Togetherness: It's Not Just An HBO Show

While our group did the assignment somewhat wrong, we still did manage to grapple with multimodal issues through the discussion of our separate stories. We didn’t communicate much about the assignment and created our own stories separately but we were still influenced by each other when we first started the assignment and looked towards Sam, who was the first person to post his story. In a way, both me and Emma were influenced by Sam. In that way, all three of our stories became coming of age stories as we graduated high school and matured into adulthood and what that means. 

In a lot of ways, the use of Google Drive made our assignment both more personal and more impersonal. Google Drive allowed us to communicate with each other without actually being in person but it also took away more of the personal nature of the collaboration. The ideas that we typed into the Google doc were ideas that came purely from us and were untainted by a group setting. It’s natural that people might say different ideas when they’re by themselves in comparison to when they’re in a group setting. In a way, this is intuitive towards teamwork as it allows us to present our unfiltered selves. In a way, the way we created our narratives has prevented smaller, more human errors, such as being embarrassed or being swayed by other ideas. As Delagrange said in chapter one of her book, “These heroic accounts of technological change thus become part of a “grand narrative” of uninterrupted progress that obscures smaller and more local narratives that may not be so unrelievedly positive.” As technology has advanced, we’ve moved past smaller more human error and have gotten more to the meat of ideas, which is what happened here. Instead of potentially being distracted in a physical meeting or possibly missing the point, we had our own pure idea of the assignment and allowed our own ideas to build off each other and come together for the assignment.