Whimsical Musings of a Loon

When I first started studying photography, mobile phone technology was still relatively primitive. Digital photography was still in its infancy (I learnt on a second hand 35mm film Nikon and dark room processing). Digital cameras were the golden grail of its time, the extra legroom supplement of technology - expensive but you didn't really get that much more for your money. To think of our lives without digital photography, or indeed, smart phones, is akin to imagining us existing without air.  Digital imaging and mobile technology has become an integral part of how we live - a repercussion of the internet emerging as the centre of modern life. Smart phones, or rather, camera phones have changed photography as a medium. It has changed the way we take photographs, obviously, but it has changed the way we share our images, the way the media use and publish images, and perhaps most interestingly, the way we even experience our lives. The first camera phone I ever owned was...

I was reading the latest news on the BBC website, having finished writing an email for submitting an e-form application; and after logging-out of my online bank account where I was keeping a 24 hour eye on finances; whilst listening to streaming music on spotify, and also quickly checking the train timetable on the railway e-route planner; before buying some groceries on an e-shop, whilst speaking to a friend in America on instant chat, and also quickly monitoring the daily lives, and their breakfast contents, of thousands of strangers on twitter....when it occurred to me, that actually, I really DID spend quite a lot of time on the internet. This shocking [sic] revelation made me think. What did I do before the internets? Could I even remember a time before online media engulfed my life like a smothering python of digital information. I remember the very first time I saw the World Wide Web. I was studying GCSE I.T in high school. Just like how my father points to areas of Cardiff ...

My dad has a computer. He bought his first 'real' PC in 1995. When I say real, I mean a modern computer with Windows (which to father, were only contraptions to look through a house wall). I remember the occasion well. It took him approximately 4,9382 weeks to make the purchase, and double that number in visits to PC World. Rumours had it they gave him his own parking space in the car park and suicide rates of PC World workers in Cardiff rose by 98%. Poor dad isn't a natural at technological advances. He struggled to show me how to use the VCR when I was 4, but the most thing I learnt was how to swear; "bloody hell...bloody machine". A year later, I was showing him how to use said machine to record an episode of Dad's Army . This was an important landmark in my life. I realised parents weren't good at everything, in fact, they could be damn awful at things. It was to prove an understatement of the millennium when it came to anything electronic coming into ...