Digital Writing: An Epilogue

      It seems appropriate that the topic of the above discussion is translations. What I mean is, the issues that arise in translating a text from one language to another are very similar to those I have faced when it comes to writing digitally. I have never been one for the digital world. I prefer the feel of pen and paper, and though I am part of the generation that is supposed to be fully immersed in all things digital, I have fought much of my life to avoid this. I use my phone almost exclusively for texting and calling, and only in the last few months did I get a phone that could actually do more than that. I, like many people now, have a Facebook and a Twitter account, but I have not updated my Facebook status in over a year, and I have never actually written a tweet. The point I am trying to illustrate now is that I am not a very digitally inclined person. Taking this course was the first time this has ever become a real issue for me. I was confortable in my little secluded analog world. I didn’t ever consider it to be too much of an issue that I didn’t know how to write in XML, or that I didn’t participate more fully in the world of social media. I had glided along in blissful ignorance of all of the opportunities the digital world allowed for. This brings me back to my comparison with translation. Writing digitally, and translating a text into a foreign language are very similar processes for me. In order to write digitally, I had to think digitally. I had to place myself in a different headspace, a different language. I am not ashamed to admit that this posed a great problem for me. The void I found myself in was not a semantic one, but it was a void all the same. For the duration of this course I have found myself in something of a limbo zone between the digital and the analog, and frankly I’ve struggled in that void. I have resisted the transition, and honestly I have progressed through this course hoping I could make it work without changing how I have lived my life thus far. As I put the finishing touches on this paper, and work through the digital publication aspect, I realize now how wrong I have been. 
         I realize now that being more digitally literate will help me leaps and bounds as I progress through my career, academic or otherwise. There is a great advantage to being able to work in the digital sphere, and I am only now beginning to wish I had taken the requisite steps to be able to do this earlier. What I am trying to say is that this course has had a great value for me as a writer, as a student, and as a person in a world that is growing more and more digital with each passing day. It’s a shame, I admit, that it has taken me until the end of this semester to realize this. I acknowledge now that I should have done less fighting, and more accepting of this (new to me) concept.
       This is not to say that I am going to become a digital humanities scholar. Despite its importance, it is not the place I want to devote my studies to. But nonetheless, I accept the place it has in all fields of study, and I accept that if I want to succeed as a scholar, a journalist, or whatever it may be, I have to accept that I am going to have to become more involved in the digital world. Again, I don’t intend to become fully XML literate, and I’m never going to stop preferring the feel of pen and paper to a computer keyboard, but I do intend on expanding my digital capabilities, and I certainly intend to stop fighting the changes that are becoming more and more imposing on me all the time.
       In putting this paper on Blogspot, my issues have been less technological than ideological. It has been my mindset, not my abilities that has needed improvement. I hope I have taken a step in the right direction, and I genuinely hope that my world becomes more digital in the future.