Good Old Fashioned Pancakes

Prep 5 m Cook 15 m Ready In 20 m

Ingredients 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon white sugar 1 1/4 cups milk 1 egg 3 tablespoons butter, melted

Directions 1. In a large bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. Make a well in the center and pour in the milk, egg and melted butter; mix until smooth. 2. Heat a lightly oiled griddle or frying pan over medium high heat. Pour or scoop the batter onto the griddle, using approximately 1/4 cup for each pancake. Brown on both sides and serve hot.¹

Pancakes were one of the first recipes I memorized after learning to cook in college. They were the perfect college comfort food: cheap, few ingredients, fast, good for one or a lot of people, and good even if you suck at cooking (notice the present tense here).

My fellow-blogger and the cofounder of Hi, Craig Mod describes the writing process on this blogging platform as “full-stack writing” (referring to a full-stack of pancakes).²

The blogging community is present through the writing process—beginning with a sketch and ending with a published story. Bloggers push other bloggers by asking them to Tell Me More about a sketch and share their appreciation by sending a quick Thanks after the story has gone through revision. A writing process powered by the conversations initiated by a bloggers’ viewers.

”Hi is a community. A community both narratively mapping the world, and making sense of their everyday lives, their loves, fears, joys, insights — all as connected to place and bound together by topic.” -Craig Mod

This connection to place separates Hi from other blogging platforms like tumblr. Tagging digital spaces using physical places at specific moments works to break down the dichotomy between the digital and the “real.” My reading digitalized experiences of place affects how I would feel about the place if I were to go there in person. And reading (and writing) about places I have visited and lived in affects how I consider these places and how language and pictures work to define them.

How might this connect with how we read the environment (as well as online environment(s))? Stephanie Strickland, in “Writing the Virtual: Eleven Dimensions of E-Poetry,” says that allowing physical places to change virtual spaces (and vice versa) is both poietic and political. It allows for “the earth [to] write to us in a way that will engage us bodily, instead of us marking the earth.” The process of mapping in digital spaces marks a shift back towards listening to the land.³

”Aboriginal listening was entirely biophysical, whereas listening today is via a ring of surveillance satellites.”⁴

So, perhaps my idea of being/becoming in place and of (more specifically) finding a home will involve an understanding of a hybrid ecology in which our connections to place are recognized as being permeated by our interconnectedness to digital spaces.⁵

A physical place, like the crappy apartment where I made pancakes in college, is not so much interchangeable as intertwined with digital spaces, like this post. The takeaway, I feel, is that digital spaces are useful tools in rooting yourself and understanding a place. However, there is no digital space unconnected to place (even if that place is just the location of the IP server), and there is no place untouched by digital space thanks to GIS-mapping tools like GoogleMaps.