Who am I and Why am I writing this?

What does it mean to be human in an increasingly virtual world? I’m here to record my experience.

I’m in my mid-30s, now, which makes me a middle-aged millennial. I spent my early childhood in the largely pre-Internet era of the early 1990s. My parents got me my first mobile phone when I was about 16 years old – a Nokia 8250 (I thought the blue screen was the coolest) – which I barely used aside from sending random text messages to my friends and playing Snake when bored.

We got our first family computer around that time too. I didn’t really spend a lot of time on the Internet, partly because I was more interested in playing The Sims, and partly because the Internet itself was a lot more limited. Going online largely meant chatting with friends on MSN messenger, downloading music mp3s, checking out MySpace and reading personal blogs, mostly of people I knew.

Yahoo! was bigger than Google back then, but it functioned more like an entertainment/news source than a search engine (shoutout to Yahoo! Answers, I loved that shit). Even when we did use the search engine, we didn’t have a ton of results pop up like they do now. There just weren’t as many websites. At some point in my late teens/early 20s, my friends and I discovered forums and memes and websites that weren’t exactly kid-friendly, but we all had much more going on offline (college, dating, part-time jobs, etc.) to get ourselves too entangled in the strangely evolving online world.

To hell with you and to hell with the internet. It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere”. 

– Ray Bradbury, science fiction author and screenwriter

Fast forward to now – I’m not sure how exactly it happened, but the Internet has become so much more than it was two decades ago. Some days, it feels like I’m living more in the virtual world than the physical one. It’s impossible now to imagine life without a cellphone, or Internet, or social media. I think, soon, we will reach a point where the majority of us wouldn’t be able to imagine life without AI.

Back in the pre-Internet era, when I was about 8 years old, I remember reading about dinosaurs and fossils in an encyclopaedia. There was a suggested hands-on activity to make our own “time capsule”; a glass bottle filled with notes and little mementos that we could bury in our backyard and dig up years later (or leave for someone else to find).

I’d recently gotten into a scrapbooking habit, which is kind of the same thing, but seeing as to how I spend the majority of my waking hours online, I wanted to do something virtual, too. I feel like it would be nice to chronicle my own moments in time, to record memories and create a virtual museum of my own and remember what it’s like to be human…