Mario Ramirez-Arrazola
I began working my position at the First-Generation Scholars program during a fiery moment of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first-gen program at the University of Utah is traditionally taught in-person, but we had to move our classroom entirely online for the semesters my coworker and I taught. Moving our “classroom” online did not only include the personnel and technology we could originally see and use in-person, but also the pedagogical techniques that had to be morphed for an “appropriate” online education. At the writing center I conduct a variety of services: asynchronous written feedback with file upload, video conference, and face-to-face consultations.
The technical headaches that have become present to me, as I believe they have to others during this so-called era of “Zoom University,” include a wide array of problems, some more novel than others. These problems include: forgetting to unmute yourself, microphone quality, not knowing how to convert files into other formats, internet access, computer hardware complications, trouble at home, and so on. This array of complications leads me to propose a better illumination of our students´ access and navigation of digital technology. This illumination, I hope, would start the path towards a heightened sympathy surrounding the chaotic situation which these students have been subjected to. Digital access and navigation is one entire problem, we must try to ease these transitions within pedagogy.
I call for a heightened empathy towards the material and immaterial problems which students face, but also for students to recognize these abstract nuances in their own lives. In terms of solutions, I also call for empowerment through the fueling symbiosis that this intersectionality between the real and the virtual presents–the title is intentional, referring to Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza and their work on synthetic identity. As Anzaldúa wrote, this short piece is being written: “to take inventory.” [1] To take inventory is the first step, for Anzaldúa, towards a mixed consciousness which makes sense of unruly clashing cultures–in our case this would be the digital versus the physical. To take inventory we must look critically at our past and take into account everything through a strenuous lens: “She puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been a part of.” [2] The subjective experience of living within this paradigm within the context of Anzaldua’s work is the mestiza consciousness. Here we are using the same techniques of remaining flexible, never fitting in within the mold of society, and the toleration of ambiguity in order to create a new symbiotic relationship between the dichotomous nature in our life that is the digital and the physical. The goal is to balance these natures but at the same time not be reducible to any nature in particular.
Computers and the internet are immense beasts of society that are always changing, synthesizing, or halting progress; there is no use to talk about the discrepancies between literally how “easy or hard” it is for you [3] to use the internet (or computers) in comparison to other fellow demographics because these technical aspects of our lives are always changing. Rather, we need a communal gathering and understanding to understand these symptoms rather than simply undermining someone for their individual problems, as we’re all facing tumultuous times.
There are a variety of problems that halt this communal empathy. Because of my specific background, I will briefly focus on the invisible nature that information infrastructure has. The intersection that the “virtual” world and the “real” world present in our lives should not be taken lightly, even by those who “grew up” with such information infrastructures; it can even be argued that the more buried this intersection lies, that the more there is to uncover upwards into the surface. [4]
To take inventory and prime introspection, I will give some surreal problems which face us all:
- How weird would it be if, when talking to someone in person, you randomly cut in-and-out, sometimes coming in as fragments and sometimes not coming in at all?
- Why do noises make you shudder more over the internet than in person? Why is the sound of a cup hitting the table more intolerable over Zoom than if the meeting was simply in a roundtable in-person?
- Why do we focus on our own webcams, looking at ourselves as if a mirror was present, instead of the speaker’s webcam?
- Is it not crazy to think that you clicking on the mute button or not could be the difference between leaking incredibly personal information/conversations or not?
- Is the detached sense of virtuality the reason behind the silence in the breakout rooms or would have it been that awkward anyway?
- We usually think about internet connectivity issues as one of the main aspects of possibly missing out on class, but what about other incredibly menial issues? What if your mouse cable was chewed on by your cat? Or what if your left-click or right-click is broken? What if the batteries died of your wireless mouse? What if a specific key isn’t working on your keyboard? What if the system update of your computer is taking longer than anticipated?
- Why must we cover up the disordered nature of our homes through the organization of our rooms, or through the insertion of a greenscreen? Given that we live in disordered times, would it not be normal for our homes to look the same way?
- Why must we play a precarious game within the chat box of sophistication versus randomness? Why do we align the chat box with the same landscape as that of a hand-raise, with a question perhaps going unnoticed because it simply might have just been lost in the void.
- How does one face disruption over the virtual, where there is less attachment to identity, even if every student is known? Is it really as simple as pressing a simple “kick” button? Is this preferred to how it is in-person? Is the detached form of virtual communication much too lenient to confront disruption?
- As it was for the University of Utah, a commuter school on the far right-edge of the Salt Lake Valley–with thousands of students commuting to school through bike, UTA light-rail, UTA bus, car, walking, and more–how does the ease-of-access affect our personal attachments to the school and to our fellow classmates? How does it feel to be almost transported to the classroom through digital infrastructure? Or maybe not even to the classroom, but to the individual homes of your classmates, creating a rhizomatic-like environment of intimate surroundings?
- For some, there was a transition towards Zoom University, but some were “born” into it. Maybe as early as kindergarten, or perhaps a more nuanced example such as transitioning into college directly as virtual classrooms were taking precedent. For these people, is there a less serious dichotomous nature between the virtual and reality of the classroom? Or what about for people who spend most of their entire day on the internet already? Or for those who prefer the inside over the outside?
I believe that the simple surfacing of these surreal questions and realities will help put attention towards our strange relationship between the virtual and reality. The discourse surrounding our hybrid and intersectional lives need to incorporate this digital/real hybrid. We must also grow to appreciate (or at least realize) this relationship to have a deeper interaction with the problems that face us. We live in incredibly precarious times, as well as very fast times, leaving very little room to actually take into account what we’re experiencing. Though some problems might be more novel than others, it is important to understand that these are problems faced by all, and that we’re all trying to figure out this balance which is encroaching more and more as the hybrid realities of a COVID-19 society develop upon us.
Footnotes
[1] Gloria Anzaldúa, “Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza,” (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). 82.
[2] Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 82.
[3] Here I mean the general form of you.
[4] This perspective comes from my personal background in media studies, but I encourage interdisciplinary attempts of analysis.
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Mario Ramirez-Arrazola is a graduate student in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine department at the University of Oklahoma (OU). He also works at OU’s Writing Center, where he conducts face-to-face, virtual, and asynchronous appointments. Mario received a B.S. degree in economics from the University of Utah, where he was designated an Undergraduate Research Scholar for his projects completed in conjunction with Voices for Utah Children. He has now shifted gears and is interested in affect theory, infrastructure and urban studies, cyberpunk, dromology, art history, and Japanese history. Beyond academics, Mario is a fan of video games, anime, music, film, and literature.