that they could be versed in when it comes to technology. However, it isn’t necessary for every single person to be up to date with the very last word in technology. Just as not everybody can operate heavy machinery or construct buildings, such advanced knowledge becomes people’s specialties. Selber struggles with the fact that many people are just becoming users of technology instead of creators, what she calls “functional literacy” however I have to disagree (25). That is not entirely a bad thing, not everybody is a creator by nature. To put it into perspective- how many people are users of automobiles but not creators? Brandt talks about technology as an unavoidable part of life, and to some degree, it is. However, she takes it to an extreme that is no longer necessary, statements such as this one showcase that belief “ . . . we assist and study individuals in the pursuit of literacy, and we also recognize how literacy is in pursuit of them.”(183) Although literacy is an undeniable issue, she markets it to be a never ending struggle for students. A perfect example of why this is not true is a friend of mine. He’s man in his late twenties, let’s call him JM, who works as a graveyard shift mechanic at a well-known theme park, he has little to no working knowledge of a computers interface, or iPod technologies. He is still in the age of CD’s and paperbound books. When questioned about it, he very passively admits that he has no intentions and no need to learn such technologies. Obviously, this mannerism isn’t for everybody, but it argues that instead of technology being an undeniable truth, it is a lifestyle choice.


I couldn’t imagine my own life without digital means, as a college student, my goal is to graduate with a degree in English (Creative Writing Track) and work my way into the professional field of Freelance Writing. For this need to become more adapted to the shortcuts and tricks of writing and processing programs – everything for Microsoft Word to FinalDraft: a program specifically for screenplay formatting. I also enjoying dabbling in photography, and although I have a basic, working knowledge of Photoshop, I would love to learn more. I want to be able to adapt to technology as it comes out, however, I can’t say I desire to on the cutting edge. Because as Selber puts it “There will never be a final word on computer literacy; Technology and its constitutive contexts are dynamic, contingent, and negotiable by nature.” (29)



Works Cited:


Deborah Brandt, College Composition and Communication, Vol.49, No.2 (May, 1998), pp.165-185.


Selfe and Hawisher. Literate Lives of the Information Age. Mahwah: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. Print.


Selber. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. USA: College of Composition and Communication, 2004. Print.