DURING AN INTRODUCTORY session with new students on our Clonmel Digital Campus, I asked how many people were using Instagram and more than half of the audience raised their hands. Although fewer than a half dozen said they had posted to Instagram that morning, my simple survey suggests Instagram is the pocket media social channel of choice for our creative students.
Let's rewind 10 years and look at what a similar audience was using.
In 2009, there were more feature phones than smart phones on our campus. Students often have to work with hand-me-down items and 3G connectivity was just getting to be a possibility across the town of Clonmel in 2009. At the time of this blog post, I still get relegated to EDGE connectivity within 300m of my home and that's the same mobile broadband speed throughout most of Questum, the high spec incubation centre in South Tipperary.
I'm asking students to share their home screens in a photostream during the month of September 2019 and to see if they can figure out what was on a student's screen a decade ago. Because I don't want to lose these sorts of electronic memories, I'm paying to host content on Flickr and to back up digital files with OneDrive, Google Photos, and iPhotos.
I wish I had backed up the precious video recordings we made in 2009. We were using high spec Nokia and Sony handsets back then, pushing content to Blip.tv. Unless I've kept archive copies of the work on removable hard drives, all that handheld mobile videography is washed away along with the companies that have long departed as free services. I was using Blip.tv and Qik more than YouTube in 2009. Today, most of my Qik clips have migrated to YouTube. I also found one of my home improvement clips from 10 years ago while drilling down into my YouTube video files.
[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology. You can see Bernie's Instalife at instagram.com/topgold and hear his Topgold Audio Clips on Spotify.]
