Final Reflection: From User to Owner

I started this course as a passive user, someone who just downloaded apps and hoped they worked. I’m finishing it as an owner.

The biggest takeaway for me is that technology isn’t neutral. Remi Kalir talked about how “digital” literally comes from our fingers (digits), making marks. Whether it’s a pen or a keyboard, we are the ones who should be making the marks. Bonnie Stewart backed this up by explaining how most “free” software is just a way for companies to profit “off the backs of someone else.”

This is exactly why I built my habit tracker in Excel. Maha Bali’s “average chair” analogy made perfect sense here. Most apps are built for a non-existent “average” person and use a “black box” of hidden logic. By building my own tool, I made an adjustable chair that actually fits my life and goals. There is no black box because I’m the one who wrote the formulas.

Even using AI shifted for me. Lucas Wright argued that we’re moving from “creating” to “evaluating.” I saw this when I used AI to help with my VBA scripts; I wasn’t just letting the bot do the work, I had to judge if the code actually made sense. As Nodin Cutfeet said, we need to “claw our data back.” Using AI to build my own private tools felt like a step toward that kind of sovereignty.

In the end, digital literacy is just about agency. It’s the difference between being a passenger in a corporate system and being the one who understands the logic behind the screen. As I move into the BCom program, I’m not just looking for the easiest app anymore, I’m looking for the one that gives me the most control.