Screen time

After dabbling in pong and handheld video football, my family’s big entry into the digital world was a Sears 2600 Atari-compatible gaming unit. My budget-minded family may not have joined the videogame trend if Atari hadn’t licensed its technology to a mass-market partner like Sears (where my richest uncle worked) and to other game developers, which seemed to outstrip Atari offerings. Activision River Raid was the favorite among my sisters and me, who otherwise spent time in the actual unnamed creek that ran through our yard.

While later I played Colecovision and Intellivision at friends’s houses, Atari was the beginning and end of gaming systems for the TV-obsessed Andrewses. With the set on day and night, we had no time for games.

Video hat tip to https://wearethemutants.com/.

Wax layout and dumb terminals

My first jobs post college were not-quite-digital. Unable to afford a job in New York publishing, I stayed in Fort Washington and secured a job amid the glitz of my hometown’s finest trade paper: Construction Equipment Guide. My first exposure to professional publishing involved running typeset text through a waxing machine, which coated the back of the paper with stripes of melted adhesive wax so it could be cut up and pasting it in layout form. I did not consider this digital, but Douglas Eyman cites Angela Haas, who wrote, “All writing is digital: digitalis in Latin, means “of or relating to the fingers or toes” or “a coding of information.” (Eyman, p. 19). If all writing is digital, cut and paste modular paste up qualifies as well.

My next job was a step back professionally but a step forward technicologically: I was a customer service rep for Adelphia Cable. I sat in front of a dumb terminal — a keyboard and black screen with green text linked to the customer mainframe — fielding complaints about pay-per-view Wrestlemania that didn’t come through or outages due to the county-wide upgrade to fiber optic cable that would eventually make high speed internet and streaming possible. Technology requires infrastructure — not just Steve Wozniak but the folks splicing the cable and dodging irate callers.

You’ve got mail

My first exposure to the internet came via my boyfriend’s father’s AOL account. I remember huddling around his desktop, looking up our college websites, and playing AOL trivia games.

Nicholas Carr wrote that “the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.” (Nicholas Carr, “Is Google making us stupid?” The Atlantic, July/August 2008.) My first exposure was a revelation; little did I know that the AOL trivia game that hooked my Quizzo-obsessed boyfriend and I was the point of a spear that would change the meaning of trivia, where every barroom dispute can be resolved with a few keystrokes.

In my own walk-up apartment, I used a Mac Classic decommissioned by my old employer to write my grad school papers; my machine was too old to be compatible with dialup. Without Internet, it offered only one improvement over my old Brother word processor: my Microsoft Word writings could be transferred via disc to other computer and the files were forward-compatible.

I came, I saw, iMac

In 1998 I took on a lucrative writing project that required me to purchase a original first-generation turquoise iMac, hooked up via Earthlink dialup. I used to the new tech to work for a dinosaur of a publishing model: collectible cards about the nutritional and culinary benefits of different ingredients delivered by a subscription service similar to recipe cards. It’s hard to believe that model existed in 1998, and I’m more shocked to discover it still exists in 2023! While it seemed archaic then, the cards were the kind of modular content that later lent itself to online publishing — a precursor of the food blogs and content creation across social media platforms.

Later in the year, I began a dead-tree job as senior editor of a print trade magazine about direct marketing. The discipline was in a state of disruption, making the transition from envelope stuffing and mailing lists to data collection and digital marketing. As paper catalogs began to lose primacy and print trade magazines along with them, I launched an email newsletter about digital marketing that reached 50,000 subscribers a week.

Image source: https://www.macworld.com/article/190458/original_imac.html

EDU Redux

CDLATER, alligator. In mid 2002 I went back to school, leaving CDNOW/BMG for a safer haven: the Wharton School Publications Office as associate director. Once again, I was rejected for the job, getting it on the rebound after asking why I wasn’t selected and how I could be considered. (Part of the answer was taking such a serious paycut that I did not reach my CDNOW salary again for 20 years.)

“Publications” as the name of our office was an anachronism. I worked primarily on digital products, with our video-rich MBA marketing package distributed via CD, since streaming was not yet reliable in international markets. The project was considered so innovative that we won the Gold CASE Award — the highest honor in college marketing (there are awards for everything).

By 2003 we gauged that tech infrastructure was advanced enough that we able to ditch the CD and deliver virtually all admissions marketing online, using a custom CMS that became increasingly clunky, with the merest flyers mailed out to direct prospective students to the web.

When sourcing some photos to report on a student event, an undergraduate told me to grab them from Facebook, a new social website for the Ivy League. I submitted my upenn.edu address and began my account in May 2004, weeks after the site first expanded beyond Harvard. I mostly forgot about the account until about 2008 until it was widely adopted by my peers. This earliest social media experience is relevant to Douglas Eyman’s citation about Gunther Kress’s 2003 observation that text is “a matter of social action and social forces, and all aspects of literacy are seen as deriving from these actions and forces” (Eyman, p. 23). Without a relevant audience and a social and cultural environment, a social media platform is a dead end.

Moderated and disintermediated

After my first child was born, I revisiting my print- and storytelling ambitions by taking on a role as Wharton Alumni Magazine, leading short- and long-form content for a quarterly print and digital publication. At the same time, I finally read Harry Potter, and as a mother and writer, I realized that the books of my childhood had inspired me more than literary fiction ever had, and in isolation, I began to write a middle-grade novel in isolation. When my second child was born, I took some time off full-time employment for unsteady freelance work.

I finished my novel, found an agent, AND got my first iphone so that I could stay connected to the agonizing silences of having a novel on submission. I had found online and real-life friends in gardening and parenting forums over the previous five years. but when I joined online writer boards and writer twitter, the difference between IRL and online friends disappeared. Some of my writer friends became famous and I became acquainted with some who already were.

My first novel never sold. My second did, to a small press that went out of business, then to another small press. I self-published a Kindle short story after being dropped from a traditional anthology, dipping a toe into the disintermediated world of online publishing.

Douglas Eyman describes the 2005 work of James Zappen focusing not just on rhetorical strategics and new media, but the formation of digital identifies and potential for building social communities (Eyman, p. 29). What he did not describe was the process of entropy that takes place in online communities with the distance and anonymity of digital identities. On the moderated board, our community fell apart with bitter recriminations, as all communities seem to. In the unmoderated one, a public persona became an expected but fraught thing amid writer blowups and kerfuffles over privilege, hubris, and identity that predated so-called “cancel culture.”

At the same time, as I became immersed in writer communities, I began reading more than ever. Nicholas Carr cited Scott Karp writing about online meaning, who confessed that reading on the web destroyed his voracious book consumption by changing his thinking (Carr). I experience the opposite, and part of it came via another social channel: Goodreads, a reader’s review site with annual Reading Challenges gamified my book shelves. I became determined to beat my annual target of 100 books, something I am this year falling behind for the first time in years (I’ll put some blame on this class!).

Winter of dis/content

Everyone remembers 2020; no one remembers 2020.

The COVID pandemic accelerated societal changes that seemed improbable or distant — removing barrirers to telework and telemedicine, while widening the digital divide between children and households those with broadband, devices, and safe homespaces.

I had been struggling in a new job at a philanthropic research center at Penn, but the pandemic gave new direction and meaning to my work. While my younger colleagues felt the pain of social disruption more, I felt purpose and connection with my family. After struggling to get past gatekeepers of children’s literature, despite selling four books, three of them without an agent, I paused. My children were teens. I left the digital spaces for writers and stopped posting in my accounts, amid culture clashes that pitted friend against friend against troll.