The Extra Mile
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is one of the best selling piece of educational software of all time. First released in 1987 by game developer Toolworks, the program offered interactive typing drills designed to improve the speed and accuracy of users' keyboard skills. The cover of the box featured Renée L'Espérance who personified the brand: Mavis Beacon, typing instructor to millions and millions and millions of people.
The film Seeking Mavis Beacon, directed by Jazmin Jones, explores the profound significance of this Black woman – surely one of the earliest Black representations in tech (alongside Lt. Uhura, of course). It's also a detective story, of sorts – an attempt to trace what happened to L'Espérance, who was paid $500 for the original photoshoot but never received any royalties from the bestselling game and who disappeared from public view over 25 years ago, leaving no digital trace of her whereabouts.
Although Mavis Beacon is a fictional character, many people remember her as very real: giving public remarks, appearing on TV shows, receiving lifetime achievement awards. Jones brilliantly leverages this confabulism, asking what it means when artifice – particularly that drawn from the lives of marginalized people – inspires and what happens when it exploits. Who gets to make and profit from these images and stories; and how might erasure – erasure of our digital traces – be an act of resistance?
