“I want to see us recognize the work of educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others…whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell.”
Debbie Chachra, Why I Am Not a Maker (The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 23 Jan. 2015)
This section of the article spoke to me on a personal level, due in no small part to the fact that I was born and raised in Silicon Valley. Opportunities for people interested in a humanities track such as myself are sometimes difficult to come by in the Valley because there is such a huge emphasis on tech. Of course educators and caregivers are always in demand, but the quality of life of these people is drastically altered by astronomical housing prices and general costs of living, as well as an implied hierarchy that places engineers at the top and everyone else underneath. This leads to both a sense of social ranking and visible economic disparity between those who work in the tech industry and those who do not. Don’t get me wrong, I love my home and the people who live there in addition to the innovative atmosphere in both tech and education. However, I recognize that it is highly probable that if I want to involve myself in any industry in Silicon Valley, whether it be in education or otherwise, I will have to have some semblance of technical literacy. One of the reasons I am most interested in this course is because I want to study how the two often clashing forces of the humanities and the digital world can be unified and strengthened by one another. I am especially interested in how modeling technologies can be used in areas of social justice. I feel particularly drawn to the subject based on my own experiences in the Bay Area and I am excited to investigate how my passion for the humanities can be used to create something entirely different upon interaction with the digital world.
