RAM

Ram, no not the Paul McCartney album but Random Access Memory.  We have recently purchased a new PC tower, the one we had was 10 years old, its operating system was Vista, remember Vista the sandwich filling between XP and 7. We decided not to upload XP at the time (as recommended by my colleagues) partly because of the hassle and partly because we were a bit fearful. It was not long after this that my boss at my appraisal took me by surprise by saying you seem to be a bit fearful of technology.   It was the early days of my elearning development career, I recall feeling a little bit embarrassed by her remark like I had been found out.  Ironically, in my pre-elearning librarianship days colleagues had thought I was a bit of techie, it's interesting how that perception can change by just side-stepping into another professional group/silo, what had changed?.

Going back to my old PC it had served us well, despite occasional hiccups, where we had to rollback, come up with techniques to stop it hanging and replace the fan.  The PC got slower and slower as we continued to fill its 1 GB RAM and 300 GB memory with the useful and not so useful stuff, so hence the necessity to go for a newer model with more RAM, this time 8 GB RAM  and memory, 1 TB. Over the 10 years I would say my technical knowledge has upgraded I know that RAM is really important for resource hungry applications and that a faster processor and a larger hard drive can also help, but I think I knew that 10 years ago.  I do think the memory of my boss commenting about my fear of technology has distorted my memory of what I did actually know about technology at the time. I do remember that we when we purchased the PC in 2005 we did not do it buy it blindly. We did our research and we did not buy the cheapest model on the block, even back then RAM and the processor were major considerations.

Looking at this from a feminist perspective when I moved into eLearning development I did feel a little undermined by the technical knowledge of my male counterparts, you definitely notice the skewed gender representation of elearning compared with librarianship is you attend any of their conferences. My boss's comment may have been illustrative of  how I was feeling within this context, although I never explored it with her, she may have also had an ulterior motive to make me face up to my fear and have confidence in my own abilities, after all she was a female boss.   According to Hirsch and Smith (2002) memories are bound up with issues of power and hegemony and gender. So why does the memory stay with me? Feminist and memory studies argue Hirsch and Smith presuppose that the present is defined by a past that is constructed and contested, that we study the past to meet the needs of the present.  I possibly hold onto this memory partly because I can use it as a narrative that I can recall to reassure others who also feel like imposters that they are not alone with their fear. It also acts a reflexive anchor to see where I am now in comparison to where I was then with respect to my relationship with technology.

Memory is not as a store, but a plurality of interrelated functions, a complex network of activities and the past is constantly selected, filtered and restructured in terms set by the questions and necessities of the present, at both the individual and the social levels (Jedlowski 2001, p.30) . So maybe a computer's RAM is not so different to our own random access memory.

References
Hirsch, Marianne, et al. "GENDER AND CULTURAL MEMORY SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS." Signs 28.1 (2002).
Article DOI: 10.1086/340890 Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/340890

Jedlowski, Paolo. "Memory and Sociology Themes and Issues." Time & Society 10, no. 1 (2001): 29-44.https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2006/SOC406/um/Memory_and_sociology.pdf