what’s in my bag? RP
Task 1: What’s in your bag?
This is me, Richard Payne with the contents of my work bag in 2023 ~ nice to meet you!
The contents:
- K94 mask from Korea. ‘left over’ from the pandemic I keep it in my bag for flying in case some countries still require it.
- When travelling, sometimes a workday could end up being up to 24 hours on the go without a chance to stop so nice to have a stick of deodorant in the bag.
- Two sanitizer wipes, I use these on airplanes to wipe down the food tray.
- Sanitizer came in an Air Canada travel pack and just stayed in my bag.
- USB stick. This has several presentations I need in case I don’t have access to the internet.
- Notepad with two pens. I use this daily. I keep to-do lists and meeting notes. I don’t do anything with them, but the very act of writing things down helps me to remember, digest, ponder and act on ideas. Once those notes are no longer relevant, I shred them.
- My Think Pad Lenovo laptop. I take this to my office everyday where I attach it to my daisy chain of computer screens. I also bring it home every day.
- The mouse.
- The power cord.
- My fob and ID badge along with some business cards.
- A pin that I sometimes wear on a suit lapel.
- My garage door opener.
- My front door key, just in case one day my garage door doesn’t open!
- My wallet.
- An external hard drive. I only bring this to and from the office.
- Finally, my beloved Contigo tumbler. This holds my tea.
These are the contents of my daily work bag. I’m usually in my office, sometimes visiting schools and sometimes travelling but usually in my office Monday to Friday. My work often extends into the evening especially communicating in different time zones, so my laptop always comes with me. I have some travel items that while I don’t use frequently, just never seem to make it out of my bag. I don’t carry anything personal other than photos of my family in my wallet. I have a much different bag I use in my free time which I take hiking or paddling which looks the opposite of this. First aid kit, bear spray, snacks, water, towel, and no electronics! While that ‘weekend’ bag might say more about me personally, I think the daily work bag inhabits much more of my life and reflects how the majority of my time is spent.
The contents of this bag point to the fact that I use technology for/at work. In fact, much of my communication throughout the day is digital. As it relates to this course, I reflect on:
How might these items be considered “texts” and how do they relate to text technology.
While my work is multifaceted, so much of it comes down to communication. So much of that communication is through digital text. As I take this opportunity to think about how these items relate to textologies, I think about the timeline of the technology. I have several items that could be considered outdated modes of text and storing text. For one, my notebook and pens. I believe, and research would seem to show, that the act of handwriting itself engages the brain in a way that typing doesn’t. In theory, digital note taking would be superior in that I can share notes, store them, organize them in far superior ways etc. However, I do not intend to keep any of the daily notes in my notebook, I just need to go through the act of writing things out to remember, digest, ponder and act on ideas. Secondly, why in this day in age of the cloud would anyone use an external hard drive? Perhaps this says more about me, in that for some of my work, I just don’t like keeping things in the cloud. The laptop itself is more a versatile extension of myself as a means of communication, multi modal creation, and implementation. While much is conveyed through video, image, and sound, still text trumps all those mediums for some applications.
What do they say about you, the places you inhabit, the cultures with which you engage, and/or the activities you take up?
From these items alone, it becomes apparent to me that I value keeping my personal and professional life separate. There are very few personal items in my work bag. They show that I inhabit a digital space in a time and culture in which that is important and effective.
What would this same bag have looked like, say, 15 or 25 years ago?
20 years ago, I led a very different life. I lived in the Rockies, lived for adventure, and didn’t own a cell phone or a computer. My bag, depending on the season, would have consisted of skiing, paddling, biking, or trekking gear.
How do you imagine an archeologist aiming to understand this temporal period might view the contents of your bag many years in the future?
An archeologist in the future, say in the year 2123 might be somewhat bemused at the machines I carried around. The electronics would be corroded and beyond access. The depth of all the rich text and information I carried around with me would be lost to the archaic technology. I recently had such an experience myself while visiting my family home this summer. I found my old collection of 1990s mix tapes, but to my chagrin, apparently magnetic strips have a shelf life. All those musical memories forever lost… (thank god for YouTube music!). The most communicative items to the archeologist ‘lucky’ enough to discover my work bag would ironically be the oldest of technologies in my bag, the notebook. The notebook, which could be very well preserved and the contents of my wallet which would provide text clues to the story of who I was. All the electronics would show is what was used but no clue as to what its contents were.
To that end, it reminds me of a striking scene in the new Mission Impossible movie (spoiler alert!) wherein the CIA had hundreds of people in a room on typewriters furiously transcribing information from digital format to ink as a super AI is contorting truth itself in the digital realm of text knowledge, and without truth only weaponized chaos would ensue. The only way to preserve text knowledge was to revert to this older technology.
Alas, those contents of my bag provide the affordances of my day to day work life.
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