As a teenager, I read Ayn Rand on how any work that needed to be done day after day was meaningless, and that the only worthwhile endeavor was creating new things.
Debbie Chachra, “Beyond Making,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentry Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
As college students, all we do is school work day after day. According to Ayn Rand, all of that work is meaningless just because we’re not creating new things. Yet, society still highly values participating in higher education. Is this suggesting that the day-to-day work of college is valuable because of the assumption that those with a higher degree of education could create more advanced technologies in the future? If this is the case, shouldn’t this perspective also be applied to caretakers, teachers, and other “non-makers” with day-to-day work? Raising, teaching, assisting, and growing the youth and adults should be worth just as much (or more), as the people who create new things have all been founded and brought up by the day-to-day work of others.
The person I was when I graduated from the various schools or care programs when I was young was different from the person who entered. These educators and caregivers created something new, in the form of each iteration of myself, post graduation. Although a person is dissimilar to creations made with machines or ones that create revenue, every job in society seems to contribute to the eventual creation of something new, the creations may just appear in a different form. This means there is no redundancy to day-to-day work, as we need more day-to-day endeavors; they are a pillar for our makers.
Using Digital Arts and Humanities, I am excited to learn about the most effective ways to visualize and present information so that it can be both engaging and informative. More specifically, I want to learn more about the tools and techniques that are used for building websites. I believe that with more proficiency in these skill sets, I’ll be able to compellingly use and display information in a way that’s more meaningful.
