I've always had a strange relationship
with literacy. My hobby has always been computers. Since infancy,
I've had access to computers and a lot of encouragement to use them.
So, I did. Computers are largely text-based machines. As a result of
simple necessity, I learned to read so that I could use the computer.
One of my earliest childhood memories is playing an “interactive
storybook”, where the tortoise and the hare would race, and I could
influence events along the way by clicking various objects. As I
aged, this progressed into playing video games with my friends
online, chatting through AIM, reading the entire archives of MAD
magazine through an app, managing troops and communications in
Starcraft, reading webcomics, arguing on internet forums, and
researching all the things the people around me didn't seem to want
me to know. Upon reflection, it almost seems like I made a dedicated
effort to avoid learning anything academic at any costs and to spend
as much time as I could goofing off on the computer. My only
stumbling block was that the internet was a really fun place to be,
but only when you knew what you were doing. But, the internet is an
amoral, anarchistic land where the only thing that matters is
results. While real life provides infinite opportunities for
stupidity being rewarded, the internet will brutally slap down those
don't respect its rules. One of the necessary rules is that
communication be as appropriately universal as possible whenever
possible. I have no clue what other ramifications that sort of
attitude may have had on a developing child's psyche, but a clear
result was that I learned how to read and write extremely quickly,
and at a level far advanced past what was expected of me at the time.
You can tell a kid he needs to learn how to type and he'll practice
for fifteen minutes a day. Give that same kid a copy of Starcraft,
and he'll spend four hours a day practicing his typing skills, two
hours doing math ranging from finances to moderate algebraic
principles, and a few hours learning amateur military strategy and
practicing solving asymmetrical problem situations with divergent
thought patterns. In many ways, playing on the internet wasn't even
fun a lot of the time. It was painful, tedious work, stretched out
over thousands of hours and interweaved with pictures of cats with
funny captions interweaved to keep my stimulus-addled brain going.
Even as I've been writing this blog
post, I've been playing an RPG on my iPad next to me, googling and
wiki'ing every other thought that pops into my head, listening to a
setlist of music prepared for me to promote focus (as prepared by the
internet), and randomly posting thoughts about this anti-social
social media network on the websites that I actually find
entertaining. I blog about the strangeness of a real fake blog for
turning in my homework assignments. One of the things I actually talk
about there is that simply shifting the assignment from “academic”
to “blog” instinctually drives me to be more informal than I
would be for most assignments. I have been lured into a medium in
which I am comfortable with a different type of presentation. In
academic work, signs of personality and wit are a death sentence.
Dry, bland, boring and as hyperbolic and loquacious as possible. A
blog lives on the personality of its author a lot more than the
content. You don't go to the Drudge Report for breaking news, you go
for Drudge. Same with the Huffington Post and Perez Hilton and so on
and so forth. This helped me to develop a rather strong writing voice
that would simultaneously advance my literacy skills while holding
back my academic success and development. Up until my Junior and
Senior years of High School, I would wow teachers with my fantastic
reading comprehension and complex analysis, only to ruin it by
relaying it in paper like I was their best friend or somebody
chatting with them. It was only through rigorous academic discipline
through thousands of writes and re-writes that I was able to manage
the intricacies of the academic monotone accurately well, and even
then only in the setting of strict academic assignments. By diverging
the structure, I revert a bit towards my more natural form of written
communication- the informal familiar over-explainer persona that goes
over so well online.
I'll likely have to return to pure
academic-style writing for a lot of these future blogs, especially as
they're not as egocentric as these first two have been, but I'm not
looking forward to it, as I feel that the casual ebb and flow of
conversation is an essential part of optimal communication. I think
this is why it shows up so often in the otherwise surprisingly rigid
and academic-ish world of the internet. I feel that academic text is
deliberately and self-consciously hostile towards outside
penetration. It wants to feel special by being snobby and different
for absolutely no reason. I've learned to deal with it as a part of
the academic world and its progression, but I have read and will
continue to read thousands of pages of self-congratulatory
meaningless rambling padded with ridiculous descriptions and words
haphazardly thrown together from a buzzword thesaurus. It's a cliché
thought, but it exists for a reason. In my own teaching, I would love
to be able to get away from the established systems and focus on a
more organic and natural approach, but in many ways I know that's an
insane pipe dream for so many reasons. So I'll keep my head down, do
what I'm told, and never make any waves to change the system. It's
for the best. Most of the ideas people have are awful anyway,
especially all the people I see on the internet. And they're the ones
who taught me how to think.
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