My name is Joseph Salvatore Cavera, and I was born on June 30th, 1991 in Pascack Valley Hospital at 7:48 Pm. I was born at a unique time, as just as I came into this world, technology began to make extraordinary leaps forward. Throughout my life, I have lived in a house which both has had and lacked sophisticated technology, where in my early years, up until about 1998, the latter was true.
We all have to begin somewhere, and that somewhere for me was the word processor that my mother used when I was about five years old. It was a gray machine with a black screen, and orange characters comprising blocky fonts in proto-digital space. The first beeps, clicks, and static processing I ever heard came from this odd plastic device, but that didn’t really matter to me when I was just five years old, because I wanted to play. The reason I remember this processor so clearly, was because apart from it being the first technical computer for me to learn to use (with macros such as MENU+PUP, which when pushed simultaneously would shift the page upwards and bring up the main menu), it was also my first gaming platform. That’s right, it all started with me playing the most classic version of Tetris on a word processor.
Games unlock so many channels of the human mind, from reaction time to hand-eye coordination, to spatial variation to mathematical and physical reasoning. With my first game also came my first GAME OVER, which was displayed after the first time I let too many blocks fill in the cramped tube at the end of my original Tetris session. Video games have you experience failure and success in a virtual, safe dimension, and permit you to try unlimited times when you fail a task, session, or level. That’s right. As with our own world, the virtual space, a synthetic domain, has tiers just as our own world does, and our reward for our successes in there is the continuation of our exploration into a new and mysterious world.
Adventures without penalty, what more could a five-year old boy ask for? What if he could become the heroes he hears about every night before he enters dreamland? What if he could save the day whenever he wanted to, and live their stories as his own? Videogames have remarkable pull, as they inspire us to complete them; finding everything we can find, and seeing the whole world that’s been created in whatever disc, program, or cartridge it resides in. Tetris was a program, not originally placed onto a transferrable cartridge, but was just one program available to me on the word processor.
I remember it pretty clearly, that dark screen, and how quickly the oddly shaped collections of blocks would fall. As I lost more and more, my understanding that quick action would get me more points, and put my “score” or degree of achievement closer to that of my father’s who had set the high score of 2,240 on the game’s main menu. Accumulating enough cleared rows to get this score was my first ever independent task, and after about two weeks, I reached it- and more. Around this same time, perhaps a few years later, my grandfather Joseph Loscalzo introduced me to a new adventure, except this time, it was called “poetry”.
That first day we spent time together in his office, he asked me to write the alphabet, and taught me new words the likes of which my parents and teachers never used. They had so many letters in them- some of them were as long as the sentences I was being taught to write! He put a few down, and demonstrated their proper pronunciation, and meaning- and then he did something else. He began to shift them around, making the short sentences or phrases conclude with words whose ends were spelled similarly. Then he read a few lines to me, and asked me to give it a try. I told him after attempting to generate phrases like he had that I didn’t know any of the words like he did, and he smiled at me. Before I knew it, he walked me outside, past his pool, and up into the woods in his backyard. I looked up at the sun through the trees, and never felt so small.
In the present, I can return to those woods readily, even though my grandfather is gone, and see those woods, just as I saw them when I was with him, and with technology- I can take these places with me. With the devices that have been created, I can take snapshots, which will last for years, of all the places that I grew up in, and all the places I have yet to discover. It is these places which hold my memories, and inspire me to write.
In so many ways, through every experience and challenge I contested with when I was younger, I’ve begun to see many tasks, assignments, and situations as levels. That being said, I’ve also found some overlap between each challenge, and excitedly apply skills learned in one area of my life to another. My drive to surpass my father’s Tetris score carried over to learn to write as well as my grandfather- both levels with great rewards waiting upon their completion. Reaching the end of a level is only half of the reward, as the abilities you force yourself to master along the way improve your understanding and feel of the game you’re playing, and define you as an inimitable character.
As with many skills, experience creates memories within our mind and body for us to draw upon when faced with new challenges. In this light, my twelve years of poetic proliferation have aided me greatly in producing prime and palpable pieces for my friends and myself to read. I recall one such piece, which I wrote while in fourth grade, which reflects my outlook at that time, and provides a glimpse (as does all writing, as Rosenblatt tells us) at what I thought about something. This piece was called “City Days”.
At the age of about 9, I wrote what is now my oldest surviving piece of poetry, and it was about what I thought living in a city would be like. I can’t entirely be sure which videogame systems I had at the time, but I’d wager I at least had my Gameboy Color at that point, which I took everywhere. Living in suburban Dumont, my hometown, I took my system outside, which was a small world in itself, and sat in what was at that time, yet another world to me- my backyard of infinite possibilities. With the worlds overlapping, I began to wonder about what other ones were out there, and thus, a poem was born:
“Day after day,
We watch many things change
They move, and sway
Life in the City,
Is simply defined this way…”
-Excerpt from City Days
That is what City Days was driving at- the change and infinite possibility that is alive in the city, and in the worlds I yet knew.
Technology alters our capacities, performing tasks that we aren’t often readily capable of doing. Humans, talented ones, created a physical representation of functional capacity in virtual space- this still astounds me. Not only have we developed this technology in the couple of decades I’ve lived for, but we’ve put these programs into chips and wires- we’ve created technology within technology. Just as you can put tech inside of tech, with proper instruction and plenty of practice, you can put words within words.
Yes. We’ve discovered that subtle messages and meanings can be added to simple words, if they are assembled in just the right order. Just as we invent, discover, and reinvent technical tools, we unlock unique ways of conveying our thoughts, opinions, lessons, memories, and other parts of our being in our writing through trial and error. Roger Rosenblatt, a professor here at Stony Brook and accomplished novelist taught me in one of his classes that “Writing is not a science; it is a mystery and barely an art” and he was right. “It is not something that one ever truly learns. As each experience is new, you will have to learn it again and again.” The masters of the art master themselves and their speech, and succinctly impart to us what we need to know. In this case, I believe Roger was trying to tell us that change and development is our nature, and with this building of learned skills- we discover that we are worth something. Technology, in its own way, captures the uniqueness of human beings, as we often create programs and data series that have and will never again be organized in the exact same way.
There is one thing that can’t be captured by technology, and that is original context. You can put Eric Carle’s “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” onto a virtual page, but it will never have the exact same feel to me as when I first read it in a book all those years ago on the floor of the library in my town. As with the keys to which my fingertips keep smacking, there is a unique feeling generated when you’re holding pages in your hands. When you want to continue accessing media, you move one piece of paper to the left side of the organized collection of many pieces of paper; when you want to do this using a virtual viewer, you hit the down arrow or drag the scroll bar downwards using your mouse.
Accessibility itself is improved with the current technology that we have today, as a character, say the letter “t”, will look identical in this word document as it would on billions of other computer screens (provided of course it’s typed in times new roman font!) to those viewing it. The current programs we have allow us to produce words at a perfect degree of similarity, whereas when we handwrote books or essays, no two compilations ever looked quite the same. In fact, if this computer or any other had not been invented so early in my life, it’s likely that I’d still be doing what I’ve done for years- hand writing exercises and long-winded responses to questions typed in old fashioned textbooks.
We have so much more than textbooks in this time. We have systems of circuitry which can contain human words and thoughts, data and files, stories and memories. There exist computers, game systems, and computers as game systems. My first computer game, to my recollection, was Math Blaster. The concept behind the game was simple- if your math proficiency was high enough, you could save your best friend, Spot, from the evil Garbage Collector. It was the first time I saw action and knowledge directly go hand in hand, but it was certainly not the last. It was the first of many games which would teach me certain moves, game-specific skills, combinations and sequences, simultaneously reinforcing my spatial capacities and eventually, the way in which I read.
I loved to read as a young boy. My mother encouraged my reading of science books once I was capable of reading text at that level, and, as with new videogames, I could not wait to immerse myself in these mysteriously exciting worlds. Videogames, with their sometimes painfully long load times, have taught me patience. Levels have frozen on me when playing games on my Nintendo 64 because I became frustrated and yanked the controller. Despite this, I never quite developed the patience to read long books until my freshman year of high school, when I found a couple novels (more like got hit in the face with, they were required readings for summer assignments) that grabbed me by my lapel and pulled me further and further in.
I had months to read a few books of a couple hundred pages each. One was a war novel (All Quiet on the Western Front), one was a biological novel (The Double Helix), and the third was a science fiction novel (Ender’s Game). Like the videogames I had come to love, I had three months of summer to try to read the books at any pace I wanted, with as many chances to retry reading chapters as I could want. This taught me that although pressure can often stimulate growth, it’s far more pleasant and memorable to take learning and development at your own speed.
My perspective to both technology and writing is certainly a unique one, as many born before my time have become sedentary in old ways, while many born after my time never knew what it was like to live without the devices we utilize every day. It’s essential to learn these new methods if you’re going to live in our world today, as it’s also become a part of our culture. Human invention has developed right alongside human writing, as necessity has facilitated nearly incalculable expansion. Technology advances just the same way that words, language, and writing do- with purpose, and relentless drive.