Digital Divides: Origami Sakura Star
The lack of access to digital technologies had a drastic effect on my ability to create the sakura star. At first I thought, “No big deal. If I can just stare at this image long enough, I’ll figure it out.” However, this was not the case. It was not as simple as walking into a library and finding a book on origami and hoping it would show me printed instructions of how to make the sakura star. Here’s why: we depend on digital technologies even at our libraries.
My first attempt at learning how to make a sakura star was by going to my neighborhood library. It was a fail. Not only were the librarians rude and unhelpful, but they depended on their computer to tell them if and where they would have an origami book. This ended with me desperately looking from shelf to shelf with no avail. I finally consulted myself with the idea that making this sakura star from scratch could not possibly be that difficult.
I went home. I gathered a colored sheet of paper and a pair of scissors. In my previous post, I made an origami dog and noted that if I could do two things over they would be to grab a pair of scissors and a colored sheet of paper from the start. So I did just that. Next, I know that since I didn’t origami paper, I would have to make a square from my original rectangular paper. I had memorized the instructions from my latest attempt and I was able to make the square. It was all downhill after this.
Since I wasn’t able to obtain instructions that weren’t from the Internet and that I was unable to find at my nearest library, I did what we all must do when faced with such a challenge: I winged it. I studied the central and outer shapes of the image and tried to replicate them. No matter how I folded that piece of paper, I couldn’t make a star or perfect pentagon. My final product ended up looking more like a square than a star or a pentagon. During this process, I caught myself feeling angry and frustrated. I was frustrated because I really thought I could wing it, but I was angry because it made me think about people who may not have access to the Internet via computer or mobile device, how would they have done this?
I started to feel ashamed of how dependent we’ve become on technology. Nevertheless, I would argue that this is a different type of dependence. It’s the type of dependence that can open opportunities and can help you learn new things at your fingertips. It made me think back to our Rojas et al. (2012) reading and how these digital divides are prevalent in the communities we live in. These digital divides made deeper by socioeconomic status, culture, gender, and age. Now more than ever, the majority of people have access to the internet or a mobile device and the affordability of such digital technologies has made narrowed this gap. However, this is not the case in other parts of the world. Moreover, I considered our current reading on archiving. If all origami websites and eBooks were deleted and there were no origami printed books in site, how would we have made this sakura star? My first guess would be that someone with experience in making sakura stars would have to teach us. What if there were no sakura star making experts? Archiving would become very useful in this scenario.
References
Rojas V., Straubhaar J., Spence J., Roychowdhury D., Okur O., Pinon J. and Fuentes-Bautista M. (forthcoming) Communities, cultural capital and digital inclusion: Ten years of tracking techno-dispositions. In: Straubhaar J (ed.) Austin Technopolis. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
