Roberto‘s techno-biography

Technology, from my existence to my future, has played a crucial part in my life. I was born one month premature and if it wasn‘t for the technology available at that time I might not have been here today, so I‘m grateful for that. As far as what technology has made me today, well many people would assume that I‘m completely made of technology. About a year ago I came by an old photo of me when I was about five years old or so in front of an Apple IIe typing away. That photo brought back so many memories; those that I remember and those that I didn‘t but was reminded of by my family. So in a way, technology has always played a part in my life and today I try to take advance of technology in all aspects of life. I quickly utilized a PDA in my freshmen year of high school. Since high school, I have gone through three PDA‘s due to unfortunate events such as dropping them or jumping over a wall with a PDA and a soda can in the same pocket; long story, ask later. Since early high school I‘ve been involved in webmastering and collaborating in Web site teams online, more specifically for gaming web sites. In my early high school life I became addicted to this game called StarCraft. But the game triggered a gene in me that I knew would separate me from the other mainstream gamers. I began to focus more on the community and development of the fansites more than on the game.

I was fascinated how teams of people would come together and develop a resource for the community, and more importantly, for free. I landed a position at a major gaming Web site for Starcraft and from there began to experiment with administering dedicated linux servers over the internet and even had my own 1-800 24hr tech support line, working for free of course. As I think back, it‘s hard to imagine that all of my webmastering began in the early parts of high school. Since then, I‘ve been married to technology for all aspects of my life. I‘m always one of the first to try a new part of technology and even though some people would say that I should wait until prices drop on cutting edge technology... I understand that someone has to pay for the research and development costs and I‘m more than happy to be one of those people. Where would the world be if we didn‘t push for the next more efficient and productive technology.

Overall, on the other half of the table, I have begun to see the social damage that technology has been inflicting. Sure, technology has brought the world closer, but it‘s spread the neighborhood farther. But then again, that‘s another story to tell later...

posted by Roberto @ 7/18/2005 04:29:00 PM 0 comments

Julie‘s techno-biography

A technobiography:

A stream of important technological progressions in my life:

Learning grammar, how to spell, Computer games on an apple, too poor to get a computer, - got a TV instead, sister‘s computer, following princess di‘s death from the wreck, taught self html, published art, angelfire, first email account, nintendo.com, im chatting, role playing, alternative source of entertainment, reboot, paint shop pro, creating animated gifs, learning how to make jpegs not look jpeggy (single frame gifs), photoshop, dreamweaver, first webpage created with wysiwyg, redesigning it in one night, working on MyCollege‘s english dept Web site, college classes (cyberculture, multimedia writing and lit, communication design, art studio multimedia design, animation design, ecology technology and culture), writers: ray kurzweil, marshall mccluhan, scott mccloud, hell.com, donna haraway, umberto eco, marvin harris, evan eisenberg, jeffery zeldman, eric meyers, benjamin, philip k. dick, william gibson, cronon, webcomics, academic papers linking ecology technology and culture, blogging, websteaming.

These things connect linearly but as the timeline moves on more concepts intersect. How can I represent this in a more nebulous manner that reflects how I connect them in my brain (ex. too poor to get a computer, following princess di‘s death from the wreck, to college classes (cyberculture, mulimedia writing and lit, ETC), to writers (marvin harris, evan eisenberg)). Naturally this comes easiest in some sort of visual context, but what about representing it in a different way? A sound collage - the sounds could merge into one sound sort of like a re-mix of ideas or a mash-up of time. Hypertext is naturally built to make something like this orderly, but it is difficult to link to more than one thing with out repeating our initial location. So our web would look something like this:

creating animated gifs - psp
creating animated gifs - photoshop
creating animated gifs - published art
creating animated gifs - benjamin

It becomes less like a web and more like a list with connections.

In essence, it is the connections that have brought me here to study technology, and less the events. These intersections have created an interesting potion of knowledge that has caused me to be passionate about something.

posted by julie at 5:01 PM 0 comments

Kevin‘s techno-biography

I suppose a wee bit of historical perspective is in order - this being, after all, a "biography." I‘ve always peaceably coexisted with the whole computer technology; interestingly, I did so for quite a long time at the exclusion of other forms of technology. My family was firmly of the belief that television was, in essence, the damn devil; so in my early childhood, beyond an hour a week of Sesame Street, any exposure that I had to a world outside of the real one came in the form of the old 386 upstairs. It was educational, it was adventurous, it was emotional (those Troggle[s] from Number Munchers were SCARY, man) ... whatever. Eventually, munching numbers lost its charm, and, in those moments when the real world didn‘t hold much to engage me, I started poking around the rest of what DOS had to offer. Only later did I realize just how little that was. Long story short, I ended up discovering GW-BASIC, which shipped with the thing, and realized that I could, without a whole lot of effort, turn the computer to my own dastardly purposes - like doing math homework.

With high school I was able to shift my focus to the more abstract realm of creative tools - I stumbled into 3d by way of broadcast video, and started on the web some. This story is getting stale to me, I can hardly imagine how it is to anyone unlucky enough to be reading it.

Anyway, my point is, through all of this, I‘ve failed to engage, as many have, with the "second life" of the computer. Since my earliest days, I‘ve looked at the computer as a tool, as something of a servant to be goaded into submission to a given task and then passed over until next time.

Part of it may have something to do with my limited exposure to the internet. John mentioned that in some parts of Vermont, dial-up‘s all you can get. Well, in some parts of Florida‘s Green Swamp, you‘re lucky to get that. My home is one of those places. When it rains, the phone line (literally) floods, and we can‘t use the phone or the internet for days. So my social exposure to the whole internet deal has arisen remarkably recently.

Wow, time‘s running out. The thrust of the entire line of thinking - I feel that I do look at technology as ubiquitous as described earlier. It‘s there. It makes my life easier. Cool. That‘s about as much thinking as I do about it.

But my life is still, apparently like progressively fewer, primarily in the sphere of the real world. When it (meaning particularly the Internet) isn‘t there, well, I can live with that too. [stuff to add here] That probably doesn‘t make much sense on its own, but sorry ... that‘s as far as I could get just now.

posted by Kevin @ 4:23 PM 1 comments

Jason‘s techno-biography

My first experiences were with technology as a creative device. I was excited as a child by computers in the same way that I was excited by woodworking.
[. . . there are a lot of good analogies here! A rough wooden table and a rough Web site have much in common—powerful functionality given the time and skill input. A smooth Web site and a smooth carving are similar: limited functionality, but well-done, comfortable to handle, and so on]

I learned about computers largely from my father, who is not much of a computer person, but dealt with them (and their powerful future capabilities) in his work as a cartographer. I met with a local librarian at his suggestion and learned to use Gopher, and we spent considerable time and money trying to get our old Performa onto the World Wide Web. I was exhilarated to write very simple programs in QBASIC that could handle multiplication and division, and then calculator programs to do my algebra. But I was always learning from others here -- the basics of one language or another, one factoid or another about how the internet works underneath, or how computers work, and so on.

. . .

Technology is the unexploited, today. This is, of course, the view of any evangelist about any field, concept, etc., but technology is mine, given my personal, extensive background. I spend my time thinking about how technology could and should be used, but isn‘t, or isn‘t well -- whether it‘s at MyCollege with a disturbingly small computer science department, deployment of technology in the curriculum, or respect for computers in the student body, or in the broader world, where my granddad has very significant trouble using a web browser, despite being a skilled electrician. I think something many in our field have come across recently is that technology has advanced to a point now that it is very developed (functionality has been increasing at a breakneck pace for decades now) but that the ease of use has not increased at the same time.

And what about me personally?
As I‘ve gotten better at this computer stuff, and as I‘ve faced a community of those inexperienced, wary or outright hostile with regard to computers, I‘ve had to deal with a different set of issues than learning the latest language, or adding capabilities to my technical skillset. I am constantly forced to defend technology to its opponents, and attempt to improve technology where their complaints are valid.

I‘ve worked two summers now with the Curricular Computing section of the IT department at MyCollege. This group hires students over the summer to implement technology projects for any faculty that are at all interested. This is largely about user-friendliness, because if the faculty members, almost never with any computing training, can‘t use the software and show it to their students, it won‘t actually be used in practice. And another large part of this is maintenance and documentation -- interns spend much of their time converting existing Web sites (often created by past summer interns) to more easily maintainable versions -- computer-savvy interns commonly implement interesting designs and then graduate, leaving faculty members in trouble.

I would say that that change is parallel between my biography and that of computer technology in general. Perhaps I am just overly self-aware, but I think many in the field are thinking about it -- about how all of this technological capability and extraordinary power can be harnessed. One would think that technology itself would make this easier.

posted by Jason at 8:01 PM 0 comments