How has your technology experience evolved since the pandemic?

[Rosaria Delacroix]

I was part of the unlucky cohort who was plunged into the mayhem of universities trying to adjust to a totally online scenario with no end date in sight. I was lucky enough to have at least a year of laboratory experience under my belt, considering the virtual training videos and simulations were kind of a joke- but I quickly learned that people don't really cope all that well when they are restrained to a space of about four paces in total.

A cramped, crowded apartment plunged into the heart of a cement city brimming with exotic strains suddenly became the sum of my world, when I'd previously only really spent time in it to sleep, choosing to study on campus and happily while my time away downtown. It was stuck in a pretty terrible part of town, too- and being within a very high risk profile (when I did later contract Covid, I nearly died- and have an extensive history of previous respiratory infections and permanent lung damage) made it pretty god fucking awful in so far as studying went. And my internet connection sucked! Bad times.

I did learn that I did quite well with online learning though, since I was highly motivated and previously 'over the top' organizational skills came in handy when suddenly you were getting a bazillion notifications at every hour of the day. Some professors really phoned it in though, man- you had ones who decided 'you're all at home anyway, I don't care if my lecture material is meant to fit into 3 hours weekly, I'm going to upload 8 hours worth of me yapping as I fumble around without a script, or straight up read from the textbook in a monotone voice' and those who had equally horrible internet and frequently crashed calls, leaving the TAs confused and trying to wrestle control of the speaker podium thing.

One nice thing about the pandemic was that it opened up a whole world of campus activities for me- previously inaccessible campus clubs, due to building locations meetups were held in, or times of scheduled events, or even just the crush of crowds making it difficult for me to navigate the space as someone who is physically disabled, were suddenly all online. A lot perished, but it also allowed me to get pretty involved in the arts scene in a way I wouldn't have been able to, previously, particularly with poetry and zine making- which would later be something I dabbled with in my own time.

I also got incredibly attached to analog bits and bobs- keeping a handwritten diary, falling in love with fountain pens, reading thrifted paperback books while huddled in the tiny bathroom to get an ounce of privacy. After hours of burning my eyes out staring at my laptop screen from almost literally the minute I woke up to when I would crash into bed after hammering out assignments and attending online classes, I really, really needed the break. I did develop something of an aversion towards my laptop initially- it felt like it was consuming my entire life, and I felt oddly claustrophobic when it came to sitting down in front of it: a wave of dread washing over me as I felt the walls sort of close on in. I stopped playing my silly little phone games briefly, since I couldn't stomach even more online time. When we started a partial return to campus, it increasingly became a source of anxiety for me, because you had to do a daily screening for symptoms with it, and scan in at doors with it to enter the labs: which acted as an ever present reminder that we were still in the thick of it, and I had to just put up with the crush of coughing bodies on public transit while knowing if I got sick again, it might very well finish me off.

Now that some time has passed from the height of the lockdowns, I find myself having relaxed a lot when it comes to my devices- though I've always been someone who kept their phone close on their person, and keeps a spotless e-mail inbox- that was a super handy habit to have when professors would lob in random midnight updates to due dates and swapping back and forth between asynchronous and synced sessions. I did keep a few habits- the zine making, essentially replacing my use of writing utensils entirely with fountain pens, diary keeping (though I have been doing soon and off since I was 13 or so), hand sanitizer and hand creams and lip balms aplenty: but perhaps one of the most interesting to me personally has been how my journals have become comfort objects for me.

I absolutely need to pack at least one when I leave the house- either whichever volume I'm working on a passion project in, or the book I used intermittently as a diary and have now relegated to being for letters to my loved ones, or else I become incredibly anxious. Doesn't matter if it just sits in my purse and I never even read it, let alone scrawl around in it- I just find it soothing to have nearby. I think it might have been because of how often I relied on my diary as a safe, private place during the height of the pandemic when crowds became especially scary, plus the comfort of it being time away from screens, and because I was often concerned about conserving the battery on my shitty phone at the time to have enough to do the daily screenings and updates (you were meant to log when you arrived and when you left campus), plus scanning into buildings with said confirmed screening QR code it'd generate or risk being locked out of the labs and auto-failing my courses: so I wouldn't use my phone as a distraction, but rather opened up my diary: since paper and pens don't run out of power. I also need to know where it is and ideally keep it close by- it normally sits on my desk right by my arm, or else beside me and underneath a pillow in bed, though I can like dawdle around the house if I know precisely where it is in my room, it's only when I head outside that I need to have it right on my person, usually tucked under my arm or in my purse or backpack.

I suppose it isn't really a subtractive relationship to technology, or an antagonistic one after that initial period of resentment and anxiety has faded with the external pressures also subsiding, but more of an additive one with how I found a lot of comfort with analog methods I normally would have been interested in, but to a much less fussy degree: like, I'm a fountain pen fanatic, when before I was into stationery in so far as 'yayyy, cheap gel pens in fun colors' was the height of my indulgence and thought put into writing utensils. I really found myself re-centering and focusing on everyday pleasures of things that gave me some distance from the screen that felt like it was eating me alive from how enmeshed it was with my social world and academia- elevating the writing experience by using fountain pens and pretty inks, dabbling around with zine making, taking up embroidery as an actual hobby, filling out coloring sheets with crayons and markers, and so on. I still do most of those to this day, so it was nice to hold onto those discoveries about what I enjoyed.

[fauxclore]

I had the (un)fortunate luck of both having been awarded a PhD grant and moving in with my then girlfriend (I was saved from this toxic relationship by the pandemic). So I had secure housing and payment, and my PhD research was very little affected by the confinement. However, my already troubling tech-addiction tendencies got so much worse. I was never an extremely social person (which is crazy considering I'm now the opposite of what I was), but the confinement coupled with an extremely toxic relationship potentiated my alienation from friends. I lost many connections, only keeping the core ones, and those were frayed by months and months of only contacting them over Zoom (my country didn't allow inter-city travel, and I lived in an isolated city).

As a musician and artist, I squandered what potential to create digital artworks by being so insecure anything I did was immediately and irrevocably deleted with shame. Luckily, some friends got together and invited me to create performances over Zoom, and I was saved from completely cutting off artistic creation for years.

At some point I understood how toxic social media was to me, taking me deeper and deeper into emotional deadzones. Later in the pandemic, I learned that I had to do something, anything, to slow my intake of media, to curtail my addictive tendencies. I started making music using cassette tapes, creating sound objects that relied on slow interactions. I deleted all social media, all apps on my phone that weren't useful.

Although I had many relapses, I still hold mostly true to that intention.

Nowadays, I tend to be much more mindful of how I use digital technology, and have been making strides to both understand it better and use it less on my work. I hope to transition my artworks from being inherently electronic to being mostly analog. We'll see how it goes.

The only technology that I still use everyday without "adverse" effects has been my ereader.