My childhood experiences with technology were very limited. I was an envious bystander while my cousins played Atari and Duck Hunt. I think my little brother played “Oregon Trail” in school. I remember hearing about it somewhere…
Technology Growing Up
My childhood experiences with technology were very limited. I was an envious bystander while my cousins played Atari and Duck Hunt. I think my little brother played “Oregon Trail” in school. I remember hearing about it somewhere…
In the summer of 1994, after fourth grade, my family moved to Lebanon to “experience Middle Eastern culture and language,” and fulfill a lifelong dream of my father’s. This memory conjures up images of transportation technology: airplanes, conveyor belts, forklifts, x-ray scanners, and metal detectors…etc. As I grew and continued to travel “back home,” these airport technologies would become smaller, more familiar to me, and more advanced with the passage of time. However, technology wasn’t a huge part of life in Lebanon; that was part of my dad’s dream too. We saw gypsy shepherds herding goats and sheep on a daily basis on the mountains in our backyard. We rode my grandfather’s donkey into the village to buy milk directly from the cow’s teats. We stuffed and rolled grape leaves one by one, stacked them in a huge pot with no handles, and cooked them outside over a wood fire. Then, we washed the dishes outside with well water, which was actually melted snow that was siphoned to the well from the roof of the house in the spring. We picked all our fruits and vegetables from my grandfather’s garden: it was bigger than our house. We collected firewood all summer for the wood-burning stove to keep us warm all winter.
Even in school in Lebanon, there wasn’t a computer in sight. We studied charts and tables. We memorized the history and geography of Lebanon; I still remember that the nahr il 3assi is the river in Lebanon that flows uphill, against the pull of gravity in some places and that the Lebanese civil war lasted from 1975 to 1991. I do remember the details, but I’ll spare you. We studied Math, Chemistry, Biology, Arabic Reading and Writing, English Reading and Writing, Religions, Citizenship, and more, without the use of computers. We took a philosophy class in sixth grade! Needless to say, the two years I spent in Lebanon were exactly what my father had wanted for us: difficult, but enriching.
After I began college, technology became a much more familiar entity, although starting out, I was far behind my peers. (For further information about the cultural restrictions I felt with regard to technology see my writing sample about Arab American Women and Access). I soon caught up to my peers and began to teach Composition. I have noticed that even non-Arabs students may question technology-use.
When spoken in a first year Composition course, the word "technology" often results in a myriad of responses from Comp. 1 students, ranging from "ugh!" to "yay!" and everything in between. While some students enjoy the idea of accessing Facebook, MySpace, Blogger...etc. as a kind of college composition, others react negatively to this idea. Is blogging and chatting really a kind of writing? If so, can it be considered "academic" or even "scholarly" writing? I have grappled with these questions myself as an instructor...
I have realized that as a student, I see no drawbacks to technologically reproducing and publishing text, other than the waste of printing paper. Technology makes reading easier, makes researching easier, makes access to reading material easier, makes finding texts easier...etc.
