"Whenever pictures from many colours and figures perfectly create a single figure and form, they delight the sight." –Gorgias
This blog represents my multi-media final project for ENG 468 – “Epic Fail? Rhetoric and Writing in the Digital Age.” The following is my Technological Literacy Autobiography which will combine elements of personal narrative memoir, with visual essay, incorporating research from our readings this semester. I chose the blog format for two reasons: one, to get past my ineptitude at using new media technology to create a multi-media essay; and two, because a blog is something that is put “out there” for a potential audience to see. As writing for an audience is something I want my students to always keep in mind, I need to practice this myself and view my writing as a social act. My goal is for this blog to be a reflection on my emerging technological literacy as a writer, a teacher, and a perpetual student.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
The Journey
"She often thought of herself as the eternal student, posing as teacher." –Gail Godwin, The Odd Woman
Many people don’t know -- or can’t guess – one important thing about me. My age. Many think, “oh, she’s 40ish. Forty-something. She looks kind of youngish, so I can’t really tell.” Much as I wish, I cannot pass for thirtysomething anymore, especially with an 18-year-old daughter. I know I still look youngish. I know that sometimes I still believe I’m a fraud trying to pass for a “grown up.” Inside, I don’t feel my age. But the truth is I’m 50. Half a century. Jumping into the final frontier. But, within that frontier, like the Star Trek allusion infers, lies a technological future. In order to understand that future and navigate it well, it would be helpful for me to understand my technological past and how my technological literacy developed from the later 20th century to the early 21st century. Yes, mine is a story that will span almost equal chunks of two centuries. Thus the confession. You must understand the generation from whence I came in order to better understand my journey
Many people don’t know -- or can’t guess – one important thing about me. My age. Many think, “oh, she’s 40ish. Forty-something. She looks kind of youngish, so I can’t really tell.” Much as I wish, I cannot pass for thirtysomething anymore, especially with an 18-year-old daughter. I know I still look youngish. I know that sometimes I still believe I’m a fraud trying to pass for a “grown up.” Inside, I don’t feel my age. But the truth is I’m 50. Half a century. Jumping into the final frontier. But, within that frontier, like the Star Trek allusion infers, lies a technological future. In order to understand that future and navigate it well, it would be helpful for me to understand my technological past and how my technological literacy developed from the later 20th century to the early 21st century. Yes, mine is a story that will span almost equal chunks of two centuries. Thus the confession. You must understand the generation from whence I came in order to better understand my journey
Early Techno-Literacy Development-My Parents
"Your love of discourse, Phaedrus, is superhuman, simply marvelous." –Socrates.
My family loves to talk. At the dinner table, no topic was inappropriate. Religion, politics, current events, were all discussed with our voices growing louder and vying for attention. My mother, however, was better at the one-on-one than the public discourse and was a great oral storyteller. She used to tell us stories from her own life – almost as parables – to teach us lessons about life. She was and has always been an avid reader, but grew up in an age (she went to elementary school in the 1930’s and 1940’s) when memorization was an important part of the learning process. Her favorite story was about a crazy teacher who tried to get the students to memorize Joyce Kilmer’s poem, “Trees.” She recently recalled that memory again, adding that she only discovered recently that Joyce Kilmer was a man and that made her think differently about the poem after all these years. My mother is a product of Chicago Public Schools when some teachers were kept on the job long after they became obsolete. The crazy Kilmer-loving teacher used to tolerate students throwing erasers at her and walked around with chalk marks on her back. Another teacher gave the students work sheets to do all day while he sat at the front of the room and worked on his novel. Even with that kind of distressing education in her background, my mother is a lifelong learner and lover of the written word. She refuses, however, to get a computer, even as we try to convince her that e-mail and Facebook would be a wonderful way for her to keep in better touch with her five children and nine grandchildren. She fears new media. For communication, she likes to say, “just give me some lavender scented stationary and an indigo blue fountain pen. That’s my favorite form of communication.” Oddly, my mother did jump on to cell phone technology early on and bought me my first cell phone and cell phone package when, as a new divorcee in the late 90’s, I was heading into DeKalb alone at night while going back to school for my teacher certification. This jumping on board, I believe, had more to do with her worries about safety than her wish to become more technologically advanced. Many of my introductions to new technology had practical beginnings.
My father was more the type to want what’s new in the gadget world, even as he holds on to what is good about the old. This may be why I am also like this. I have a “make new friends but keep the old” philosophy when it comes to new technology. It took until this year to decide to give up a land line phone, but I had a “dial” princess phone by my bedside table until then. I just bought a laptop computer this year but still have a fairly old desktop one in my home office that I still use. I also still own an IBM Selectric Typewriter and ribbon in which to use it if I wish. The home I share with my boyfriend proudly displays his grandmother’s old Underwood manual typewriter in his office. And, although I own and use an I-pod, I not only have a hard time giving up listening to CD’s, I also still own a turntable and listen to vinyl 45’s and 33-1/3’s and sometimes even listen to cassettes on my cassette player. (How tedious, to have to wait for the rewind!) I was also the very last to jump on the CD technology in the 80's, combing the record stores for the last of their vinyl -- lamenting the disappperance of it all -- but getting some great bargains as they liquidated their stock! However, much as I realize the old music technology is impractical, and takes up way too much space, it is hard to give up the memories these old friends give me in the scratch and pop of the needle hitting the groove. When I think of technological literacy in terms of my father, it is all about music. My father was a classical music aficionado. When I was still in elementary school, and already a promising violinist in 3rd grade, my father and I used to sit in his den and listen on his impressive stereo system to variety of classical composers. He taught me early on about the differences between the Baroque, Romantic, and Classical age and how to discern a Beethoven piece from a Bach or a Bruckner. I developed a keen auditory-based imagination when picturing in my mind the dramatic stories of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” or Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” or Mussorgsky’s “Pictures in an Exhibition,” while the music blasted through the house. My father’s impressive stereo system in those days of the seventies consisted of huge speakers and many components like graphic equalizers. This may also be where my fear of technology and gadgets comes from. My father, bless his heart, wanted me to be a great violinist and appreciate classical music, but, to him, women needed to stay away from all kinds of mechanical equipment – including cars! This extended to his strict admonition that none of us touch his stereo equipment. We were allowed to use the old turntable attached to an old radio component from the 1950’s, but the lights and knobs, the woofers and tweeters of his convoluted system was considered just too complicated for my feeble female mind. Although an I-pod owner now, my father still listens to music on behemoth stereo equipment and still owns a turntable that can accommodate his old 78 rpm records – works of art that came in huge book-like volumes to accommodate many heavy black records in brown sleeves, with compelling paintings on the covers and extensive liner notes. To him, it’s great to have new conveniences when listening to music, but it is hard to replace the quality and style of his old collection.
Here is a young picture of my father and my grandfather. My Dad is on the right:
Please also enjoy the old 60's cartoon version of "Peter and the Wolf."
My family loves to talk. At the dinner table, no topic was inappropriate. Religion, politics, current events, were all discussed with our voices growing louder and vying for attention. My mother, however, was better at the one-on-one than the public discourse and was a great oral storyteller. She used to tell us stories from her own life – almost as parables – to teach us lessons about life. She was and has always been an avid reader, but grew up in an age (she went to elementary school in the 1930’s and 1940’s) when memorization was an important part of the learning process. Her favorite story was about a crazy teacher who tried to get the students to memorize Joyce Kilmer’s poem, “Trees.” She recently recalled that memory again, adding that she only discovered recently that Joyce Kilmer was a man and that made her think differently about the poem after all these years. My mother is a product of Chicago Public Schools when some teachers were kept on the job long after they became obsolete. The crazy Kilmer-loving teacher used to tolerate students throwing erasers at her and walked around with chalk marks on her back. Another teacher gave the students work sheets to do all day while he sat at the front of the room and worked on his novel. Even with that kind of distressing education in her background, my mother is a lifelong learner and lover of the written word. She refuses, however, to get a computer, even as we try to convince her that e-mail and Facebook would be a wonderful way for her to keep in better touch with her five children and nine grandchildren. She fears new media. For communication, she likes to say, “just give me some lavender scented stationary and an indigo blue fountain pen. That’s my favorite form of communication.” Oddly, my mother did jump on to cell phone technology early on and bought me my first cell phone and cell phone package when, as a new divorcee in the late 90’s, I was heading into DeKalb alone at night while going back to school for my teacher certification. This jumping on board, I believe, had more to do with her worries about safety than her wish to become more technologically advanced. Many of my introductions to new technology had practical beginnings.
My father was more the type to want what’s new in the gadget world, even as he holds on to what is good about the old. This may be why I am also like this. I have a “make new friends but keep the old” philosophy when it comes to new technology. It took until this year to decide to give up a land line phone, but I had a “dial” princess phone by my bedside table until then. I just bought a laptop computer this year but still have a fairly old desktop one in my home office that I still use. I also still own an IBM Selectric Typewriter and ribbon in which to use it if I wish. The home I share with my boyfriend proudly displays his grandmother’s old Underwood manual typewriter in his office. And, although I own and use an I-pod, I not only have a hard time giving up listening to CD’s, I also still own a turntable and listen to vinyl 45’s and 33-1/3’s and sometimes even listen to cassettes on my cassette player. (How tedious, to have to wait for the rewind!) I was also the very last to jump on the CD technology in the 80's, combing the record stores for the last of their vinyl -- lamenting the disappperance of it all -- but getting some great bargains as they liquidated their stock! However, much as I realize the old music technology is impractical, and takes up way too much space, it is hard to give up the memories these old friends give me in the scratch and pop of the needle hitting the groove. When I think of technological literacy in terms of my father, it is all about music. My father was a classical music aficionado. When I was still in elementary school, and already a promising violinist in 3rd grade, my father and I used to sit in his den and listen on his impressive stereo system to variety of classical composers. He taught me early on about the differences between the Baroque, Romantic, and Classical age and how to discern a Beethoven piece from a Bach or a Bruckner. I developed a keen auditory-based imagination when picturing in my mind the dramatic stories of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” or Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” or Mussorgsky’s “Pictures in an Exhibition,” while the music blasted through the house. My father’s impressive stereo system in those days of the seventies consisted of huge speakers and many components like graphic equalizers. This may also be where my fear of technology and gadgets comes from. My father, bless his heart, wanted me to be a great violinist and appreciate classical music, but, to him, women needed to stay away from all kinds of mechanical equipment – including cars! This extended to his strict admonition that none of us touch his stereo equipment. We were allowed to use the old turntable attached to an old radio component from the 1950’s, but the lights and knobs, the woofers and tweeters of his convoluted system was considered just too complicated for my feeble female mind. Although an I-pod owner now, my father still listens to music on behemoth stereo equipment and still owns a turntable that can accommodate his old 78 rpm records – works of art that came in huge book-like volumes to accommodate many heavy black records in brown sleeves, with compelling paintings on the covers and extensive liner notes. To him, it’s great to have new conveniences when listening to music, but it is hard to replace the quality and style of his old collection.
Here is a young picture of my father and my grandfather. My Dad is on the right:
Please also enjoy the old 60's cartoon version of "Peter and the Wolf."
Visual Technology Literacy
"By visual literacy, then, I will refer to the ability to read, understand, value, and learn from visual materials . . . as well the ability to create, combine, and use visual elements . . .for purposes of communicating". –Cynthia L. Selfe
Although we kept two Zenith black and white televisions for the whole of my childhood memory, we were one of the first family’s on our block in 1968 to own a color television. Our first one was a big, expensive console television that was more like a piece of furniture than a technological gadget. It became the focal point of the living room. A shrine at which we all worshipped. The gigantic TV antenna on top of the house signifying our conversion to the latest high technology. The old black and whites only needed the “rabbit ear” antenna on top of the set itself. Those televisions lasted forever, as Zenith lived up to its advertisement promise: “The Quality Goes In, Before the Name Goes On.” They were built to last – as were subsequent television sets built by Toshiba. I still have, and up until this past year, used the Toshiba television set my ex-husband and I received for a wedding gift back in 1987. Today, I enjoy a huge, flat screen television, hidden away in a cabinet in my home I share with my boyfriend. Today we hide the “boob tube” shrine – at least those of us who consider ourselves intellectuals who don’t need it on all the time, do. But, I’ll bet that new set does not last half as long as the televisions of my childhood. Technology is upgraded so fast today, it does not have to be built to last. Plasma televisions I have heard have only a five year life span. This is one of the things I have a hard time “buying into” about the latest technology. I like things to last. I guess that goes back to the age in which I grew up. Television eventually became a tool for learning with the advent of Public Television programs and later educational programs on cable TV. My generation learned to read and write without technology. Mine was the generation of “Think and Do” workbooks, “Dick and Jane” readers, and wet, fragrant, purple dittomaster worksheets. Computers in the schools were unheard of in the 1960’s and early 70’s of my elementary school days. Our visual learning consisted of film strips that teachers deftly rolled into weird brown machines with heat lamps or shaky reel-to-reel films that broke more often than not, manned by the geeky AV-boy in the classroom. My younger siblings (and, of course, later my daughter) did have the benefit of early literacy learning through the talented programming of shows such as Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Zoom on PBS. I was too old to learn much from them in 1969, when Sesame Street was introduced, but, that didn’t stop me from watching and loving it. Here is one of my favorite memories of that show.
Although we kept two Zenith black and white televisions for the whole of my childhood memory, we were one of the first family’s on our block in 1968 to own a color television. Our first one was a big, expensive console television that was more like a piece of furniture than a technological gadget. It became the focal point of the living room. A shrine at which we all worshipped. The gigantic TV antenna on top of the house signifying our conversion to the latest high technology. The old black and whites only needed the “rabbit ear” antenna on top of the set itself. Those televisions lasted forever, as Zenith lived up to its advertisement promise: “The Quality Goes In, Before the Name Goes On.” They were built to last – as were subsequent television sets built by Toshiba. I still have, and up until this past year, used the Toshiba television set my ex-husband and I received for a wedding gift back in 1987. Today, I enjoy a huge, flat screen television, hidden away in a cabinet in my home I share with my boyfriend. Today we hide the “boob tube” shrine – at least those of us who consider ourselves intellectuals who don’t need it on all the time, do. But, I’ll bet that new set does not last half as long as the televisions of my childhood. Technology is upgraded so fast today, it does not have to be built to last. Plasma televisions I have heard have only a five year life span. This is one of the things I have a hard time “buying into” about the latest technology. I like things to last. I guess that goes back to the age in which I grew up. Television eventually became a tool for learning with the advent of Public Television programs and later educational programs on cable TV. My generation learned to read and write without technology. Mine was the generation of “Think and Do” workbooks, “Dick and Jane” readers, and wet, fragrant, purple dittomaster worksheets. Computers in the schools were unheard of in the 1960’s and early 70’s of my elementary school days. Our visual learning consisted of film strips that teachers deftly rolled into weird brown machines with heat lamps or shaky reel-to-reel films that broke more often than not, manned by the geeky AV-boy in the classroom. My younger siblings (and, of course, later my daughter) did have the benefit of early literacy learning through the talented programming of shows such as Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Zoom on PBS. I was too old to learn much from them in 1969, when Sesame Street was introduced, but, that didn’t stop me from watching and loving it. Here is one of my favorite memories of that show.
Family Literacy
"Because I read when I could still believe in magic, reading was magical, not merely breaking a code or translating one set of symbols into another. The idea of translatability was itself magical, and so it remains." –Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading
My family watched a lot of television, but we also read quite a bit. My father, mostly newspapers, but we always had a subscription to the Chicago Daily News and later The Sun-Times. My mother read many novels and we kids were all great novel readers. We would come home from the library with stacks of books almost taller than ourselves. We had at least two bibles and some children’s bible stories in the house, but we were not an overly religious family, even though at one time in her youth my mother studied to become a Lutheran Deaconess for awhile. Music and buying records was key as well. I do not remember a time growing up when music did not fill my house. My older sister Karen was the first to get into electronic gaming and it is a craze that has only interested her and my brothers. My younger sister and I never got into it. My older sister used to visit gaming arcades quite a bit as a teenager and considered herself quite the “Pinball Wizard.” If only Elton John and the Who would have known then the floodgates they would be instrumental in opening!
My family watched a lot of television, but we also read quite a bit. My father, mostly newspapers, but we always had a subscription to the Chicago Daily News and later The Sun-Times. My mother read many novels and we kids were all great novel readers. We would come home from the library with stacks of books almost taller than ourselves. We had at least two bibles and some children’s bible stories in the house, but we were not an overly religious family, even though at one time in her youth my mother studied to become a Lutheran Deaconess for awhile. Music and buying records was key as well. I do not remember a time growing up when music did not fill my house. My older sister Karen was the first to get into electronic gaming and it is a craze that has only interested her and my brothers. My younger sister and I never got into it. My older sister used to visit gaming arcades quite a bit as a teenager and considered herself quite the “Pinball Wizard.” If only Elton John and the Who would have known then the floodgates they would be instrumental in opening!
Introduction To and Ongoing Relationship With Computers
My first introduction to computers was as a senior in high school, I had to take a class called “Data Processing.” My mother, an advocate of women being able to support themselves with office skills, insisted I take typing, bookkeeping, and the new technology of data processing. At that time, the skill consisted of typing on a weird large keyboard and pressing an enter button that produced manila colored “punch cards” that were later fed into another big, metal machine that produced a “print out” of data. These printouts were on special “computer paper” very wide, with many small holes on either side, and green stripes. It was downright archaic when you think about it today. I also had to learn some basic programming like Fortran and Cobal and make flow charts. I never really grasped the concept of programming and used to flirt with some of the geeky computer guy types (all on the AV Squad, no doubt) to get them to do my flow charts for me. I guess I had bought into the lesson learned at my father’s knee that my feeble female mind couldn’t grasp how all these big, bad machines work. Today, I still do not care how a machine works – just that it does.
After that strange introduction, computers increasingly became an important part of my work life and life as a student and a writer. When I was in undergraduate school, at Northern Illinois University, I had two different jobs through the years – both of which involved technology. True to her word, my mother was right about office skills being valuable. They allowed me to have better jobs with more flexible hours than the kids that were stuck working in food service jobs. My first job at NIU was in the Math Department where I typed and ran off work sheets and tests for professors. Besides the wonderful, you could get high off the smell, ditto master machine, there was the Thermofax, a scary, heat-driven machine that allowed you to make dittomaster carbons from regular sheets of paper. Then, there was the monster – the Multi-lith machine – the machine made by the maybe-defunct-by-now A.B. Dick Corporation. It was a horrible, messy contraption that involved a complicated process of typing text (on an IBM Selectric) onto treated sheets of paper, coated in some kind of plastic. This sheet of paper was treated with a clear solution, then placed in the saber-toothed maw of the monster Multi-Lith. It then proceed to crank out copies of the tests, furiously spewing black in spittle as it worked. I also had to load the black ink into its hungry innards and quench its neverending thirst with water. It was a pain. I learned to wear a smock so I didn’t ruin my nice sweaters. The other student secretary and I, needless to say, called that monster machine, “The Dick” after its Maker.
In those days, the early 1980’s, Xerox-type copiers were too expensive to use for multiple copies of anything. That changed quickly, however. The Canon Corporation came up with a more cost-effective machine that was used frequently in my next departmental office job as a student secretary and research assistant for the Center for Governmental Studies. There I became invaluable by learning the art of double-sided copying to save paper (more complicated back then as there was no automatic way to do it) and learning how to type data on the new-fangled “Video Display Terminals” or VDT’s that connected to a giant main frame computer in the basement where I retrieved the familiar stacks of green-lined computer paper. The VDT’s looked a little like the early personal computer screens, and gone were the archaic punch cards, but the green papered results were the same.
That Governmental Studies job allowed me to land a position as a corporate paralegal right out of college. I wasn’t yet ready to take my English degree and teach at the time. It was 1984 and the corporate world was changing as fast as the technology. When I began, at this expensive, cutting edge firm, we had one “telecopy” operator, secretaries still had typewriters, and we had a Word Processing department. When I retired from my paralegal career, 13 years later in 1997, there was an entire department devoted to faxing documents, the Word Processing department still existed, but personal desktop computers were making their way on to everyone’s desk. Oh, and we just started using that new mode of technology called the “e-mail” which, when they realized it was safe to send legal documents this way, would prove to eliminate the “Fax Department” forever.
My mother’s insistence on typing skills did give me a more comfortable introduction to computers as I was comfortable with the materiality of the keyboard after mastering the typewriter. My love affair with the typewriter began when I first spied my mother’s imposing, heavy, iron black Underwood typewriter hiding under its plastic covering in my dad’s den. My mother had used it to practice typing after her classes at Jones Commercial High School in Chicago – coincidentally now Jones College Prep High School, the school at which I teach English. The Underwood graduated me to the IBM Selectric – which I loved for the round ball you could use to change the font sizes and styles, to desktop keyboards, to my cute notebook laptop computer that I finally purchased this year and now cannot imagine my life without it. I think too fast for the pen now and, as a writer, my laptop has become a valuable companion – almost a friend. I call her Della. Pretty blue Della.
After that strange introduction, computers increasingly became an important part of my work life and life as a student and a writer. When I was in undergraduate school, at Northern Illinois University, I had two different jobs through the years – both of which involved technology. True to her word, my mother was right about office skills being valuable. They allowed me to have better jobs with more flexible hours than the kids that were stuck working in food service jobs. My first job at NIU was in the Math Department where I typed and ran off work sheets and tests for professors. Besides the wonderful, you could get high off the smell, ditto master machine, there was the Thermofax, a scary, heat-driven machine that allowed you to make dittomaster carbons from regular sheets of paper. Then, there was the monster – the Multi-lith machine – the machine made by the maybe-defunct-by-now A.B. Dick Corporation. It was a horrible, messy contraption that involved a complicated process of typing text (on an IBM Selectric) onto treated sheets of paper, coated in some kind of plastic. This sheet of paper was treated with a clear solution, then placed in the saber-toothed maw of the monster Multi-Lith. It then proceed to crank out copies of the tests, furiously spewing black in spittle as it worked. I also had to load the black ink into its hungry innards and quench its neverending thirst with water. It was a pain. I learned to wear a smock so I didn’t ruin my nice sweaters. The other student secretary and I, needless to say, called that monster machine, “The Dick” after its Maker.
In those days, the early 1980’s, Xerox-type copiers were too expensive to use for multiple copies of anything. That changed quickly, however. The Canon Corporation came up with a more cost-effective machine that was used frequently in my next departmental office job as a student secretary and research assistant for the Center for Governmental Studies. There I became invaluable by learning the art of double-sided copying to save paper (more complicated back then as there was no automatic way to do it) and learning how to type data on the new-fangled “Video Display Terminals” or VDT’s that connected to a giant main frame computer in the basement where I retrieved the familiar stacks of green-lined computer paper. The VDT’s looked a little like the early personal computer screens, and gone were the archaic punch cards, but the green papered results were the same.
That Governmental Studies job allowed me to land a position as a corporate paralegal right out of college. I wasn’t yet ready to take my English degree and teach at the time. It was 1984 and the corporate world was changing as fast as the technology. When I began, at this expensive, cutting edge firm, we had one “telecopy” operator, secretaries still had typewriters, and we had a Word Processing department. When I retired from my paralegal career, 13 years later in 1997, there was an entire department devoted to faxing documents, the Word Processing department still existed, but personal desktop computers were making their way on to everyone’s desk. Oh, and we just started using that new mode of technology called the “e-mail” which, when they realized it was safe to send legal documents this way, would prove to eliminate the “Fax Department” forever.
My mother’s insistence on typing skills did give me a more comfortable introduction to computers as I was comfortable with the materiality of the keyboard after mastering the typewriter. My love affair with the typewriter began when I first spied my mother’s imposing, heavy, iron black Underwood typewriter hiding under its plastic covering in my dad’s den. My mother had used it to practice typing after her classes at Jones Commercial High School in Chicago – coincidentally now Jones College Prep High School, the school at which I teach English. The Underwood graduated me to the IBM Selectric – which I loved for the round ball you could use to change the font sizes and styles, to desktop keyboards, to my cute notebook laptop computer that I finally purchased this year and now cannot imagine my life without it. I think too fast for the pen now and, as a writer, my laptop has become a valuable companion – almost a friend. I call her Della. Pretty blue Della.
Current Techno-Literacy
Despite all the experience I have had with adjusting to the changes in machinery that becomes invaluable to life, I have been called a Techo-retard, a Techno-phobe, and Mechanically Challenged. Sure, it’s mean and rude – but also kind of true. My mind can sometimes become very confused by technical processes. I was not good at math. I am kind of clumsy when it comes to getting machinery to work. My father’s voice might still be in my head when confronted with flashing lights, cords, bells and whistles. But, I know I need to get over this fear. I cannot become a teacher who loses her effectiveness because of a fear of machines. I cannot become the writer who misses the boat in cutting edge composing by ignoring where writing is going and how it is now being published. There was a time when being published on line was the death of a writer’s publishing dreams. I was even told that by several of my writing professors before I came to Roosevelt. It’s not true anymore. For writers or musicians or any kind of artist, it is now not only okay, but crucial to get your work out there in cyberspace. Artists create full galleries of their work on websites. A talented musician I met recently, Nathan Xander, said, “it no longer matters if you are signed by a record label. My work gets exposure from my live concerts, sure, but I also have my catalogue of songs and videos out there on line. I have my music listed with I-tunes and people buy it. I get most of the profits that way. No record label executive getting rich off of me and my voice is still out there.” These are good things to know – even as the idea of work out there to be stolen kind of scares me. I am part of a three-artist household. My boyfriend is a painter who has yet to put his entire gallery of work on line, but does have a blogspot that represents his work. You can visit it at: bbradford@blogspot.com. I’m a writer, but am just starting to get used to the idea of publishing on line. My daughter is a singer, who has yet to promote herself on line, but frequently gets posted on You Tube when people she knows video tape her performances and post them on line. The attached is a wonderfully raw cover of a Civil Wars song she performed with some of her colleagues at Belmont University in Nashville. It was recorded with one of those mini, hand-held video cameras, and it is really shaky, but the sound comes out amazing.
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