I love my bakelite telephone (yes it works), I know how to untangle a cassette tape (although I have not used that skill for a long time) and I prefer to take notes by hand on blank papers. I don’t use Swish (the Swedish app for money transfer), and for many years my mobile phones where those my husband had discarded as too stupid to handle the necessary running apps. I hate to have breakfast without my local newspaper, paper version, on the table.

On the other hand, I googled before Google existed – I think it was Yahoo at the time – I was the first in my family to master a laptop, and digital tools have been part of my professional life for twenty-five years. I am a low-key professional resident who have been strolling around slowly in the digital world since the mid 1990s. There are traces, of course, but I make no headlines. I take the same familiar paths as in the physical world of my university town; I know how to get around. Outlook is my office, and Google is my library. Teams and Zoom have become my meeting and seminar rooms, and Padlet has replaced flipcharts (sometimes) and whiteboards. Privately, Messenger is for communicating with family, Facebook is for arranging excursions and Instagram is for bragging about scenic views and sneak peeks on what our daughter is up to in London. Twitter is an overcrowded lunchroom with too many conversations going on.

Not much difference between the two different worlds, is it? The algorithms make us feel at home in the digital world when we have been there for a while, just as our familiar and beaten tracks in our physical town make us blind for those buildings and sights tourists marvel over.

Corona is a nuisance but this spring was wonderful in two ways. On a private level, it was nice to have the emigrated daughter back home for a couple of months and to get it confirmed; it is easier to share home with adults than with teenagers. On a professional level, I discovered the art of teleportation. Zooming in to my known and previous unknown colleagues’ living rooms, without physical travelling and having to find my way, and without mingeling before getting to the point. Instead, we have had creative conversations on how to translate physical meeting tools to the digital arena. Problems have been solved, relations have been created and it is fun, and then I can teleport myself straight back home again. Magic for a digital introvert who loves to build relations, but needs to be alone to think.

Reference:
White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).