From the Tech Boom to Nostalgia: A Dive into the Past
Reflections:
Reflections:
As I listen to Michael Bolton, I find myself reflecting on many things. Here I am in Tanzania, immersed in research for my project RAW FACTS, which will be unveiled on September 20, 2024. Thanks also to several collaborators, today I am here thinking about my generation, the generation of the '80s and '90s.
I was born in 1988, but I am a child of the '90s, a generation that revolutionized the modern world. I remember the first SMS, the first phones, the first computers. It was incredible when we went out with the Ciao moped or on foot to meet in the square and decide what to do. How many times were we the protagonists of fights, laughs, pranks, and escapes! Those were the years of love lived outside the house, of VHS tapes we watched on large black and gray cathode-ray tube TVs.
The era of the first computers, with front or side monitors, large keyboards with keys that went "clack" every time you pressed them, printers that shook the whole desk and the floor below if you lived, like me, on the third floor. We experienced so many wonderful things! Foosball games that worked with a hundred lire, when you felt happy with little: those friends and that family, perhaps imperfect but present.
Our generation is different. Our parents were pure teenagers, yet they went to work. At twenty, I was thinking about university, having fun, without forgetting the exams. We were the generation that breathed transformation: the boom of phones, PlayStation, Alcatel, Motorola, 6 MB memory cards, and audio cassettes in car stereos that you then stored in the glove compartment to protect them.
We were fortunate to experience the presence of our grandparents, making tomato sauce, going mushroom picking, riding bikes without a phone sucking the life out of us. We were the ones who folded the pages of our diaries to keep secrets, who forged signatures on school excuse slips that increasingly resembled checkbooks.
I remember my carefree days watching National Geographic documentaries on that great 50-inch black Philips TV, with three large buttons, losing myself in distant worlds. Today, I wonder if photography is dead. I try not to believe it because it must still be alive, it must have value, a purpose. I've seen many things and am finally continuing to see them again, where I left off in 2020.
Our generation lived incredible dreams, an unparalleled lightness that no longer exists today, crushed by stress and social pressures. We lived what no one can ever understand today: the great transgression of life and freedom, when being free truly meant flying. Every day was Christmas; today we take everything for granted.
I remember saving up for my first PS2, ten euros here and ten euros there. I remember when my father gave me my first camera from what many today don’t know: Emmezeta, an old shopping center. We were champions and dreamers, a quality I no longer see in this society. Why?
Do you remember the two-thousand-lire phone cards? They were collected. And who can forget when we said goodbye to the Lira and the Euro came in? Or when we wrote the date 2000 in our school notebooks because we wrote day, month, and year. The 2000 notebook, who can forget that? When bell-bottom pants were in fashion, or when the first episodes of Friends came out, who can forget it? For me, it was incredible.
Our generation experienced the magic of transformation and the thrill of novelty, something that seems lost today, buried under layers of technology and routine. But perhaps, for this very reason, we have the duty to remember, to keep those dreams and that lightness alive, so that time does not erase what we were and what we could still be.
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