"The language [I] use depends on whom I write to or what I want to search or research about. In terms of English, I often do three things: (1) e-mail contact with my international friends, (2) searching for shopping information on-line, and (3) academic writing." (Yi-Huey, quoted in Hawisher, Selfe, Guo, and Liu, 74)

The summer I moved to Boston, I did two things of note while not wandering the dark streets of JP: read Capital v.1 and figured out how to illegally download Rosetta Stone v. 3. Fifteen blogs, three viruses, and ten anti-virus blogs later, and I had successfully downloaded Rosetta Stone, installed the crack that gave me access to more than its trail levels, and began talking awkwardly to my computer in incredibly rusty German. Rosetta told me that I could not pronounce my R's - especially in the word lehrerin. She and I chatted about my favorite colors, reading books, buying groceries at the supermarket, cooking in the kitchen, and going to the movies. We really were hitting it off, chatting almost every day. I felt things were going well. But then... (and isn't there always a but then...) school began to pick up, I met some people who were a bad influence (graduate students)... I have a litany of excuses, but our budding relationship died. I have been lucky enough to have a friend in Germany, Miriam, with whom I can occasionally practice my German. We, too, chat about films, but usually French New Wave (she loves Godard where Rosy would watch any ol' movie). It is always a very different kind of German from the kind Rosy and I used to speak.  My brief fling with French the next summer went much the same way, only without a connection or link to someone else.

Perhaps this is an odd way to talk about learning a language, but I can't help but feel like my relationship with Rosetta Stone is important. When I read about the information age, or new media, it is always focused on how the "connections and resources that structure the lives of individuals" and how these "connections and resources are linked ... to the related ... formations that structure the information age" (76). Which sounds good, but the taxonomic categorization of "both personal and economic" - human relationships and technologies/mechanisms/resources - seems odd to me. It seems to always dedicate human-human relationships as the goal. Resources and the economic, technological literacies, etc. are always tools that help one achieve better networks between humans. That focus seems to hide things, but I'm not sure what.

I built a relationship with Rosetta Stone. I certainly spent more time chatting with it than with girls I was going on dates with (sad though that makes me to write). I was grumpy when I started writing this post (and I still am to a degree), so I'm tempted to say that the relationship I built is a codified social relation dreamed up by individual workers in corporations which embody the ideological influences and values of the place and time in which it was created; if a group of Tibetans were to develop a language acquisition software, what conversations would we have? But I don't know why I am tempted to say that this is bad. People who live partially in the realm of fantasy - for example, those who live for their time in Adria, the world of Renaissance reenactment, started in So Cal - build relationships. And its not just with the people there, though it is tempting to shrink it down to that. The thing that most people find odd about it is their relationship with the time - a snapshot of history which has been codified historically, much like how the snapshot of German language has. Does that invalidate the experience or its use? I loved my time with Rosy. And believe it or not, I'm not being facetious.

For most of my usage of other languages, there is no dependence on "whom I write to" or speak to. When there is, it is a radically different experience. I'm a radically different person.