Starting off on the right foot
It started with seven suitcases and I on the front doorstep. I was taking a taxi with all of my belongings (at least in this state) to my new apartment in Cambridge. He showed up disgruntled, in disbelief that such a tiny woman could want to get in a vehicle with so many bags.
He asked me what I did, where I was going, why I was here; the usual small talk questions. Big mistake if he was looking for small talk—it opened up a whole new door to conversation.
What follows is a paraphrased version of what I vivdly recall from the conversation, circa the beginning of September.
D: I’m studying everyday media and communication technologies, so for example your cell phone, your e-mail and other sources of information online from newspapers to google searches.
Taxi: (professes that he is angry about the technology in his life.) How does it become part of our lives? How do you even study this stuff? I wouldn’t even know where to start!
D: You can look at it from a media history point of view—printing presses to books, phones and then the Internet, or on the other hand from a cultural studies or anthropological point of view, conducting interviews and getting at the particular social and cultural constructs that surround a particular medium. Also, technologies are great insofar as they can be powered by electricity, but without a charger an iphone will just become a small, stylish brick.
Taxi: So the whole city uses energy? and the cars? My car is using electricity—
D: It’s a combustion engine, where, well nevermind—it uses energy. A lot of technologies use energy. It’s what makes them so powerful, yet so easily rendered useless. It’s easy to get started learning about media and technology…
I left the driver with a good tip and a list of websites—He could check out Make, and if he wanted to get into technology—he didn’t even have to make the projects, he could just read them and gain an understanding.
I told him if he ever wanted to learn how to program he could check out Processing, (I could have also easily directed him to Scratch, which I hadn’t heard of at the time) but programming was a both illuminating and frustrating can of worms to open, so proceed with a good mix of caution and resilient hope.
The last link I left him with was Wikipedia, beleive it or not, not for the contents of the articles themselves per se, but the links of sources at the bottom are often a pretty good, and dare I say, even somewhat comprehensive look at different viewpoints or ideas in an area of interest.
He profusley thanked me and asked if there was anything he could do, but I told him as this had been my first day of class at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, with a goal to teach and empower people with technology, he’d given me the best first-day-of-school I could have ever dreamed of.
