Modern Day Doodling

Boredom strikes in the midst of a most arid lecture. Abandoning this desert of interest, you vicariously dive into the seas of social media, but soon grow ill of surfing Tumblr. Twitter is no longer piquing your creative interest. You wish to build, to construct something clever; something more than a witty one liner and ironic hashtag. You search your backpack and find nothing by a laptop charger and a wireless mouse. There is a graphing calculator without games in the front pocket. Oh god! Oh pi! How could this be?

You find yourself paperless. You carry no notebook—the class notes are posted online. You bear no pen—your fingers type away anything else you have to say. You realize you no longer possess dexterous artistic ability, from all those hours staring at your computer and not setting pencil to sketchpad. But you have an undying desire to doodle. And no, creating an easy scheduling experience on www.Doodle.com does not suffice. Editing photos or scrawling random words into a .txt document is not the same. You need to draw pointless things in the corner of your document. But you don’t have a stylus with interactive digital ink. The ‘Draw Something’ app on your iPhone has simply lost appeal. Appeal…Your fingers, poised above the keyboard, become attractive to your eyes—the mirrors to your soul, the container of your ideas. The metaphorical light bulb goes off. You draw a stick man.

…O

/  |  \

./   \

The idea incites you.

The symbols on your keyboard dissolve all meaning. Letters and numbers become new shapes. Various symbols become tools to be employed. You chuckle at your ingenuity and become absorbed in the possibilities. Your fingers dance across the keyboard and soon your mind is racing to discover new and clever ways to turn the text symbols into pictures. Slashes and bars become your best friends, O’s and underscores become your guilty pleasures.

Soon, the class empties and you remain in your seat. The absence of fellow man is barely recognized. You remain locked to the screen and your newly fabricated flow state continues. Seconds tick by and minutes melt into hours that go extinct. Before long, clever you has created several side-splitting variants of cows. You chuckle. You chortle. You gurgle and titter.

You have created a new art form.

This digital graffiti (Nyan Cat!), or modern doodling, is growing in brilliance around the web. With the evolution of online media, we transform the handful of characters and symbols we are bound to from shackles to tools. A new medium to paint images.