After a couple days off, I am battling a small case of writer’s anxiety. This will be my first conscious effort to “write through it,” or to “write to make meaning.”

Gian Pagnucci opens the chapter “Telling Your Own Story” with a bit of his own story: his first comic book purchase. Comics serve as a repeating theme in the chapter, serving to tie together different periods of his life. Pagnucci alternates between his storyteller voice and his more professorial voice. Each time his revisits his own life, he tells another story related to comics: his love of reading as a child, his superhero moment climbing a wall in college, his decision to pass along his love of comics to the next generation. Rather than just explain how he gave a twenty dollar bill to an anonymous boy for a comic book box purchase, Pagnucci slowly builds up to that moment by using stories to reinforce how important comic books were in his life. The effect is that when readers come to the climax, they are emotionally invested in Pagnucci as a character. In a sense, they live the moment along with him.

Ondaatje’s piece was a bit harder to unravel. The most noticeable thing is that there are multiple genres at work here. The piece opens with a parenthetical note in italics, a sort of stage note for the rest of the work. Then, readers encounter a short poem from the perspective of Sallie Chisum about her house. It closes with Sallie’s admission that she was frightened the first time Billy the Kid came to visit. What follows is the account of another voice, this time in prose, presumably belonging to Billy the Kid. The voice seems erratic, as if the speaker has undergone some traumatic psychological event. On page 32, a hint: “After burning my legs in the fire and I came to their house…”

There are a lot of questions left by Ondaatje, and this white space creates mystery. The possibly “unreliable narrator” reminds me of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper. The voice of the narrator observes an obsessive amount of detail, the detailed observations of the immobile or otherwise impaired. I can remember sick days, lying in bed and noticing the dust dancing in the strange angles of light, the places where the paint from the ceiling did not quite meet the paint from the walls. The idle mind, it seems, finds other ways to be occupied, and one way is though intense observation. The way Ondaatje writes this section gives me the impression of such an idle mind.

Anxiety. Did I remember to check my school email account? And my Facebook wall, to make sure nobody posted anything obscene? I pause from my reading and jot down some notes about what to pick up from the grocery store tonight, and an idea I had for a tweet. I could just pull out my cell phone now, but I’m not sure that five minutes is adequate time between tweets. I wouldn’t want people to think I was addicted to this stuff. Besides, I might want to edit.

In the technology-soaked existence that most of us lead, there is little time for reflection. At least, little “real” time. It seems as though everything is done “in real time” these days, which makes it seem like anything that will take longer to think about than to say is not worth saying at all. It’s a shame, because some things really are worth thinking about, even outside of real time.

Carey Jewitt observes that “the page is increasingly shaped and remade by the notion of screen.” I imagine this as being similar to the way the written narrative was shaped by the notion of cinema, with its utilization of flashbacks and simultaneous story lines. I wonder how social interaction is being shaped and remade by electronic communication. Could it be that short bursts of twitter-style information will influence our face-to-face interactions? Or will the use of twitter for brief messages reserve face time for more in-depth discourse? Maybe, as Theodora Stites confesses, we will increasingly dread in-person socialization. “Eye contact isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” she says, “And facial expressions are hard to control.”

This sounds a lot like Jewitt’s description of the multimodal video game Ico. The title character speaks a made-up language which is subtitled in English, but the character Yorda speaks a made-up language that is subtitled with inaccessible symbols. The video game creators have removed modes of communication (verbal, written) from their characters just as social media creators have removed modes of communication (body language) from people.

The world is multimodal. There have long been efforts to recreate this multimodal experience. Motion pictures added an element of time and motion to the presentation of static images. Later, sound added another mode to movies. New technologies sometimes add, sometimes take away modes of communication. What they do provide are options, sometimes overwhelmingly so. I have ideas that I wonder would be more effective if presented in photo, video, or musical form. Each medium’s combination of modes has strengths that I do not yet understand. If anything, multimodal communication reinforces the importance of every slight utterance, blink, or punctuation mark. We ought to slow down and think about the implications of our communications. So that scrap of paper in my pocket with ideas for tweets? I’m going to sit on it.

As I write this entry, I am listening to Elvis Costello on iTunes, and I keep getting the urge to Google, and tab over to my Facebook and newly acquired Twitter. There's a lot going on, and I can't really resist the urge to play some air drums. (C'mon, Big Tears, Radio Radio, anyone?) So is technology a distraction? I think it really depends on the person.

After reading Part II of Marc Prensky's article on digital natives, I had several thoughts. He bases his conclusions on the amount of time kids spend playing video games. He says that the hours kids spend with the games help reinforce "a very different blend of cognitive skills." I have never really played video games, not when I was a kid and not now. When later in the article Prensky states that "six hours is far less than a Digital Native would typically spend over a weekend watching TV and playing videogames," I thought, "I could never imagine spending that much time in front of a screen!" However, it would be an easy leap to say I spent at least six hours a weekend building with blocks as a kid. So, I may have developed cognitive skills that look different from the typical Digital Native.

Considering this while asking "Is technology a distraction?" begs the questions "What technology?" and "Distracting to whom?" The answer for myself is most technology, including "portable music," is distracting to me. I get too involved. I think I was conditioned to need solitude to focus.

I remember standing with my first or second grade class in the school library huddled around a large wooden cabinet. The librarian was pulling out long drawers full of index cards and pointed out how each was labeled with a range of the alphabet. She called this device a "card catalog."

By middle school, all the card catalogs had been hauled away to some media center purgatory, and we were in thrall to Google. I remember buying my first CD; about a year later I downloaded my first song on Napster. I also remember being in awe of the real-time abilities of instant messenger.

In high school, getting a girl's screen name seemed to take on the same meaning as getting her number. I thought about every movie which makes reference to getting a number, and how they might all soon be dated. (And what about that universal gesture for rolling down a car window? When will that become an anachronistic vestige?) Still, none of my friends had ever heard of Youtube or Wikipedia.

I feel like I grew up in the borderlands of the digital divide. I didn't have the internet at home until forth grade, and by then my bookshelf was full and my cursive was established. I was told to study in seclusion and learned to give my full attention to the environment around me. If I wanted to read, I would go to the library. If I wanted to socialize, I would go to the diner. If I needed to use the bathroom, that's where I went. No wifi, no laptop, just toilet paper.

I still feel rooted in place. Sometimes when I take my laptop to another place and need to access a file, I get the urge to return to the physical place where it was created. On the other hand, so much of our lives take place on the computer, from job searching to banking to entertainment, and I feel like part of my identity exists within the computer. Still, it's not just any computer, but MY computer that I'm wrapped up in. When I moved down to Glassboro a few weeks ago, I only brought my laptop. It has Microsoft Word and connects to the same internet as you. But after a week of living here, it just didn't feel like home. I decided to bring my desktop down, and now my room feels like mine.