Digital Reflections 1

The digital divide is possibly something people never really think about. To better illustrate the point we all know that the internet still needs wires to get the signals to where they need to go. What people do not know is that these wires are a lot longer then anyone imagines. These cable wires literally run on the floor of the ocean. These cable wires determine where and who can use the internet. While growing up in a small town the only way to access the internet was to either have a computer in your own home or get on your smartphone. The school was making progress on having students getting used to using computers. This was happening as I was finishing up high school. In the past, there were papers That I needed to type up but these were rare and I needed to do this once every year. When high school came around students were allowed to take home laptops that the school had provided to work on assignments. Because of how recent this development was when freshman a new class came into the picture to teach kids how to use Word and other programs to help with their homework. I was asked to help with my younger sister out on how to do different things on Word and Google docs such as formating her content per the instructions of the teacher. As I did not hang out with other people much I looked to the internet for recreational activities in my down time such as comics, translated novals, and an old art sharing site called deviant art. I found a lot of great stories, art, and some good games. The only computer in the house was a desktop that three kids had to share. So my time on it was limited as well as unlimited at the same time. My younger sisters did not get into the online scene until the school started to become more digital. I had a lot more acess to the web and also started to understand a lot of different lingo. I did not create any social media profiles though. From what I have heard about them they seem to cause to much trouble. From this, I was pretty much ignorant of many different events that were making head lines online. The art site showed me a wide array of how people express themselves. The site is still up but no one really uses it anymore. From my expereces on the web, the connections that I have made are more incline to the digital divide, net neutrality, and digital social actitism. Seeing all the different ways people express themselves on the web was eye opening for me. I had acess to the internet but I did not really know how much the internet would affect me so much in high school. It changed a lot about how I go online now. The connection to the digital divide for me was the time when my younger sister was doing these assiagments that required the use of a computer years before she would be in high school. I did not have the chance to learn about or do the work she was doing before high school.