Tom Petty Showed Me the Great Wide Open
A “Breakdown” of what TP meant to me
The internet that I first experienced was not yet the greatest library ever known to humankind. But it was something just as important: my introductory experience with unmitigated access to (potential) answers to questions born exclusively of my own inquiry. The internet represented an opportunity to learn without going through a gatekeeper, and I wanted to learn about Tom Petty.
But first…
Brief background on free falling in love with Tom Petty’s music
It’s 1992 and the sun is going down on a beautiful sunny day in Jacksonville, Florida. Uncle Dave is driving us in his convertible and introduces me to the idea of singing with the top down. Perhaps I agree that it’s a good idea because I’m a 13-year-old free thinker who independently decides these sorts of things. Or maybe it’s because he gave me my first beer the night before (a Fosters tall boy) and I’ve decided that he is the coolest person on Earth and all of his ideas are good. Or, most likely, I’m sold on this idea because it’s Tom Petty and of course you sing along with top down to Tom Petty.
That day, I fell in love with Tom Petty. I saved up the next few weeks (think my allowance was $2/week plus I had several neighbors for whom I worked as a doggy pooper scooper, clearing their backyards at 50 cents a visit) and purchased Full Moon Fever. It was my first CD. We took a family road trip around this same time and the new minivan had a CD player. Because it was the only CD in the family and a lot of the highway between Pueblo and Tulsa lacked radio signal, the Geisels got very, very familiar with Tom Petty. My brother claims to this day that the opening guitar lick of Runnin’ Down a Dream gives him nightmares.
New Media, New Literacies & Participatory Culture
The part where we combine 20/20 hindsight and academic jargon to celebrate the subtext and overanalyze what was *really* going on.
If I’m honest with myself, the timing of my Tom Petty affinity probably has more to do with impacting my life than Tom Petty did. There was just something about that moment, and TP coming in with catchy choruses was in the right place at the right time.
As I said, it coincided with my first days of being able to access the internet. By the time I went to college, I owned 17 Tom Petty CDs and had studied every word of the liner notes. But all of that only added up to a fraction of what I had patiently learned via our dial-up internet connection (in between my dad and brother pranking me by picking up with phone and “accidentally” severing the connection, of course).
There were not yet algorithms to understand me better than I understand myself and to nudge me in my information consumption. Left to my own devices, I was myopic in understanding my own interests and would therefore spend hours monopolizing the dialup internet exclusively to seek out information about Tom Petty.
I learned about the Heartbreakers’ origins and other names and side projects under which Petty had performed. I mapped out tour performances that I would never get to see. I memorized his discography and turned it into an aspirational shopping list for my weekly bike rides to the used record store. I was geeking out.
Something I quickly realized was that I was not alone in geeking out over Tom Petty. I was only able to learn so much because there were people out there who knew much more about him than I did and possessed the skill sets and passions to create web pages about him to share with learners like me. Discovering these pages became an obsession that prepared me for much later in life when any dinner table minutia could send me off on hours of meandering in the Wikipedia rabbit hole.
In addition to learning from these people, I occasionally started to learn with them. I remember connecting with a girl in Alabama who was also a fan and that over juno.com email we traded addresses so we could send one another school pictures. Snail mail was still just regular mail and I guess it didn’t yet occur to us that email was the same but faster.
On the surface, this behavior was adolescent awkwardness. But taking a step back and giving the benefit of context, it starts to look like something bigger: we were engaging in the early acts of a new kind of participatory culture that we were accessing through a shared affinity group. Stumbling around these new media of email and the internet, we were (without realizing it at the time) collaborating in the most important of all learning efforts: Making Meaning.
And even if I’m overstating all of this and disproportionately assigning profundity to the trivial, at the very least we were putting in place foundational building blocks for digital interpersonal communication that would later lead to useful skills, like wooing my now-wife via online dating apps. While that may fall short of making meaning in an academic sense, I’ll forever credit Tom Petty’s timing for teaching me about being a Face in the Crowd as one of the most meaningful acts in my life.
