My Digital Studies
My first experiences with digital studies probably began when I was about nine or ten years old, when I got my first Sims game — it was The Sims 2 Double Deluxe — for the PC. The Sims games are life-simulation games that allow you to create people (“Sims”) from scratch, molding their physical features and personalities to your liking, and then place them into virtual worlds that are entirely customizable, where you build and furnish their homes, control their interactions, their jobs, and their lives, ultimately.
This Double Deluxe edition that I had came with multiple add-ons (expansion packs are a common thing in the Sims franchise) to the base game, meaning there was an expanded amount of items for your Sims and their homes. I fell in love with the amount of creativity and customization that the game allowed for, and, despite the extra content of the Double Deluxe version, I craved even more options than what the game provided. I wanted more hairstyles, more makeup, more clothing, more, more, more.
Naturally, I discovered the game-changer (literally) that is custom content.
“Custom content” is the term used to describe clothing, furniture, hair, makeup, body modifications, anything, that is created by Sims fans and then uploaded to various websites for other fans to download and put into their own games.
If you’re curious, here are a few currently-running Sims custom content archives: The Sims Resource , Sims4Downloads , Simista.
Imagine: this child sitting at the family computer figuring out how to find custom content, navigate the Sims program files, and download the custom content into the correct folder in order for it to appear in the game. I definitely didn’t work it out myself; I read forum pages for help. But still, the fact that I was able to find this information and follow it enough to do it myself is pretty unreal when I think about it now.
I say this is my first experience with digital studies because I think it’s a good example of how technology was such a foundational part of my late childhood, and how comfortable I have always been with using it.
Fast forward about ten years and I’m a college student enrolling in a course called Ethics of Digital Culture. I found the class while browsing through some credit requirement I had to fulfill, and it sounded like something I’d be interested in so I decided to take it.
We covered a lot in this course, from some internet history, to surveillance and sousveillance, dark data, cypherpunks, and the list goes on. Ultimately, the focus of this course was on digital privacy and how we can protect our personal data. A key piece of this was the Cypherpunk Manifesto written by Eric Hughes, one of the co-founders of the cypherpunk movement. In the Manifesto, Hughes speaks of the importance of protecting privacy:
“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world…In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. …When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.
Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.” (1993)
There was not a day in this class where I wasn’t engaged in learning something new. This was really the first time that the veil of mystery that surrounded technology was lifted for me. Computers, cell phones, social media, technology in general, all these things that I had literally grown up with. I realized that I had never really questioned how any of it worked or why it worked the way it did. I was comfortable with technology, but not really familiar with it. This made me wonder how much privacy I had given up, or was in danger of giving up, by growing up digitally.
While taking Ethics of Digital Culture, I also learned that the course was part of a minor called Digital Studies. I had a vague idea of the minor and I wanted to learn more, so I looked into it and saw that a few of the courses were already fulfilled by my Film & Video Production major. I decided to declare it as my minor then.
Since then, I have taken the other courses for the Digital Studies minor which taught me of the history of the internet and social media, how data is collected, produced, and used, what we can do with data, how we can protect ourselves in digital spaces, how we can foster digital communities. All of these topics are not just relevant but absolutely necessary for life now where almost everything is done online, digitally. And it also makes me think about how being a digital native has affected my entire identity.
Digital Studies to me has been about being more critical of the technology I used growing up, and the tech I use now. Because technology is so integrated into everyday life now that it’s pretty much unavoidable, we have to remember that this doesn’t need to be the case. We have to think critically about what we choose to engage with and how we do so. I have found that being digitally literate does not just mean that I know how to navigate the Sims program files to install custom content, for example. Digital literacy is not just being comfortable with tech, it’s being familiar with its functions and limitations so that we can understand how to use it and how not to use it.
Hughes, Eric. A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, 9 Mar. 1993, www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html.
