‘Despacito’

Netnet Camomot

SPOTIFY is now my main source of music. Click “Browse” on its upper left corner, and you’ll see Overview, Charts, Genres & Moods, New Releases, Discover, and Concerts as possible choices for your listening pleasure.

Genres & Moods must be the most interesting—for me, anyway. It has Pop, OPM, Chill, Mood, Artists, Romance, Travel, Decades, Party, Focus, Sleep, RnB, Hip Hop, Electronic/Dance, Rock, Indie, K-pop, Karaoke, Workout, Dinner, TV & Movies, Trending, Christian, Soul, Reggae, Punk, Jazz, Country, Folk & Americana, Kids & Family, Gaming, Classical, Latino, Metal, Funk, Blues, Fresh Finds, Comedy, and Word. If you have nothing to do the whole day, try clicking each of these playlists.

But if you’re busy, click “Focus” so you can focus. Then, go to “Deep Focus,” one of its sub-playlists. On Friday afternoon, that’s what I listened to while preparing details for a newsletter. But instead of helping me focus deeply, I tended to tune out until I started feeling the Monday blues, and it wasn’t even Monday! Gosh.

Better look at a playlist’s number of followers—preferably 2,141,112, to ensure it’s for your listening pleasure, and not listening torture.

There’s this video of kids trying to discover gadgets of earlier decades: rotary phone, flip phone, Tamagotchi, floppy disk.

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re already in the second decade of the 21st century. Yup, time flies. So, even a flip phone is now considered antique.

I’ve saved my parents’ antique “gadgets” and now use them as house décor. Once upon a time, I thought I would be a minimalist, but add the piggy collection to the antiques and—voila!—décor galore.

I’m reading a book now whose characters still use landlines, so that they have to be home or in the office to make or receive phone calls. I had to check out the year when it was published because this is not exactly an antique book. Well, it was printed in 2002. Mobile phone use was already widespread in New York in 1999, so, how could this book still have landlines as its main source of communication? But there are houses, stores, and offices that do use landlines up to now in 2017, especially when they’d rather keep their mobile numbers known only to family members, friends, and colleagues.

It feels strange, though, to read a book’s characters rushing home or to the office to wait for phone calls. And I’m not even a millennial. I’m supposed to be familiar with this.

So, how much more for kids who are given antique gadgets such as the rotary phone, to see if they know how to use it.

If all these are making you feel ancient, hmmm, that only means you are ancient.

There was a time when we’d go to a store to buy vinyl records and cassette tapes. Then, years later, the CD and Walkman. Then, the iPod. But the iPhone is now your everything—camera, photo album, music source, gaming gadget, encyclopedia, e-book, photo album, alarm, timer, calculator, health monitor, newspaper, radio, TV, movie screen, map, reservation guide, emails, notebook, guru, CCTV monitor, and, uh, phone. It’s possible for that phone to be your best friend now—“Hey Siri.”

And you don’t even have to go to a store nowadays, with merchandise available online and paid through credit cards, PayPal, bank deposits, cash on delivery, etc. Faith Popcorn was already talking about cocooning way back in 1981. 1981 is ancient—that’s 36 years ago, and yet, Popcorn already had a term for the way we live now, this preference to stay home and considering home as our best vacation ever. That’s why Facebook now has 2 billion users—people would rather communicate through Messenger, Skype, and Viber.

Face-to-face interaction may soon become ancient, too. Do you still remember long-distance and overseas calls via landline? Oh my gas!

I’ve always been a homebody, staying home to read books and magazines. As the traffic in downtown Cagayan de Oro worsens, the more the preference to avoid the stress of going out. Cocooning to the max.

Ten years from now, children born today, who will be 10 years old by then, will be asked to use the 2017 iPhone and iPad, and they won’t have any idea how.

The iPhone is only 10 years old as of today. It was released in June 2007 and instantly became the most sought-after gadget. Regarded as a luxury then, it has since lost that status and is now the most user-friendly phone that can do everything.

Meanwhile, the most-sought after song is still “Despacito”—No. 1 in Billboard’s Hot 100 and Spotify’s Global Top 50 charts. Wow.

“Despacito” means slowly. The way gadgets are updated, though, the only slow part of these times is the speed of cars trapped in traffic.