Every piece of information in the wold has been copied. Backed up. Except the human mind, the last analog device in a Digital World.
— Robert Ford.
I remember the deep churning sounds that my first computer used to make as I pressed the power button on the CPU. I remember a high-pitched whirring, followed by rumbles from the inside of this large white box tucked neatly under the desk in my mother’s room. I remember the familiar sound of the Windows XP start theme. I even remember how funny the cursor and the hourglass next to it looked to me as the desktop was loading. What I don’t remember at all is how life ever was in the absence of all this.
When I turned 7, my parents told me they had prepared a surprise for me. My mother led me by the hand into her room and pointed to her desk; a strange gray object with a shiny black surface lay silently on top of it. With my father’s help, I got on the chair. I saw my face and my long hair distorted strangely on the lustering darkness. And suddenly – colors! My reflection got swallowed in a lush sea of swirling pixels, blue, red, green, and black.
Lush sea of colorful pixels.
Source: From How To-Geek https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.howtogeek.com/175824/8-reasons-why-the-windows-desktop-is-awesome/amp/
I’ve been swallowed by the digital world in this way for as long as I can remember; to some extent, we all have. The first moment where I turned on my first computer coincides with my very first conscious memories. I can’t see my life without some form of digitized medium because I’ve never had a life without one – not one that I remember, at least. To my generation, that’s exactly the nature of the digital. It’s not just a part of how we interact with each other, or of how we define ourselves socially in the online environment; for me and my generational peers, it played a formative role. It’s been there all along, tracing our development, coloring our early years, embedding the digital world within us.
As I write this down on my computer, I keep trying to recollect details about learning how to use one. I can’t. To remember life without something is to have a life before it; I don’t have a life that I know of before computers. Even to my creative mind, thinking about the first time I used a keyboard or a mouse or even YouTube is like thinking about when I first learned how to walk – I’ve known how to walk since before I can recall knowing how to walk. But this is a peculiar thing; not all people share this mindset.
First steps to exploring technology.
Source: From The Costa Rica Star https://news.co.cr/the-children-of-costa-rica-to-be-protected-from-risks-of-the-internet/10866/kid-using-macbook-costa-rica/
It was years after i got my first computer, in 2016. Netflix had just arrived to Lebanon, so I set up an account for my family. My parents were both skeptical. Even so, my mother eventually made a ritual out of watching some TV show, usually a soap, on Sundays after lunch. From 2016 to the present day, she still asks me to her room every Sunday if I’m home. Why? She can’t even remember how to log on to Netflix and find her TV shows.
To my mother, computers have always been a mystery. When her old Dell laptop stops working properly, I’m the one who fixes it. ‘Mom’, I’ve said to her, ‘let me teach you how to fix things yourself.’ I’ve tried many times, but it somehow never sticks. She can remember how it was when computers weren’t around; to my mother, the computer, the keyboard, the mousepad, the touchscreen, they’re all tools that one learns, methods to be practiced and developed. I often wonder at this – how must it be to even be capable of conceiving of a world without technology? My mother can do this, so can my father; so can their entire generation and so can all those before. They have memories of a me-before-the-digital that I don’t have myself.
For people like my parents, thinking about the digital world is thinking about the external world; for me, it means thinking about the internal world, about myself. Over a decade ago, I was swallowed by my computer screen, just like I was when I was a little girl. And I’m still in there. We must understand our relationship to the digital world, my generation especially – after all, it’s about who we are.
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