On September of 2008, my dad threw a surprise birthday party for me. Frankly, I am not a fan of birthdays, parties, birthday parties or surprises in general. Besides its clown-faced cakes and terribly fatty meals, a birthday is nothing but a mundane occurrence in my life. Yet what made this birthday so different from others I have experienced was that it was my first birthday where I received a gift that changed my life forever. My dad blindfolded me and guided me towards his office, where my gift awaited for me. Typical birthday scene, I thought. Once we arrived at his office, dad removed my blindfolds, and there I saw right before my eyes my ultimate birthday gift: the new, the pristine and awfully shiny iPhone 3G.

Now this was a surprise that I surely did not mind. I will never forget how fascinated I was when I was examining that paper-thin, black piece of technological slate and how intrigued I was when I turned on its crystal-display touchscreen.  When I slid my finger across the silver, gleaming arrow on the screen, I unlocked the world of the iphone. It showed me a homepage smothered with colorful icons that floated like nimbus clouds. However, these icons were more than floating nimbuses. They were portals of other channels of communication and of other storages of memory. “See here, Soph? Now you can really keep connected,” said my dad. “Plus, you can chose to remember what you need to (or want to) remember. Isn’t that great?”

Indeed it was great. With my new iphone, I had the ability to converse across a wide spectrum of channels and to control what memories I wanted to obtain, to create, to look back on, and perhaps to look forward to. The thought fascinated me, yet frightened me as well. I thought to myself that what if the iPhone gave me too much control over my memories? What if such ability would lead to even more mundane days of my life?  Such is how I wonder about the rapid development of communication technology. While I appreciate that its development has led to many devices containing features that allow us to create an archive of memories much easier and much quicker than with past devices, I am quite concerned that such an ability may erode our understanding of and the overall concept of the past all together, making our lives as “timeless” entities with no moments to look back on. I thank the iphone for helping me keep in touch with people and memory, yet with this phone, everyday is like a birthday to me (perhaps that is the reason why I think birthdays are so boring).

A day after my birthday, I did nothing but sift through the colorful clouds and portals on my new iphone. Communication icons including telephone, text messaging, e-mail, instant messengers of different brands, video chats of different programs, social networks, voice recorder, video recorder, picture camera and wireless internet connection, and storage icons like virtual picture albums, video libraries, voice memos, calendars and note “pages” were all littered across the screen and open to the touch of my finger. But according to Marc Oliver’s study  “Civilization Inoculated: Nostalgia and the Marketing of Emerging Technologies”, which summarizes how current industries appeal to nostalgia and past ideals to sell big bucks on their devices, these colorful portals are really nothing new.  That is because my iphone has been created “at the moment of integration (as opposed to invention) of emerging technologies” (Oliver 134). Although my iphone was new itself, its features were not so much because the phone was enmeshed with two kinds of purposes, one being communicating and the other being the storing of information, that used to function in separate devices. In sum, the iphone is like a nesting-doll that holds numerous devices within one device. Because I had so many opportunities in keeping in touch with my loved ones and with my memory, I did not have much emotional anxiety when I left for college nor did my parents. Of course, I felt some nostalgia for home, aching to go back in time and relive the relics of my beloved childhood, but fortunately I was able to obliterate all yearning thanks to the many opportunities of communication that my lovely iphone has given me. Oliver claims that “nostalgia requires departure but it also contains the promise of return” (135). Thanks to my handy iphone, I was able to suspend myself temporarily from college life, return back to my past world of home, immerse in its comforts and then when ready go back to my collegiate reality. Home was resting inside of my pocket at all times.

My past not only lay in my pocket, but every blinking moment of the present along with possible futures of college life was inside of it, as well. I was able to take high-quality pictures of myself and my girlfriends in a matter of seconds. I was able to film precious, embarrassing videos in just a matter of minutes. I was even able to voice record my ideas, my lectures and my feelings over the cell phone “microphone” and from those memos create an entire library of voices just within my finger’s reach. In essence, what all of these activities have in common was that I was able to create lifetime memories just within a matter of seconds. Such a situation is what Ori Shwarz addresses in “Good young nostalgia: camera phones and technologies of self among Israeli youths,” a study that examines how Israeli youth’s usage of cell phones and the blogosphere has caused a change in their perceptions on what nostalgic memories they would want to look back. Likewise to Israeli girls and their usage of cell phones, I was creating a sort of “fragmentary and reflective nostalgia” (366) while using my cell phone as a library of memory. As paradoxical it may seem, I was being deep and shallow simultaneously. My cell phone allows me to capture moments much faster than older devices. For example, my phone’s camera has allowed me to take pictures that develop within seconds, and once they had developed I was able to look at them deeply, this being the indicator of nostalgia, the bittersweet feelings of past occurrences. If I felt bad about the picture, I would delete it and try to take another one. At first glance, me deleting pictures seems like  me refusing to look back at the past, but what it really shows is how I cared too much about it, how I wanted it to be something else. If my friends and I made terrible smiles or looked “too fat” we would reflect on it so deeply and get frustrated that we would want to try again and take a better picture. This shows how my iphone is a “mythlogization of technology”, a device that’s main motive is to help me facilitate the creation of my perfect historical landscape (Oliver 134). The iphone has given me control over nostalgic occurrences because it allowed me a second chance on the memories I wanted to create and even on determining my future memories as well. I captured small, momentary fragments, but reflect, scrutinize and redo their every detail to create a more ideal moment.

The iphone was truly a blessing for me for helping me keep loved ones in never-ending touch and a bundle up fragmentary, yet precious memories. But such a blessing was also a blaring concern.  Day by day, I was keeping in touch with my past way too much, calling mother thrice a day, skyping with my cousin twice a day and texting my brother once every hour (it’s even more overwhelming when I am doing it all at once). Not to mention, my time-span of nostalgia for things had shrunken significantly, feeling like five minutes was as long as five years! I did not know if this was all just being merely homesick or being spoiled. But I did know for a fact that I was constantly wired. Acclaimed journalist Walter Kirn, who claims that multitasking in technology has led to economic, health and social dangers in his article “The Autumn of the Multitaskers”, describes that the very reason behind my wired condition is that I am part of timeless era of “roaring zeros…years of over-enlarged, overextended, technology-driven and finally unsustainable investment of our limited human capacities in the dream of infinite connectivity” (Kirn 157).  Given that my iphone was an example of mythologized technology, it indeed has led me to create so many fantasies to a point where I was constantly attached to something or someone. Not once was I detached from my past, my present or my future. I was aware of everything because of how connected my phone made me to my home, my friends, my family, my college, my high school.  Yet such awareness gave me headaches, duping huge amounts of information, facts, and memories of all kinds into me like a huge overload pick-up truck that dumps massive piles of rubble into a tiny landfill. From texting siblings to skyping friends, and from recording videos to taking pictures, I was stuck amidst a web of never-ending connectivity, standing in the crossroads between past, present and future. I was in limbo and I simply had no clue where to look back or look towards. I slowly found out the culprit behind this dilemma. I was in limbo because, as Kirn implies, the mechanization of my iPhone gave me too much autonomy over my memories that the notion of “cause and effect had yielded to the principle of dream-and-make-it-happen” (Kirn 157). Because I was striving to make all my dreams come true, to relive realities that I have never even experienced, I was constantly missing something or someone, I was constantly experiencing some sort of “cumulative nostalgia” not based on strong distinctive task between the past and present  (Shwarz 348). My never-ending yearning shows that since my iphone, like other communication technology, enabled me to be culturally and emotionally connected much easier through user-friendly mediums, my time span had flattened, integrated and meshed all wards of my life into one, flat pancake. When this thought drifted by in my head, everything began to make sense to me: I realized that my iphone, the nesting-doll device was the very reason why my life became a pancake itself because it had allowed me to travel anywhere at any time. It was like a time-machine that moved me in any direction I pleased simply by a touch of a button.

My mom always used to tell me that distance is what keeps people so close and memories too precious to lose. Although it was nice for me to travel the long-distances over virtual mediums back and forth between the space of time, I really did become, simply put, tired of keeping of touch because it subtracted the uniqueness of certain moments in my life. Today, I no longer have an iphone 3G. Its cracked screen lies dead inside my room drawer and ceases to light up its nimbus clouds again. For now, I am not as trapped inside limbo as I used to be and have a clear direction of where lies north and south. But time and time again, I sometimes open up my room drawer just to catch a glimpse of that cracked touchscreen just to think to myself that at least I have some past to look back on.