As far as I know, I have always been intrigued by technology, in the way that it opened up so many possibilities for self-development, self-expression and the immersion into other people's forms of expression. I remember singing along with Disney's 'Magic English' as a kid, eagerly putting those shiny discs into my parents' DVD player which opened up the world of English to me. I also remember having my father's 'Golden Oldies' echoing into our living room from our CD player, putting me in touch with the likes of Abba, the Beatles, and a fair amount of Cantonese songs with the occasional Hokkien and Mandarin tunes in between (anyone familiar with The Moon Represents My Heart?). Of course there was also that exhilarating moment where I learned how to copy songs onto a mixtape, and inevitably messed up doing so as I got my small fingers tangled up in tape.
Listening to music has always been a crucial part of my personal development. My first MP3 player must've held less than 300 MB of storage space, but many a nights have the songs on them lulled me to sleep. As I grew older, I proceeded to a whopping 4 GB through my Creative Zen Mosaic MP4 Player, which allowed me to broaden my musical taste. I wasn't the most musical person per se; I was mostly intrigued by the lyrics. The lyrics of my early teenage pop-rock idols inspired me to write poetry. I started off old-school through multiple notebooks and pens. After that, I wrote poems on-the-go during my one-hour commute to secondary school: avidly typing away on my 12-button Samsung phone, saving poems as SMS drafts until I got my own laptop to continue typing on Microsoft Word. As you may have realised from a previous blogpost, I can be quite nostalgic about these kind of things.
Textual documentation has always come natural to me. As soon as I learned how to form proper sentences through a ballpoint, I started writing in flower-patterned diaries, which eventually progressed to classy, sleek notebooks. However, once the internet became popular I took a big turn. It was like a whole new world opened up to me in Myspace, where a 12-year-old-me taught myself the basics of HTML and started playing with Paint, Paint Shop Pro and GIMP to create my own visuals. Despite appreciating this new form of self-expression, it soon made me realise that words were still most endearing to me. And so I went back to honing my English through long e-mail conversations with pen pals, becoming an active member at a poetry website, and starting a personal blog in 2012.
Flashforward to 2019: I have been writing less and less, exchanging words for pictures since I decided to develop my photography skills through Instagram by the end of 2015. Ever since, I have also dabbled in illustration and videography as someone who's realised her love for multi-media expression, (something I already mentioned at the end of this blogpost). It's safe to say I've created a pretty comprehensive digital archive throughout the years. This is not surprising, given that back in 2017 our world was able to generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. I cannot imagine having to deal with this, as I myself get quite overwhelmed with structuring and saving my documents in a way that's navigatable.
The last two months I have mostly been sorting out my pictures, turning the digital into tangible memories so that I won't forget. There is still so much more to sort out, and it makes me wonder whether we are truly conscious of our experiences these days. I keep asking myself: is every moment truly worth snapping a picture of, and when is it time to let go of certain digital artefacts? I am fairly good at being a minimalist in terms of my tangible possessions, not so much with my digital possessions. Even though technology makes it easy to document and express ourselves, I think it is important to be mindful so that every byte truly matters.
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