Chill Out, What Ya Yellin For?

If there was a love letter I could sing to the internet it would sound something like Avril Lavigne’s song titled “Complicated”. The chorus that starts with Avril asking the question “Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?” reminds me of my unique experiences in carefully constructing my digital identity over the last 20 years of my life. As both an audience member and digital author living in the increasingly digital world today, I often forget about my young adolescent life or the first 20 years of life, during the eighties and most of the nineties, without the capability to create digital content and establish myself as a digital author. As a self-proclaimed xennial born in 1982, I’ve lived a life “in real life” and during that period I cultivated a sense of deep meaning in a non-participatory culture. That slower unplugged life makes my digital identity unique and one that is centered around my earliest experiences that helped to shape my media consumption and my digital identity as a creator today. Thus the entrance of the web and my earliest forms of becoming the sender in this transactional process of mass communication really made my sense of being so “complicated”. In this piece I’ll first expand on my early life as an audience member shaping my life around music, personal interests and embracing my cultural background. I’ll then focus on the latter part of my college and adult life expressing my professional interests that have reshaped my digital identity in the digital world. Finally, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the steps I have taken in becoming a digital author.

Of course there’s more to the song “Complicated”. Not only is it a love letter to the internet but a letter to my younger self when the song was released in 2002. Coincidentally this was the time period of becoming and growing as a young adult. It was also a time period of letting go of a life I left back home when I decided to move away for college. Avril writes in the first verse “I like you the way you are, when we’re driving in your car”. I can’t help but smile reconnecting with my past. My younger self at twenty-years-old was this person that embraced all genres of music. Now that I think about it, my “analog life” of burnt cd’s and tapes in my backseat and glove compartment grounded me in who I was. I consumed music while driving in my car and I was indeed my authentic self in those moments. This was my form of documenting and authoring my travels to and from. Back then I took every holiday break from school as an opportunity to drive from San Antonio to Dallas to visit my parents. So needless to say I spent hours consuming music from here to there. Perhaps something called Napster might have helped expand my music pallet during this time. Anyhow, I sang out loud without a digital playlist and without Google Maps or my phone apps listening to what I was saying. I sometimes wish I could harness that carefree feeling and courageous attitude when approaching my creative digital products.

Now there was certainly more to life at that younger age than just long road trips and singing. However, my media consumption at an early age always tied back to my love for music. Learning to backspin on a flattened cardboard box was influenced by the movies about hip hop like Beat Street and Breakin’. I loved to dance so much I even enrolled in a Ballet Folklorico course for three consecutive years in high school. As a kid I played little league baseball and won a few city championships. The taste of victory as a kid and living a storybook ending by making a crucial catch to win the championship game really happened to me. I still can’t believe it happened to me! I relive that moment every time I hear Queen’s “We are the champions” randomly on the radio. As a teenager I rushed home to the television just to switch back and forth between MTV’s TRL with Carson Daily and BET’s “The Basement” with Big Tigger. These were our versions of “microcelebrities” , a term noted in the article “Making Sense of Youtuber’s” by Martinez and Olsson (2019). I tried to make sense of the slick product integrations without a comments section but now I realize why I wanted that specific pair of shoes or jacket to add to my wardrobe. So sports, dancing, and indeed music of all genres were major parts of my early life. I literally was dancing like no one else was watching.

These early experiences are what built my personal and cultural identity that I still carry with me today into my role as a husband, dad, teacher and as an online digital author and publisher. If I had the mental capacity and the ability to create a YouTube channel during this time I totally would have been singing the part of “Complicated” where Avril says “ You try to be cool. You look like a fool to me.” I could never imagine documenting my life on video or another form of media and disseminating that out to the rest of the world like the Swedish youtuber Misslisibell that I learned about recently. I still struggle with making my content for a wider audience as an adult.

This thought leads me to the current or the here and now. My life as an adult thankfully involves my world of professional work as a teacher and prior to that as an academic advisor in a higher education setting. I am a public figure whether I like it or not. I tread carefully with everything I publish online. I stick to what I know best and that’s teaching and mentoring. I host a podcast and interview media professionals letting students know what to do to get into this specific career. I have another podcast where I speak to my online students at the end of each unit to summarize what we have learned. Now my colleague and I are launching a new podcast aimed at sharing ideas for advancing media literacy in the classroom, pedagogical approaches, and various professional development topics. Covid-19 really accelerated my podcasting ventures and even my YouTube channel. I record mini lectures to support my online students. All of this is very informative and educational. This is certainly my comfort zone because it works and I’m happy with the work I have authored in this podcasting arena tied to teaching and learning. “Honesty and promise me I’m never gonna find you faking. No, no, no.”

So my life thus far as a digital author doesn’t seem so complicated right? Or does it. Perhaps my love letter to the internet was written, sent, then also stamped return to sender. Perhaps the song’s lyrics are a metaphor to explain how my concept of self became complicated because of Myspace, much later Facebook, Twitter, and now Instagram. I guess I never really came to grips with who I really was back then. How wonderful it was to not feel like I had to record or take a picture of everything. Privacy was my power and yet it can still be that. I can certainly be strategic and purposeful in what I decide to publish online. I guess I’m learning to let go and live in this moment now too without regret. I don’t have to be anyone else than the person I have become in real life that then transcends into these digital spaces.