Sponsors are all around and we don’t even know it!

After reading Kerri’s post on Digital Literacy and her struggles with learning how to operate Twitter, I thought back to when I was finally allowed to have a MySpace and how I had really no idea what I was doing.  And so, my sister became my sponsor for MySpace as she taught me how to acquire the cool zig-zag background, the music player that played your favorite song, and most importantly how to organize your top friends.  Looking back on it now, I never realized how big of a sponsor my sister was in my learning to navigate and communicate correctly through MySpace.  However, after having one sponsorship like that, I was able to figure out Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Tumblr all on my own because I had been sponsored from the correct source and I learned enough to push me into new realms of digital literacy.

In the life of digital literacy, I think that there are many more sponsors available than with print-based documents.  The internet has allowed for millions, maybe billions, of people to become sponsors of people all around the world.  Because of this, I think that when I was growing up reading books and articles from hard copies I was learning, but I had nowhere else to really go to get more sponsorship other than people I knew like my mom or teachers.  Thus, when you consider the opportunities the internet has to offer with sponsorship, I think the possibilities are endless.

As I discussed with my group in class, I think that my main sponsors at this point in my life are my professors and my bosses.  I am sponsored by my teachers because they are the only people who I would really come to with questions at the collegiate level, especially my English teachers.  Sponsors are all around.  Don’t get me wrong, movies, music, books, magazines, art, and dance are all sponsors for me as well, but I feel most heavily sponsored through my education practices.