Day: February 14, 2008

I graduated a Music Major with a Minor in Applied Mathematics, which translated means I switched majors and wanted two years of Electrical Engineering to count for something. In my final year of college I discovered IRC and Pine-mail, which allowed me to communicate with other students I had met on the road while traveling with my a cappella group without a ridiculous phone bill or stamps.

Before leaving college I bought my first computer, a Macintosh G3 tower with a 3GB hard drive, and started building a cappella websites. I would spend hours a day, browsing sites and communicating with people from around the world who shared my passion. Email and newsgroups were my primary forms of communication. I stated working with php and MySQL,, while venturing into digital video editing, translating what I could do with sound wave forms into manipulating frames.

Over the past year, I have taken a special interest in virtual worlds, and specifically SecondLife. It’s my intersection of video, audio, animation, im and voice chat. I’ve even started an a cappella group, made up of members from three continents.

Twelve years and 90+ technologies later, I get to teach other people how to use rich media applications and social software at a small liberal arts college in Vermont. This helps, as my wife’s family owns an apple orchard and farm market about one hour north of here. Quite literally, our roots are here.

I must admit that I am not very technology savvy. I was three when we first got a computer at home. I was one of those children that always had to be doing something. So, in order to get me out of her hair, my mom sat me down in front of the computer and told me to figure out how to use PC paintbrush. I think my encounter with technology at a young age has almost made me take it for granted, not truly appreciating what exactly it can do. My computer use is very constricted, in the sense that until recently the only thing I really used it for was for homework and social networking. For me inventions such as AIM, Facebook, Cellphone texting, and Skype are one of the greatest inventions ever. As you will come to learn, I am not the most talkative person. But, with AIM and texting, it is a completely different story. I know that many people say that this form of communication is less personal, but I feel that texting and im-ing has enabled me to communicate better than I normally would.

Growing up, I always thought that I wanted to major in Chemistry. And up until about three years ago, I thought that was what I would do. But then, my senior year in high school, I decided to take a media literacy class for fun. I was told “Oh, all you do in that class is watch movies!” That sounded like a good idea to me, seeing as though the rest of my schedule was full with intensive science and math courses. But, what I did not know what that class would open up my eyes to and entire aspect of life that I normally disregarded – technology. I have become fascinated by the way technology is used to communicate.

I suppose my techno-biography until I was about 19 was fairly typical. I remember playing the LucasArts computer game “Monkey Island” (the game Jessie mentioned below) on my dad’s PC circa 1991, and that it was a big deal that the game came on a…(gasp)…CD. It had a full MIDI score and everything. Playing that game was one of my earliest technological memories, and when I got my own computer at 8, I used it primarily for gaming, although I felt pretty snazzy using it to write middle school reports on topics like Greece and Mountain Gorillas.

My first real exposure to Web 1.0 was actually eBay…I used it mostly to buy and sell Magic and Pokemon cards, but I think I also got a Homer Simpson poster that still hangs in my room to this day. That was also about the same time I started to get into film, making relatively silly videos with my friends. I actually had to use an analog video editor-one with sliders that you plugged into your VCR. My extremely amateurish skills with the technology as a 13-year-old resulted in awkward, seconds-long frames of blue VCR image between cuts, but I thought I was pretty cool. Eventually I learned Final Cut Pro, as well as such sophisticated cinematic techniques as framing, multiple takes, and placing the camera on a tripod.

When I was in high school, I used the web the same way most everyone else did: purely as a consumer (apart from my production of email, the occasional blog comment, and other ephemera). At college, however, I had my first real experience as a producer of web content, when I became involved with the radio drama group here on campus. I learned how to upload, edit, and podcast recordings of the group’s live performance. The first time I actually podcasted a show, I remember feeling like I was giving a magical permanence to that performance – odd, since the vast majority of the classic radio dramas of the 1930s and 1940s have been lost simply because of their ephemerality. I think that odd transformation of media that has occurred in the past few years due to the influence of the web was one of the things that attracted me to this course…”radio drama” is so often associated with a kind of golden “lost age,” but the advent of digital technology means that no one has to “be there” at the right moment to capture an otherwise ephemeral broadcast. Everyone becomes a possessor and owner of a copy of some “moment” – whether “moments” become somehow cheaper as a result of that sheer ease of capture remains to be seen.