ALT + HOME: Digital homecomings
Rachel Wagner · Digital Collections - Ithaca College Library (Ithaca College) · 2013
The home key we are familiar with from the very first computer keyboards had a very specific function. Using the home key was often the easiest way to reorient, to see the beginning of a linear document and move through it in a forward motion. Today, however, the home key is an anachronism, absent from most laptop keyboards altogether. A digital sense of “home” may still involve walls (firewalls) and keys (codes), spaces (webpages) and objects (for programming), but we are less likely to have just one home, and there are likely to be several versions of ourselves in any digital “home”at any given time. Increasingly, home has become less a physical site of inhabitation than a marker of movement, a trailof pixels, a trace of where we have been and a longing to find the beginning of things-an impossible but oddly powerful compulsion.