Since I can remember, I have been involved with the digital world. It all started when I was two years old and was watching cartoons on TV, and over time, my interactions with the digital world began to evolve. When I was three years old, my dad bought me a PlayStation, I used to spend all the free time I had playing. I remember that my biggest challenge was to try and beat the games before the electricity goes down in our apartment, since there wasn’t a built in memory card for the console, and I didn’t even know such a thing even existed. Every night, I would go to sleep frustrated, then the next day after school, I gave it a go again, again, and again… Spoiler alert, I never finished a single game before owning a memory card. Technology has evolved exponentially over the past two decades, and I consider myself an up-to-date individual. I always kept track of upcoming releases and always enjoyed using hi-tech gadgets. But I believe that the biggest innovation is of course social media. Not in a sense that it is very advanced technologically, but social media changed all of us. It changed the way we interact with each other, I might even argue that it changed the way we think and live. And apart from my grandparents, I don’t think I know a person that isn’t on the socials.
I first joined online communities when I was six years old, in 2006, my friends and I used to chat on MSN. And then we started using facebook, and know I think most of my circle are using instagram mostly nowadays. With the passing of the years, I am spending a lot more time on social media platforms than I used to earlier. According to my iPhone’s statistics, I spend on average 2 hours on instagram per day, which for me is huge. But comparing it with some colleagues, it doesn’t seem that much. Some people spend 5 to 6 hours a day on instagram alone. However, I spend enough time playing online games, which means that the digital world influenced me enough. When I’m not online gaming or browsing the socials on my phone, I’m watching TV shows and movies on streaming platforms, such as Netflix.
I don’t really enjoy reading on a screen a lot, I’m a bit old fashioned when it comes to books, or maybe it’s because I usually read at night and the screen light disturbs me, I’m not sure to be honest, but anyway, technology hasn’t influenced my reading practices across time, however, I prefer to write on a PC than on a notebook, so I guess it has affected my writing.
On a personal level it has affected me a lot, I grew up around technology, and interacted with it my entire life, it made life easy and difficult at the same time. Easy in a sense that whatever you want to look for, you will find, that’s what google and youtube offer, but it’s difficult too because each one of us is stripped of his/her privacy, data is being collected and sold every second as everything is becoming more and more public, information is available everywhere, and for me at least, the thought of that is frightening and amazing at the same time, it just depends on the perspective.
Marc Jabbour's Blog 