noodling on technology
I fell down a video rabbithole today. The topic?
Gen Z people getting sick of AI and algorithms and making changes in how they use technology. For most that meant simplifying drastically, sometimes buying singular technology like an mp3 player to focus their consumption.
It was great to watch. It made me think on how I started using technology for personal use, and how it changed.
Given that I talked about mp3 players, I thought I'd focus on music first.
I started with radio's, cassette decks and recordplayers, then moved to portable cassette players, cd players and then put all my music on my first iPod.
I've used streaming services, tried all of them, but stopped because it was just too overwhelming, having all music to listen to and then, overwhelmed by choice, not listening to anything.
I still had my collection of mp3's though, mostly. I lost part of it in a hard disk failure. I slowly started to rebuild it and I've been using sandisk players for years now. I really love those little things.
Curating my own music collection is still a joy.
And now I see young people discover that too. iPods are refurbished and sold again, some people running companies doing just that, even.
Same for camera's. All of a sudden, people buy film camera's again, and get film developed, something I started with too.
And I've used separate camera's alongside my phones. I never just was happy with that thing in my pocket that took good pictures.
There are no distractions on camera's. They just serve one purpose and that calms me down.
Critics call this wasteful, buying several things when smartphones have everything, but smartphones have a nasty side effect: addiction.
People are chronically online and they are more and more overwhelmed by all the AI slop poisoning social media.
It's no wonder they are searching for something else, and going back to things that I grew up with to ground themselves again.
And I can learn from their search too. I can look back on my life and see how much better it was when I didn't live life focusing on my phone constantly.