So, I’ve had this “post” saved into my Word Processor for probably two months now. I wanted to release it last month but everytime I tried to do it, something would always distract me. I think a few days July came we got the July-August issue of Smithsonian magazine and it had an amazing article in there that really got me thinking. I think I read it all and took a break for a good twenty minutes and sat back up and began to write out what I was feeling as I was letting everything settle in my mind of what I just read. I loved it so much that I wanted to express my thoughts on it and I have also included the link at the bottom so you can read the actual article if you wanted. Enjoy!
Everybody knows that I am not a big fan of magazines. I wasn’t always a hater of them though! When I was younger, mostly as a teen, whenever we’d go to the store, they had the more adult-gossip magazines that my mom was obsessed over and then on the second and third racks there were the science fiction ones that had catchy titles about dead celebrities living on beyond the grave, haunting their own houses and well, sometimes they said they were not really dead at all! Usually, the pre-teen magazines were at the very bottom or on the rack they had when you first get inside the store. That’s where I was, googling at the cute boys like Backstreet Boys and Justin Timberlake. This is how I found I was more like my mom than I thought I was at that time. Would you actually believe though, there is one magazine that I actually do like to read? If you’ve read my blog before or seen some of the books I’ve read then you know I’m like a huge history buff. Well, that’s also a family trait and my papaw is just as addicted to the magazine as I am!
It’s the Smithsonian magazine. My dad actually came in my room one day, with a new one and I’m not kidding you when I say I got so giddy and didn’t take me long before I sat up in my bed and flipped over my remote (to prop it up) and begin reading it. Our July-August issue had just came in and the cover was pretty dark. It’s a deep read backdrop with elephant tusks on the sides along with the different titles of articles around the cover. The main article is about The Hunt for Africa’s Most Notorious Elephant Poacher and I did try to read that article but after getting into it and reading about the baby elephant I had to turn the page. Just before that sad story though, was a very interesting tale of how everybody uses social media. It seems very strange to be reading such a nice article like this, when most of us are typing more than writing actual letters, checks, and calling on the phone. I have always believed in the saying, “history repeats itself” and with reading this article, it seems like the hype of something new like this has been around for quite some time. How sites like Pinterest, Tumblr, and our ordinary “copy and paste” have an even bigger history than we all think they do!
Computers didn’t come out until the 80’s and even the internet didn’t become known until the late 90’s. I didn’t know what internet was until I was in third grade. I had been using a computer for two years before that. For me, being able to reach the keyboard and do the typing with my feet was a bigger thing than anything else we were learning in our computer class! It wasn’t until I was in middle school did we actually start learning how to save, delete, open documents but the majority of us were learning how to do the easy “copy and paste” that we all seem to love with all our hearts. Surprising this article, which was called, Piece Of Mind by Clive Thompson, most of what we are doing as far as the “pinning” and “copy and paste” goes, it’s been around a long freaking time. The fun past time for most women was scrap booking and it has been around for a few centuries according to the article, as close to the 18th century, it was common for women to cut out little things from the newspapers and put them in a book for save keeping. Different things that people were doing back then has come back into this new form of using technology to post things to places and hopefully, it stays there.
When I was in my last year of high school and I started blogging, practically everybody in my family said I should go into creative writing, but they’ve been saying that for years! I had enjoyed writing little things, but writing as a career would just take away the joy of finding an idea for a post and actually finding the words to express yourself. I didn’t want to make writing into my worst enemy, but I also had another reason for the recent hating on magazines. Why does a person want to read about somebody’s life from another person’s angle? Why do we enjoy reading the lies and rumors of others, than the actual story they tell us? This is why I turned to reading blogs only, because most are very truthful and by real people (or so I hope!) just casually talking about their personal style, favorite memories, their travels, food they mastered at making and DIY projects they recently finished. I have even gone as far as reading celebrity blogs and I’ve been enjoying those more than just a normal magazine. I am a lifestyle blogger, but I talk about a number of things. I’m generally like a magazine as I like to promote other bloggers and their blogs, which is like an ad in a way! I post pictures of everyday life and I’m known for writing more than I probably should in a normal post. I’m not the perfect writer as there are words missing the posts and I misspell words even after I’ve done the spell check.
I find it sad of how the world looks at the Internet nowadays, it’s normal for people from the ages of 13-49 years old creating profiles on different websites, but now that there are iPads, and touch screen phones both babies and elderly people are getting into the whole phenomenon of being able go online everyday and to update their everyday life with the world. Something that I have recently found that babies are even more curious about these new inventions they’ve never seen before, that didn’t even come out until after they’re parents were born. They know how to turn a phone on and flip through different pictures with their little fingers. Seeing kids walking and riding bikes are rare anymore, but I have seen more kids out in the last two months this year. Everything we know is fading and for some, they can accept the change and have kept up with the new changes of the world, but there are some like me who accepts changes in life but will always remember that history come back around and never let us forget about what we did,
LINKS:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-copy-and-paste-reigned-age-scrapbooking-180951844/
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