Digital Reflection, AHIS 430.

As more of a writer, not an illustrator, I really prefer to utilize the digital medium. While I can write quite quickly and efficiently with pen and paper, my handwriting is not the clearest. I do feel as though I miss some of the level of creativity that I feel is inherent to writing with pen and paper though. There feels like there is some level of inherent personality that comes with writing on paper that comes across as lacking when writing on a word document. I think the same thing goes for drawing or painting; there is the very real risk of “messing up” what you are working on in a non-digital medium, and that adds personality. Every single one of the pen strokes or paint drips is original, irreplaceable, and unique. Meanwhile, in a digital medium, one always has the ability to “undo” whatever “mistakes” they may have made during their creative process, and I feel like that robs a little bit of the artistic integrity of the piece. That is not to say that digital art or writing do not have artistic integrity, but it feels like hand-made art has that extra level of authenticity that cannot be re-created in a digital realm. Even for writing, there is constantly a spell-checker going in the background, you have the ability to look up synonyms or alternative ways of wording a phrase, but with pen and paper you have to do that yourself; there is a level of accountability and originality inherent to pen and paper that just isn’t there in a word document. You know for certain that it was the author that wrote that sentence if it is in ink, but if it appears on a blog post or a twitter feed, there is always that chance that it is not from them, that it was copied and pasted from someone else, or simply not written by them. That is not to say that there isn’t the chance of plagiarism in a physical media, but it is so much easier and so hard to tell the difference in an online or digital medium. I think it is the combination of risk and accountability, as well as originality that makes me inherently drawn to hand-made art over digital art; which is somewhat hypocritical of me since I personally prefer the “lazy” method of writing on a computer over doing it by hand. I think that is why I do not truly consider myself an artist; I do not have that same level of commitment.