D-Spine Interview

My interviewee has decided on the moniker Dr. Spine; I will refer to him as D-spine.

I think it fair to say that more than half of D-spine's social interaction with friends involves gaming, specifically multi-player games. The main cohort, his tech-posse, is made up of other males of his own age most of whom attend the same school. 

They all have Steam accounts and regularly audition new games.

D-spine uses a gamer's headset along with gamer's mouse and meets his buddies regularly online. I have eavesdropped, with permission, on a few of these gaming sessions, which can sometimes last all night.

Although the game is the main focus early on, after a time the conversation tends to evolve and sounds more like several young men on the telephone discussing other friends, school and family topics etc. My initial impression of social interaction brought to mind a 'chat-room' analogy, but that is too modern or contemporary a comparison. 

A more apt comparison would be an early 20^th century 'party-line' conversation such as those you might see enacted on television shows like Andy Griffith or The Real McCoys where several households share the same telephone line and can listen in on each other's conversations; It's a gossip fest of sorts and the participants enter and exit the space at various points throughout the session based on things like dinner, chores and parental requests.

The amazing thing is that these young people (specifically his peer group) have such facility with gaming that they can maneuver with great speed in the gaming space; destroying zombies, flying lizards, nazis or any number of other antagonists, and still discuss other friends and acquaintances or pending classwork while on-line together from different physical locations. 

D-spine and his friends have a habit of taking sick days at a rate that would have been alarming when I was in school, but this seems to be de-rigueur and has no impact on their grades.

When D-spine explores other digital tech genres it is usually in service of gaming. For example, he auditions screen capture software programs to see what will best capture his gaming activity, which he shares with his friends. He has discussed putting these on-line in the same vein as pew-die-pie (although without the adult content), but he has yet to do so. I have introduced him to a few of the Adobe Suite products like Premiere-Pro, After-Effects and Photo-Shop but the learning curve for these products tends to be too steep for his energy-level.

When we discuss the use of technology in the classroom he tells me that it is virtually non-existent (I suspect this is relative). There are a few tech-savvy teachers trying to weave what they can into their individual curricula, but without a great deal of success. 

Teachers do assign on-line work, but these are mainly meant for home completion. The school provides a bank of computers in the library; these are used primarily for research, writing and printing out completed assignments and for students without home tech resources. Most of the students carry personal technology in the form of I-phones and I-pads or their competitive equivalents along with laptop computers.

D-spine enjoys reading and writing and takes pride in his spelling and math acumen. He does conduct research for school and takes academics seriously. He wants to attend college and is working towards the skill sets he believe will serve him there.