My Brain on Digital-Essay for English

A Story by ZackOfBridge

I haven't been posting much because of school, but i figured i could post my blog essays.

As time passes and my indifference towards hash-tags and ‘Man Crush Mondays’ grows, I become increasingly worried that the tools of this generation may slip past me. I see the digital age evolving while I push my pencil to a yellow pad piece of paper and I fear being left behind. Employers are not excusing digital tools as a means for selecting employees and so I, as a desperate college student in need of work, should not excuse digital tools either; no matter my disdain and contempt for them. I have experienced first hand that if I want to advance myself into the working society, I must let the steam of my inner defiance billow from my ears and get along with a mouse and keyboard. The positions for jobs are dwindling and the pickers are becoming pickier, in the web article How To Get a Job by Thomas L. Friedman; he describes their choosiness as the desire for a purple unicorn (3). What that tells me is this: if an employer wants a purple unicorn and I am a zebra, well I’d better paint myself violet and pray to God I burp fairy-dust and crap bedazzled cupcakes because I need to be noticed. My personal shift in attitude becomes even more imperative at the thought that this digital work dependency not only applies to my part-time aspirations, but also my future career of being the next Vonnegut-Hemingway-Fitzgerald type, all American writer. Yes, the digital age has come and is here to roost and I can either kick and scream or let it engulf me, taking me down the rabbit hole in a euphoric, submissive surrender.

I knew this day was coming, and I don’t mean the digital age because I really did not expect it to blow up in the way it has, but I mean I expected the day when I became an adult and would have to take on some responsibility. In some ways my parents prepared me, but in other ways, they had no way of preparing me. Seeing both of my parents work and maintain a career was an example to me. Now, with me going to college and having the weight of the books on my shoulder, not to mention the outstanding dues glaring at me through my computer screen, work is something I desperately need. My parents prepared me to desire work, to want a job and support myself. Seeing them rise higher in their fields was an inspiration to me, but they couldn’t prepare me for the digital age pairing with the job search. These people, my parents, are the people that need me to work the TV and the people that tear their hair when trying to open a new tab on a web browser. My dad started working when he was a child, he worked in the fields with his mom. My mother started her first job as a waitress at fifteen years old. I am certain they never had to fill out an online application or scroll through craigslist ads. They used face-to-face means of hiring and personal networking to get work and it worked great for them. Today, an employer doesn’t want anything to do with me until I have filled out an online application and that application they may or may not look at is not me; the personal and human aspect of job finding has been replaced with pixels on a monitor.

I can allow myself to be disappointed, but I will not allow for discouragement. Being discouraged by the digital age, my generation, would be like being discouraged by the prospect of breathing for the remainder of my life. To be happy and find a position of enjoyment and contentment, I will first have to wade through a lot of unpleasantries. For example, I am going to be a writer in the near future. Whether I am going to be a successful writer or a starving writer depends fully on whether I will network and branch myself properly. In another age, a simple time, I could have sat at a café of my choice, drank a couple beers and a whiskey-sour, wrote a story, smoked a cigar, sent the story to a literary magazine, smiled and repeated the process, but the times have certainly changed. For one, I would definitely be escorted away from a café had I been drinking and smoking a cigar and secondly, literary magazines have declined in popularity since the age of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Hell, Playboy and HUSTLER magazine used to accept stories, but even they have declined in popularity and it isn’t as if I could send stories to digital pornographers, their users already have their hands full. Being a writer in this digital age, forces me through a new set of hoops, which include blogging and social networking. And believe me, I want nothing to do with either, but for the love of writing I will endure; I’m like a martyr, or a whiny egocentric college student.

My problem is that martyrs don’t make money and whiny egocentrics don’t get followers. This calls for a complete personality overhaul in which I allow myself to delve deeper into digital technologies and force my face to smile wider as I do so. I have to fool my mind into believing that this coming of the digital age isn’t the end of all that is human and good, but instead, the necessary and proper evolutionary step in mankind’s history. In the video A Vision of Students Today, students show on a melodramatic slip of paper that they bring their laptops to class, but don’t actually work on schoolwork or take notes. I think this is a fantastic example of how technology has advanced our knowledge and ability. In what other period of time could we bring a computer to higher-education classroom, and instead of listening to the professor profess his profession, we sit and aimlessly steer a cursor to the next page on tumblr or pin that bacon muffin on pinterest? Technology and the digital age have truly opened up a new realm of possibilities for me and everyone else in society, and I certainly cant wait to see how it keeps on keeping on.

© 2014 ZackOfBridge

Author's Note

Me being a smart ass through an essay about the switch to digital technologies

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Marie

Technology is here, and we either go along with it, or we drop out. I have no patience with people who expect the world to slow down because they can't keep up with it.