A flat lay of the items currently in or on my coat

In the winter my coat is my bag. I find the bulk of a warm winter coat gets in the way of comfortably carrying a bag. There are a few things that currently influence what I carry with me:

• I’m on education leave, so I don’t leave the house very regularly
• I live in a small, small town, which means I’m never far from home
• It’s the deep, cold part of winter
• I have a kid

I play a game with my friends called “mom pockets” and here are the rules: I randomly send a text saying “show me your mom pockets” and they have to send back whatever is currently in their pockets. I would argue that anyone who cares regularly for a young child knows that these pockets are paradoxically specific and random. There are usually rocks, food items, garbage, and other various and sundry. Although I do not have any rocks in my pockets at the moment, I think you can tell from my bag that I’m around a little kid often. There is a toy ring at the top centre and a kid’s mask on the bottom right. The fruit to go might also tip someone off. Most of my items in my pockets I don’t have a daily need for, with the exception of lip balm.

When I think about how these items might be considered “texts,” I think about all the ways in which we can ‘read’ the items for the clues they might give about who I am. Does carrying around two lip balms mean that I have really dry, cracked lips, and like to be prepared, or does it mean that I am absent minded and forgot that I already had one in my pocket. Does the hand warmer package mean that I live somewhere cold or that I get cold easily or that I just carry garbage around with me because I’m forgetful and don’t clean out my pockets?

Here is what I think these things say about me:

I think that what I carry in my pockets seems objectively practical and no frills. I have my mask and my kid’s mask, because as we all know it’s a pandemic out there. Plus these masks might be a dead giveaway to an archeologist of the temporal period I’m living in. I have lip balm, because I have cracked lips (and yes, there are two because I forgot that I had one in my pocket already).  There is also some cash, my wallet, a pad, a snack, and the arm band at the top is a light so I’m visible walking around.

If I tell you that I live in the arctic, the items start to make even more sense. The cold, dark, desert climate might explain even better the reason for the lip balm, arm band light, and hand warmers. Also, the beading on the wallet and the key chain reflects the traditional Indigenous artwork of my community. A former student beaded the wallet and a neighbour beaded the key chain.  These items might also help an archeologist narrow down the location in which I live.

As for text technologies and literacies, I’m not sure there is much information held in my pockets. Perhaps some indication of financial literacy and maybe visual literacy with respect to the bead work.  The text is limited and consists of digitally printed packaging. The key fob has some printed symbols on it as well as the money. The contents of my pockets I don’t think are a good reflection of who I am or who I outwardly project to be. There are some superficial indications of who I am, for instance, the pad might indicate that I’m a woman, or at least someone who menstruates, and the kid related stuff might indicate that I’m a mom or care for a kid, the car keys maybe let you know that I’m at minimum old enough to drive. However, my pockets don’t say anything about my nuanced feelings on parenting, or my experiences of being a woman, or the anxiety I feel when I drive.  There is nothing in my pockets to indicate any other relationships in my life or any of the hobbies, likes, or dislikes that I may have.

Can you tell who I am from these pockets? Do you think other people can tell who you are from yours?

As prompted by our course, and further to my own initial thoughts of what “text” and “technology” mean, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “text” as anything written or printed and includes words, phrases, and sentences. However, the OED  does not mention other visuals. I wonder whether or not most people would include images, specifically graphs or diagrams, as “text.” Interestingly, related words such as texture and textile refer to weaving and fabric which, to me, has an obvious relationship with our common metaphors for narratives, such as weaving a story, or spinning a tale. Like Jonathan Berkowitz notes in his segment The Word Guy on CBC’s North by Northwest (Mackay, 2020), original definitions for words serve as metaphors for new definitions of words. In this case, the Latin word that “text” is derived from, means to weave. With respect to the OED definitions of technology and related words (technical, technique, technocracy) what stood out to me in the definitions were words like “specialized,” “particular,” “elite” and “experts.” I do think that there is a general idea that concepts related to technology are too complicated for general audiences to understand and that there seems to be a silo of information within the technology sector. Does the average person know how the internet works? Or how a computer works? I think of images of people vaguely gesturing around them when mentioning ‘the cloud.’

In Google’s NGram viewer I put in technology, text, and progress. I included the word progress because I had tied that idea to technology in my first post. Below are my results:

I’m very surprised by the results. I would have predicted that the use of the word technology would have increased during the Industrial Revolution, yet instead their are two small spikes in the early 16th century followed by no use until the 1950s. I wonder if the steady increase in the word starting in the 1950s is due to the establishment of the field of computer science. I also wonder if there is any relationship to the genre of science fiction. I suspect that as technology, as a consumable product, became more readily available in households, so to did the use of the word. The word “text” follows an interesting trajectory. Like another classmate, Carlo Trentadue (2021), mentioned in his post, perhaps the spikes in the word text in the 16th century are related to the invention of the printing press in the previous century. At least according to Wikipedia (“Printing press”, n.d.), the printing press spread across Europe through the 1500s. In The Word Guy podcast, Jonathan Berkowitz notes that the word “text” was used during Shakespeare’s time (end of the 1500s, early 1600s) to mean a style of handwriting. If I had to hazard a guess explaining the spike in the word “text” toward the late 1990s/early 2000s, I would put my money on the rise of SMS text messaging. According to Mashable (Erickson, 2012) the first text was sent in 1992 and Nokia became the first company to create a phone with texting capabilities in 1997.

Lastly, despite initially tying together the idea of technology and progress, the two words have opposing trajectories.

References

Erickson, C. (2012, September 21). A brief history of text messaging. Mashable. https://mashable.com/2012/09/21/text-messaging-history/

MacKay, S. (Host). (2020, April). [Radio episode]. In North by Northwest. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-43-north-by-northwest.

I admit I checked out synonyms for “text” (idea) and synonyms for “technology” (machinery) and that’s how the site name came to be. When I think about what the word ‘text’ means to me, I conjure up thoughts of printed images. In that sense text is anything that is visually consumed in digital or printed form (although, in saying that, it feels like ablest terminology and I’m going to have reflect on that). Examples of text would include words, graphs, tables, and pictures. With respect to technology, I immediately think of modern examples of technology such as computers, however I also think about technology being any tool or resource that changes the way we engage with a task or object. I think that technology is sometimes associated with the idea of progress, but I personally have always been uncomfortable with the concept of progress when the values and worldviews associated with that idea aren’t problematized. I’m looking forward to reflecting, expanding, and critiquing my understanding of text technologies and their relationship to reading and writing while working through this course ETEC 540 Text Technologies: The changing spaces of reading and writing.