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.
I really like what you touch on at the end of your post. Are moments becoming cheaper? Are we being desensitized? In many ways, I think we are becoming desensitized. Look at the advent of reality TV, for example. We are so bored with fiction as a culture that we have turned to observing real people. Also, if you read about the ridiculous amounts of hardcore pornography on the internet, in many ways, we are upping the stakes. We are demanding more and more as a culture in terms of entertainment. Are real moments of subtle beauty becoming lost?