She cried for what was and what wasn't
She cried for what she had and what she never would
She cried until her head and her heart ached
But never loud enough to be heard.

An unpleasant milestone

I recently reached an important milestone in any girl's life: I had to make my first breakup phone call.
Technically it wasn't really a break up. I'd only been out with the guy once and although we had had no trouble making conversation over a long dinner it just didn't feel right for me.I'd realised when I met him that he was older than me but managed to convince myself prior to the date that the age difference was only a couple of years. When I found out that the gap was significantly larger than I had previously thought it sealed the deal for me.

He was nice and funny, talked about bands I'd never heard of and we had similar taste when it came to movies and TV. Still, it didn't feel right. I'm not naive. I wasn't expecting a perfect date like in the movies and I don't buy into the whole idea of feeling 'the spark'. But it still didn't feel the way I thought it was 'supposed' to feel. I wasn't comfortable. When he stepped forward I stepped back. When he told me about yet another friend who was getting married I stuffed more food into my mouth so I didn't have to respond. I felt like we were at completely different points in our lives and we were. He has graduated from uni and is now pursuing different strands of his chosen career. I'm still in uni and have no idea where I want to be next week, let alone in a year. He's had previous long-term girlfriends. I've been out with only one other guy and we never progressed beyond holding hands.

The friend who introduced the older guy to me said she thought we'd really hit it off and we did. He was easy to talk to and we had a good time. But that wasn't enough to convince me. When my mother said that the fact we had never been lost for words was a good sign I didn't entirely agree. Easy chatting is definitely a positive but it's not exactly the clincher. I can talk for hours on end with pretty much all my friends. It doesn't mean I want to date my friends.

So when he asked me on a second date the next week, I felt cornered and said yes too quickly. For months I'd been whingeing that so many of my friends had partners but no one was asking me out. Having any guy actually show an interest in me, let alone one I was pretty sure I didn't like in 'that way', absolutely terrified me. I worked myself into such a state that I felt physically sick.

After a long talk with a friend of mine I made the decision I'd been considering for a while. The night before the date I debated how best to break the news that I didn't want to go out with him again in a romantic capacity. After considering and then dismissing the idea of going along to the date and telling him in person I decided to call him the night before instead. I didn't like the idea of meeting him under false pretences. The phone call lasted only one minute and consisted of me explaining the situation and him responding to each phrase with 'ok'. We said our goodbyes and I hung up feeling surprised and more than a little cruel.

Around ten minutes later I received a long text from him thanking me for having the decency to call rather than text and telling me that he meant it when he said that if I ever changed my mind I should give him a call.

Of all the moments that made up our brief acquaintance, it was his final text message that impressed me the most. In a few sentences he showed me more kindness and respect than I felt I deserved and went further towards making me like him than the hours we'd spent talking. I stand by my decision. I'm not ready for a grown-up relationship with a real adult. I still feel very much like a kid and I don't need someone to treat me like a princess. Right now I need to learn who I am and what I like in a guy, whether I'm dating him or just hanging out. I need to meet new and different people; go on dates and maybe even ask someone else out instead of waiting for them to make the first move. And who knows? Maybe I will take up his offer some day. When I'm good and ready.

Homelessness

I see him huddled in the corner between two buildings, sheltered from the wind. He is asleep but not at rest; his face twitches and frowns as he dreams. His thin coat and a layer of newspapers could not possibly keep him warm. No wonder he is having bad dreams.

I wonder who he was. I see him each day, shuffling along on tired feet in worn out boots. He never smiles, never looks up, never makes eye contact. He looks as if the weight of the world is on his shoulders and it is. Of all the people I have seen in life he is the saddest and he is the one who has the most right to be.

Suddenly he stops moving and lies still. Is he dead? I wonder. I wouldn't know what to do if he was. I feel immensely sorry for him. A nameless, sad man lying in an alley, with no one but a passerby to see.

Then he smiles. He is not dead but resting, having finally reached a peaceful state of slumber. I wonder what he is dreaming about. I try to imagine a happy life for him. Maybe he is remembering his daughter's wedding, walking her down the aisle and smiling. He looks old enough to have an adult daughter. Or is that just shadow on his face? In this light and under so much dirt and an overgrown beard he could be anyone, of any age. Does anyone miss him? Does that happily married daughter wonder where he is? I don't know. I hope there is someone out there waiting for him but I will probably never be brave enough to ask.

Movie lies and life truths

When I love a movie, I love it to death. After the initial viewing and corresponding emotional connection I am likely to re-watch the film at least once over the next 2-6 weeks, depending on whether I watched in a cinema or at home. I will read as much trivia I can find, look up and memorise quotes and trawl message boards to see other people's opinions.

'Obsessed' is a state I am clearly familiar with.

This goes for most genres of film and the timeline is pretty standard. Watch, re-watch, obsess, frighten others with knowledge. Rom-coms are different. When I love a rom-com, I follow all of the usual steps but on a greater scale. I particularly like watching rom-coms online as it means I can schedule my first re-watching for immediately after the first viewing. I will watch a rom-com over and over and over again and am unlikely to get tired of it. I don't necessarily offer my undivided attention each time. After the second viewing I am likely to watch the film accompanied by a game or other pastime which only requires half my attention. It's not that I don't want to pay attention to the film; it's more that I feel that most films require my virtually undivided attention to continue to have an impact (for example: I can't really imagine films such as The Silence of the Lambs or Black Swan eliciting a passionate response unless my eyes are glued to the screen). Rom-coms are more like companions to my life. Background music, if you will. I like to have them there so that I can continue to interact with the characters and enjoy the story but I don't need to focus entirely on them to keep enjoying them. I know where the characters are going and how the story will end. This is the case with other films I've seen before but a rom-com is often comfortingly predictable so it doesn't feel so bad to not pay attention to every pratfall a couple (or love triangle - ooooh! different!) faces on the way to the inevitably pleasing ending.

I mention all this because I was thinking the other day about one of my absolute favourite rom-coms, He's Just Not That Into You. Central character Gigi, played by Ginnifer Goodwin, has the task of delivering the film's closing moral monologue. (Spoiler nazis, keep your hair on. She basically paraphrases her opening monologue and it doesn't give much away if you haven't seen the film and even if it does she is the central character in a rom-com, of course she ends up happy!). Gigi presents the audience with some uplifting advice, which I will repeat here:

"Girls are taught a lot of stuff growing up. If a guy punches you he likes you. Never try to trim your own bangs and someday you will meet a wonderful guy and get your very own happy ending. Every movie we see, every story we're told implores us to wait for it, the third act twist, the unexpected declaration of love, the exception to the rule. But sometimes we're so focused on finding our happy ending we don't learn how to read the signs. How to tell from the ones who want us and the ones who don't, the ones who will stay and the ones who will leave. And maybe a happy ending doesn't include a guy, maybe... it's you, on your own, picking up the pieces and starting over, freeing yourself up for something better in the future. Maybe the happy ending is... just... moving on. Or maybe the happy ending is this: knowing after all the unreturned phone calls, broken-hearts, through the blunders and misread signals, through all the pain and embarrassment... you never gave up hope."

Now I can safely say that I have never tried to trim my own 'bangs' (I thought about it the one time I had a fringe. I was five and hated the frizzy wave that made my forehead itch and obscured my vision. Luckily my mother explained to me that if I did go down the radical route and chop it off with my little pink safety scissors I would be left with an ugly little tuft of hair that would grow back into the detestable fringe before it achieved the all-over, even look I was going for), and I have never believed that ridiculous thing about how if a boy likes you he will treat you badly. Although my parents happily left me with my "boys have cooties" delusions in primary school, neither of them would have ever let me think that if someone was mean to me it was because they liked me and any parent who tells their kid that is just setting everyone up for trouble down the line. I'm more inclined to agree with Justin Long's character, Alex, in the same film who gives Goodwin's Gigi a wake up call when he points out that "if a guy is treating you like he doesn't give a shit, he genuinely doesn't give a shit. No exceptions." That makes much more sense. Even if the guy does like you and is just "treating 'em mean to keep 'em keen", is that really the sort of guy you want? One who doesn't treat you as well as he should because society has suggested different behaviour? Excuse me if I expect a little more.

"As I'm sure you know, a good night's sleep helps you perform well in school, and so if you are a student, you should always get a good night's sleep...unless you have come to the good part of your book and then you should stay up all night and let your schoolwork fall by the wayside, a phrase which means 'flunk'."
~ Lemony Snicket, The Austere Academy

My natural progression from the written word to the digital sphere

Some months ago I was required to write a final essay for my first-year university subject Writing Ecologies detailing my experiences with technology and literature throughout my life. At first I thought it would be easy. After all, I was not only writing about myself (as anyone who knows me will tell you, I am quite an expert on the topic and not at all averse to showing it) but incorporating a particular aspect of my life which has had often significant effects on me. Then I thought it would be difficult. After all, this was not a navel gazing memoir I had been charged with but an academic essay incorporating the varied opinions of true experts as well as my own musings. Like many things in life the writing of the piece proved both challenging and rewarding in terms of how easily some sections flowed from brain to purposefully typing fingers. Once submitted, marked and returned the essay could have simply disappeared into the oblivion that is my overflowing home desk. Yet today I found the original copy on my laptop and thought, hey, why should my six pages of hard work be limited in audience to a couple of university lecturers? So here it is, almost in full (I tweaked a few things; somehow phrases which seemed perfect before now seem clumsy), including references. I certainly would not recommend reading all of the quoted commentators for yourself, and that's not just because I object to being labelled as a member of an 'increasingly illiterate generation'. I do hope however that you find something of interest in these paragraphs, even if it is only to reminisce on your own childish introductions to technology.

And so, without further ado...

My natural progression from the written word to the digital sphere

It is difficult to remember a time when the written word was not important in my life. Early childhood was filled first with the joy of being read to and the magic of falling into another world through literature. Learning to read these texts for myself opened more doors and introduced me to the euphoric feelings associated with the power to lose oneself in simple printed words on a page. Then came access to a computer and with it the realisation that illustrations in books weren’t the only images available and many of these could be created with a few digital programs.

Now it is difficult to remember a time when the use of digital technology was not the norm. Like reading and writing, in my memory there is no clear moment of introduction. Text, digital and printed, has simply always been there. Changes have occurred as developments have brought in different ways of doing things but the formula essentially remains the same: the written word provides a wealth of emotion and the ability to chronicle our experiences in life. Yet we must ask ourselves, what is the written word? Does the term only refer to printed text on a paper page? If this is the case then it would seem possible that ‘writing’ will very soon be something only referred to in the history books. Or perhaps, as many children of the digital age seem to feel, the written word is evolving to include those words that have not yet been printed. Those phrases that wait in the digital cloud for us to recognise them as a literature just as pure as the traditional book.

Like any other year 1994 was a mix of exciting firsts and forgettable continuations. It was a largely ordinary year, highlighted by events such as the release of Disney’s The Lion King and former President of the United States of America Ronald Reagan’s announcement as a sufferer of Alzheimer’s. It was the year of my birth and as such the year I was brought into the technological age, so it is fitting that the month of my birth also played host to the first International World Wide Web Conference, entirely devoted to discussing the commercial value of the World Wide Web, in San Francisco, USA.

Although I say I was born into a world of technology I wasn’t a precocious toddler touch-typing on the family desktop computer. Some of my earliest memories are of books, books everywhere: books filling shelves in almost every room, books being read aloud. Drawing was also a key element, with colouring books and pieces of paper covered with brightly coloured crayon blobs all over the house. The computer was always there as both the adults of the house used them for work but my parents were always more focused on getting me to read widely and enjoy the written word the way they did.

I probably used them at an earlier stage but my first clear recollections of using computers came with my progression through primary school. Typing up projects and reports were eclipsed in my desires by the Microsoft application Paint. Many hours were spent drawing squiggles and testing out the ‘spray paint’ tool. Looking back now these digital experiments, which I always demanded be praised by my parents, were really a natural progression of my desire to create. The computer offered a different way of constructing essentially the same images I had drawn on paper.

With adolescence came the joys of computer gaming, with applications such as The Sims and World of Warcraft fascinating me with their three-dimensional graphics and ability to personalise creations. The stories I could create in these games seemed so much wider and better developed than those I could create on paper. I wasn’t simply describing what I imagined but creating it in a way that others could see and understand.

As I grew older still the attraction of the Internet and the audience it gave me access to increased and necessitated membership to social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter. The ability to converse so easily with friends and family drew me in and the desire to feel involved resulted in a frenzy of status updating. Similarly, although keeping a diary had never held much allure, the culture of blogging fascinated me. It had always seemed useless to me to keep a journal of mundane everyday activities but blogging encouraged my argumentative nature and desire to communicate as I held the belief that someday someone other than my parents might read and respond to my words favourably.

Bradley (2010) states that “the online writer has at his/her disposal the most versatile storytelling platform ever” as the Internet, “allows the seamless integration of the written word, sound vision, and motion”. The attraction of this wide range of entertainment and creative outlets is obvious and sets the stage for the change in culture, communication and language that has become particularly noticeable during the 21^st century.

Kaiser (2011) stated that the proficiency of new technologies meant, “improved ways of communicating are mainstreamed into our society”. This is certainly the case with my experiences. How often have members of previous generations noted how comfortable members of my generation are with digital technologies? Even those like me who by no means consider themselves experts in the digital field are able to perform basic functions with very little thought or planning. Most of us have grown up with at least one computer in the house. Public school students of my age all received government laptops in 2009 and now there seem to be few academic courses or job opportunities that do not require at least a base form of computer literacy. You could be forgiven for being swept up in the excitement of the ever-developing world of digital literacy and agreeing with Stommel (2012) that “the capacity for something wondrous is upon us” in terms of how we communicate.

If we only used computer programs to collate data and perform mathematically based functions perhaps there would not be such a strong argument for computers as destroyers of language. It stands to reason that a change in writing formatting from pen and paper to typing digital documents would inevitably result in a change in writing style.

Porter (2002) asks the question “How much do these computer-based writing technologies really matter in terms of their effects on writing?”

It would be easy to claim that the digital shorthand developed by computer users to make conversations more concise is damaging traditional language. In the extreme, the language of digital technologies seemingly bears little resemblance to arguably antiquated speech. Kaseniemi and Rautiainen (2002) note that mobile phone text messages in particular bear “more resemblance to code than to standard language”. Full of contractions and other simplified terms the language widely used in communication via 21^st century technology bears little resemblance to traditional spelling yet follows the same basic structure. As Thurlow (2001) points out the language of ‘netspeak’ or ‘webspeak’, which began to rear its head among Internet conversers in the early-2000s, is a way of communicating favoured by teenagers and young adults due to their comparatively greater use of digital communication than previous generations. As a member of this community of young people I can attest to the allure of quick and easy communication. Unlike our parents and grandparents we have not grown up with handwritten letters and phone calls to and from single landline telephones. Instead, we have been exposed to the relative swiftness and convenience of communication via email, text messaging and social networking.

Crystal (2006) said that communication on the Internet and via mobile phone text messages displayed “much of the urgency and energetic force which is characteristic of face-to-face conversation”. When communication through 21^st century technology can feasibly be as fast-paced as in-person discussions much of the formality of older forms of communication is omitted in favour of colloquial and contracted terms.

It is through this that Porter’s (2002) questioning of the significance of digitally mediated language becomes appropriate. As previously stated, language will inevitably change with the development of new ways of communicating. Being born into this digital age of convenience necessitates a desire to communicate in a correspondingly rapid fashion, yet this truncated form of conversation is not necessarily a negative by-product of computer-based development.

Stommel (2012) claims that digital shorthand such as that used in emails “fails to live up to the grammatical standards of typed or handwritten letters”. He goes on to argue that the prevalence of ‘netspeak’ among young people has rendered many members of this generation “terrified” of writing academic papers. The language style used for everyday digital communication is undoubtedly radically different to that used in academic writing, but does that therefore make it a problem? The outlets available for digital 21^st century communication are not restricted to the polar opposites identified by Stommel (2012). Between social networking and academic papers there are a wealth of opportunities for contributions to writing which incorporate both modern abbreviations and traditional sentence structure. The growth of creative text outlets such as blogs and personalised webpages often produce a style of writing which is intelligently phrased but with personal, colloquial touches as per the culture of these mediums. This makes me inclined to agree with Porter (2002) that contrary to Stommel’s (2012) assessment, as well as that of Crystal (2008, as cited in Stommel, 2012) who argues that new forms of communication are “harming language as a whole”, the personal computer and its programs “is simply one more writing tool, like the pencil, that aid the writing process but doesn’t revolusionise it” (Porter, 2002).

The idea that young people want to learn and communicate in a way that incorporates their changing environments is not a new one. In 1970 Margaret Mead noted that the forms of education children considered most useful in preparing them to operate successfully as adults were those who largely depended on the changes in the culture around them. This is another argument that suggests that the increasing use of computers, particularly by young people, does not herald the end of language and the written word. In order to successfully abbreviate and condense information into the modern digital language the writer must initially understand the words and the meaning of the phrases they are condensing. In this way knowledge of traditional language is needed to communicate via digital mediums. This theory is noted in a similar fashion in the study noted by deVoss, Hawisher, Jackson, Johansen, Moraski and Selfe (2004), which found that children born into this age of “new media…have all developed considerable skill and success in conventional education settings and literacy environments”. Online gaming and social networking may be conducted in a different form of language to lessons in the classroom, but no more than children of the past adopted a form of shorthand when playing games outside. The effect of digital communication on academic literacy need not be substantial.

The world of literacy is changing. Developing technologies have changed so quickly over such a short period of time. In my own short life to date I have seen and experienced technologies such as the hard drive, VCR players and cassette tapes, all objects which my eight-year-old cousin has never known.  The way I communicate now is very different to the way I communicated as a child. Not only do I now communicate through computer-based mediums such as social media and this very blog, I also write amateur academic papers and converse face-to-face. The language used for each of these fields of communication is different but that doesn’t make one any more or less valid than another. Although it appears simplified much of the language presented on the Internet is as important and informative a form of literature as the traditional printed word. It is this that encourages us not to dismiss the typed word. Just because it is floating above our heads in a digital ‘cloud’ doesn’t make it less important, it just makes it different.

References

Bradley, S. D. (2010). Narrative theory. In C. Baehr & B. Schaller, Writing for the Internet: A guide to real communication in virtual space (pp. 81-93). Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press.

Crystal, D. (2006). The language of netspeak. In Language and the internet (2nd ed., pp. 31-39). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

deVoss, D., Hawisher, G. E., Jackson, C., Johansen, J., Moraski, B., & Selfe, C. L. (2004). The future of literacy. In C. L. Selfe & G. E. Hawisher, Literate lives in the Information Age: Narratives of literacy from the United States (pp. 183-210). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Herman, I. (2009). International World Wide Web Conferences (“WWW2000X”). Retrieved via http://www.w3.org/Conferences/Overview-WWW.html

Kaiser, B. A. (2011). Text lingo as idiosyncratic communication: The new frontier of dramatic interaction. Ojela: Ohio Journal of English Language Arts, 51 (2), 15.

Kaseniemi, E. and Rautianien, P. (2002). Mobile culture of children and teenagers in Finland. In Katz, J. E. & Aakhus, M. (eds.). Perpetual contact. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Mead, M. (1970). Culture & commitment: The new relationships between the generations in the 1970s. Columbia University Press, New York.

Porter, J. (2002). Why technology matters to writing: A cyberwriter's tale. Computers and Composition, 20(4), 375-394.

Reagan, R. (1994). Text of a letter written to the American public announcing his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease. Retrieved via http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/alzheimerletter.html

Stommel, J. (2012). The Twitter essay. Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal of Teaching and Technology. Retrieved via http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Twitter_and_the_student2point0.html

Thurlow, C. (2001). Generation txt? The sociolinguistics of young people’s text-messaging. Department of Communication, University of Washington, Seattle. Retrieved via http://faculty.washington.edu/thurlow/research/papers/Thurlow&Brown%282003%29.htm

My new relationship with Twitter...

Although it is difficult to admit it, I am a Twitter fiend. Although I don’t post a-million-and-one updates on my life a day, I am likely to post something daily, often more than once. All of this is relatively new to me. Until I started a Writing Ecologies unit at university and was instructed to write an ‘essay’ on Twitter (a novel concept I rebelled against for, oh, two hours, and whinged about for two weeks) I had been one of the many who considered Twitter silly. I couldn’t seem to reconcile the great new way of communicating users of the website talked about with something I had always thought of as navel gazing.
Not surprisingly, I have since had to remove my foot from my mouth and admit that I now post to Twitter far more than I do to Facebook or any other form of social media available to me. Within a few minutes of navigating to the Twitter website I had downloaded the app to both my iPad and iPhone (for convenience, in case there were more tasks, I told myself). Ridiculously appropriate, my first Tweet was a whine about having to use Twitter. Oh the irony. Then I re-Tweeted a celebrity’s Easter message (it was funny! It didn't count!) and finally posted my Twitter essay.
I might have been able to defend myself if my use of Twitter had stopped there. But no. Less than a week later when I saw scaffolding going up in one of my favourite studying spots at uni my first thought was to photograph the scene and take to Twitter to air my wrath. It was official: I had become a Twitter user.
Since then, I have come to recognize the possibilities available through this new truncated form of social media communication. Whereas Facebook has a similar base structure of a newsfeed of posts by people and groups the user has chosen to become involved with, Twitter has the added bonus of making all these updates brief and largely to the point. While scrolling down a Facebook newsfeed can be laboriously time consuming due to the often lengthy posts and widely spaced layout, Twitter’s restriction of length to 140 characters a Tweet means that a user can take in numerous updates in a matter of minutes. To view pictures, links and other more lengthy details the user needs to ‘open’ that particular Tweet, which saves space on the feed. If you don’t want to read it, you can simply continue scrolling down. With such short messages it takes only a moment to scan a Tweet and decide you aren’t interested.
The ability to link Tweets through a hashtag (#) or to attract the attention of a fellow user by including their name preceded by this symbol (@) also allows people to connect and share more easily. There is also the added bonus of feeling as if you are involved in a wider group as hashtagged Tweets may be picked up by people over the other side of the world who have similar interests.
All in all, Twitter is not as terrible as I previously led myself to believe. Tweets from news providers all over the world lets me know the headlines of breaking stories and updates on current ones. Not only this, but Twitter has made me and many others, it seems, question how much we really need to say to get our points across. Does the news really only need to be brief snippets of the key points? Can an entire fictional tale be provided with only 140 characters? The number of authors who have given it a go would seem to suggest that some can. And I think we’ve all at times wished that a friend’s seemingly never-ending Facebook status about their day had just been a few events shorter.