"What the hell is digital writing?"
Replacing myself with a playlist
At a certain point in my career as an educator, if I’d had to choose a single course to be representative of what I do and think as a teacher, it would easily have been our department’s “Digital Writing” course, probably for a decade or longer. Interestingly, though, it’s been several years since I’ve offered a section of it; while we don’t technically choose our courses here, we do express our preferences, and it’s been several years since I explicitly asked to teach Digital Writing, so I haven’t.
I’ve already written a bit about the shift from the optimism of the early and mid 2000s to the current day; that shift isn’t purely theoretical or academic, at least not for me. The tech backlash in the 2010s provoked a crisis of faith for me as someone who’d tied no small part of his academic identity to technological exploration and expertise. How do you teach a course in a particular approach to writing when you’re having serious doubts about the ethics of the entire enterprise? When you no longer believe in the platforms and applications that formed the core of that course for you? I’m not sure I’ve arrived yet at a satisfying answer. (I have taught courses that were critical, including a really fun Black Mirror-themed course, but that’s a different slot in our curriculum—Digital Writing is specifically intended to focus on writing practice.)
While I’d say that we’re well past the most intense phases of that backlash, there’s an extent to which it feels like digital writing is living in the ruins. Even some of the earlier seasons of Black Mirror hit a bit differently than they used to. There’s a sense in which we’ve sailed beyond some of those cautionary tales and arrived at a place—actually, I can’t even really finish this sentence. I don’t really know where we’re at.
I was thinking about this, though, for a specific reason. One of the things that I do when I write in a group is to put a Pandora station on while I write, and last week, I summoned up a Marshall Crenshaw station, and I had cause to reflect upon how effortlessly it put together a mix of songs that could easily have been taken from one of my many (many!) mixtapes from my high school and college days.
When I taught digital writing, I used to preface the course with David Foster Wallace’s anecdote from This is Water (another good prompt for thinking about attention, as it happens):
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
In the earlier days that I taught digital writing, I think most of the students understood what I was after. Over the years, though, thinking “about the internet” increasingly got to be a lot like thinking about water. So I started the course with a short essay that asked them to reflect on “how the internet has changed X,” where X was a sphere of activity, profession, milieu, etc, of their choice. And I asked them to do primary research, to go back into the archives as best as they could, to get a sense of what X was like before the mid-90s. They could dredge up magazines, watch movies, interview older family members, whatever they liked. The point was to try (momentarily) to inhabit a pre-internet world and to look forward from that point to think about where they were at in the present. It was a fun activity to assign, and for some of them, I think it was rewarding.
As I sat there, re-remembering music from my teenage years, I found myself doing something similar. Those mixes weren’t anything special, but you have to imagine me as a teenager in Iowa, where there is no internet, and no real college radio to speak of, searching through the import bins (all 2 of them) at the one local record shop in our city. When I was in high school, I remember a friend returning from college for a quick visit and telling me that I had very “college radio” music tastes. I was partial to the music coming out of England that was post-punk. Some of it was synthy, some of it was ska, some of it was alt-pop, and I used to buy records based solely on what they looked like and whether they looked like something that I’d be interested in. It wasn’t until I got to college (and became a DJ at my college’s radio station) that I began to find all sort of “scenes” and pockets of interesting stuff in the US as well. But my point is that I spent countless hours (and thousands of dollars over the years) building both a collection and a sensibility.
I don’t want this to become a barefoot, uphill both ways, 2 feet of snow story about how much better we were before the internet (although that was a tongue-in-cheek strategy I wasn’t afraid to break out in my digital writing courses on occasion). But I will note that, when every conceivable type of music is available at our fingertips (including “escape room”!), there isn’t really any opportunity for exploration, for counter-culture. Maybe that’s offset by the fact that services like Spotify can fold in the social in a way that seemed unthinkable to the teenager I was back in Iowa. Maybe not. I do know that High Fidelity felt a lot more foreign to students in the 2010s than it did in the 2000s. It’s difficult for me not to feel as though something’s been lost.
In case you’re curious, Pandora laid out a sequence that could easily have been on a cassette of mine in the mid-80s…
Marshall Crenshaw, “Someday Someway”
Elvis Costello, “Every Day I Write the Book”
Nick Lowe, “Cruel to be Kind”
Squeeze, “Black Coffee in Bed”
General Public, “Tenderness”
Bananarama, “Cruel Summer”
Joe Jackson, “Steppin’ Out”
Nik Kershaw, “Wouldn’t it be Good?”
Peter Gabriel, “Solsbury Hill”
Kate Bush, “Running Up That Hill”
Marshall Crenshaw, “Whenever You’re on my Mind”