Note to self (Jonathan)

 

Length: 4:09

 

Jonathan speaks while against a black background we see the following words slip and slide into and out of one another, the white letters exchanging places with one another to form different words:

 

QUEER

CLEAR

CORNER

CAREER

 

The words exchange places throughout the video as Jonathan speaks:

 

I’m sitting outside the campus Starbucks with my laptop open and my phone at my side, trying to pull together some thoughts for an interview I’m about to conduct with a writer. I only have an hour, and these days it seems that any writing I get done gets done in hour intervals, between meetings and events. The phone and the laptop are indispensable for their mobility: a draft of the Techne project sits on my digital desktop, which I carry with me and pick away at when I can, while my phone serves as digital note taker via its notepad, emails to myself, and voice memos.

 

And it’s the voice memo function that’s leading me back to Techne again and again. I walk around campus speaking surreptitiously into my phone, taking notes about this and that while walking from one meeting to another. What is usually a handy feature (pun intended) becomes increasingly frustrating while using it to compose this project, a project on queer selves, on the techne of queer and queered and queering selves.

 

I say the word queering and Siri hears it as clearing. I try to take a note about the “queer archive,” but my voice recognition software translates queer into the word corner. On one hand, the phone seems to want to straighten me out: queer into clear. On the other, it reads a different kind of “bent”: queer into corner. Either way the technology seems to try to orient me, or reorient me—surely not intentionally, but I’m at least bemused by the mis-hearing. Indeed, just now when trying to write this note about the “queer archive” being misheard, the software translates queer, again, into clear. And just now, yet again, queer becomes career.

 

You would think the phone would learn that I’m queer, or at least that I use that word a lot. But now I’m thinking my phone has other issues—issues with difference more generally. I’m trying to record notes about a recent classroom observation, a wonderful session I saw on Audre Lorde’s Zami. Sure enough, Lorde was right to try to claim the spelling of her own name, because my computer this time corrects my noncapitalization of “white americans,” which is what Lorde prefers in Zami. More oddly, when I use the voice recording mechanism it understands Zami as zombies.

 

Fair enough, you might say.  Zami is not a “standard” name, while zombies are all the rage these days. However, the tech I use to compose surely seems to have some normalizing tendencies—even if just normalizing in terms of tending to recommend or auto-correct toward more statistically driven use patterns. And I get that, having discussed the configuration of such tech with several experts. But I also wonder about those “settings,” those “preferences” we call them, and how they orient us more generally, how they orient the world in which we live. For having constantly to correct my tech’s correction of my use of the word queer is itself a stark reminder of the orientation of the social in general away from the queer.

 

That reminder took its own affectual turn just now when taking notes and my phone heard discussed as disgusted. Yup, sure am. And now I’m sitting back at that same Starbucks, trying to enjoy the SoCal sunshine while cranked up music is blasting the environment, making my mobile computing practically useless. Who wants to sit through this? I bet Starbucks doesn’t want me to sit through it, taking up precious space with my “work.” Although I’m on a college campus, where people should be invited to sit and work, I’m being oriented by this environment to move on, not to linger, to get out after my (admittedly meager) purchase of a “tall” coffee, no room. The message is clear: there is no room here for you to take your notes.