“Digital Media Proliferation Around the World”: Taking A Journey with Digital Tour Guides

1. “Digital Media Proliferation Around the World”: Taking A Journey with Digital Tour Guides By E.D. Woodworth

2. Writers are tour guides who take their readers on a journey. Writers choose the path they will travel for the journey; each writer may choose a different path. Writers create stories, just as tour guides do, to illuminate aspects of the journey, to enrich and enliven the experience.

3. In this project many writers came together to explore digital proliferation around the world in all the time zones. Each writer has chosen the way information is presented, but whether information is available or not isn’t the choice of the writer—some time zones/countries have more details about digital media use than others. Whatmaterial can be shared is part of the journey. The writer takes a journey through the research process not knowing what will be found: statistics, narrative, historical accounts, quotations, images. In this case, I also took a journey through the project via the writers’ reflections about embarking upon this endeavor.

4. I love to travel and often have expressed interest in taking a trip around the world. I was able to do that via this project. Thank you.

5. I saw the world in a different way, through a different lens. I saw the world as huge and disconnected, as a smaller place than I ever thought of it before. I saw the world as connected, as a larger place than I ever thought of it before. I was elated and saddened to be part of an age that moves so quickly and yet, so slow.

6. As I traveled around the world, through multiple countries, through many time zones, thanks to these writers, I realized I was taking a journey down different roads. I was actually traveling with the writers, they guiding me along a path they created.

7. I had expected certain information for each country across time zones, but like real travel, I learned quickly to set aside my expectations and embrace each writer’s work based on their perspective, their voice, their presentation (some with images, some without), their decisions about what to focus upon.

8. I found that the writers’ reflections read along with the mobile app and research report helped me to form a larger, broader, deeper picture of the project, as a whole, a textual experience that considered multiple purposes and audiences—including me and so many more than me.

9. Sometimes, the writers guided me to a place that seemed barren in terms of digital media proliferation. Hence, I was saddened to think that so many were without connectivity. It felt like such a gap, such a loss. But is it? Is the lack of mobile or digital connectivity a negative?

10. Does instant connectivity keep us moving too fast, too rushed to feel connections we have? Are we too crowded all the way around?

11. Does digital media keep us from traveling in the dark, being in the dark, or does it push us to follow a path that only leads to more darkness? Or does this road lead to light?

12. Sometimes the travel through digital media proliferation via time zones was stark and lovely, enlightening and thoughtful, lonely and full.

13. Sometimes the writers helped me see what a solitary road some might travel in our world.

14. And sometimes there are no roads to travel at all. Sometimes, the writers made me consider that digital media proliferation could provide a road where there might not be one, because sometimes, there actually are no roads, only a river, very far off.

15. Sometimes, the writers made me see the smallest of details.

16. Sometimes, I couldn’t see what might be coming within a time zone or in the next time zone. The path led over a slight rise, and I just couldn’t see what might be next. Yet, I had to, wanted to, keep going… from zero back to zero. I wanted to know what was going on in the next time zone over.

17. Sometimes I didn’t know what I might find as I wandered down a forest-like path, no markers, dense information on all sides, inundated by digital media proliferation information.

18. But then I’d round a corner in the project and see a peaceful scene. Such unexpected places were the sweet treat of the project—a digital media dessert.

19. Some of the vistas were stunning.

20. Some were whimsical.

21. Some were haunting.

22. Sometimes, on the journey, I lost words to describe what I thought or felt.

23. Indeed, the writers themselves even found that they wrote differently or more easily in one form than another—just as one road is easier to take than another, depending on conditions, circumstances, seasons.

24. Some suggested writing for mobile apps was easier than writing a “paper”; some suggested the other way around was easier. Each writer took a different road and found resistance or not—everything depends upon the road taken, doesn’t it?

25. The meta-ness of the reflections make the overall project even more intriguing to me as I was guided around the world by time, by country, by vision, by words, by numbers, by stories, guided through a story of digital proliferation, around the world, one time zone at a time.

26. All images were retrieved from Public Domain.net, through Flickr (licensed via Creative Commons), or in the public domain. This response, in keeping with the CC licenses for many of these photographs, is licensed CC BY-NC-SA. Photographers are listed in order of the appearance of their photographs: Christian Moser Tony Fischer Dennis Stauffer George Hodan Bruno derpunk Cindy Cornett Seigle George Hodan Nic McPhee John Holm Gerald Backmeister Andreas Levers Pattys-photos BiserTodorov Library of Congress Kim Newberg Nicholas A. Tonelli Pierre Pouliquin Steven Straiton Rennett Stowe David Blaikie Carl Wycoff Benoit Deniaud Larisa Koshkina Adolph Rice Studio (Library of Virginia) Ronald Carlson Thank you to the photographers who licensed their work for remixing and reuse so that this response to amazing student writing would could be easily created and then shared.