Life is a river; it is always changing and moving with rhythm and time. It’s not always refreshing, but it certainly has plenty of rocks along the way.
Lately I’ve been looking back a bit, at the same time as forward. I’m enjoying the present one day at a time, but there are moments during which I am reminded of something from childhood. Today, someone I’m following on Twitter linked some older pictures from the original (and best) Star Wars. What a great piece of history, I thought to myself. I remember watching the original movies when I was really young. At the time, we didn’t have DVD players, and music came on casette tapes. We didn’t have Black Eyed Peas, and rock was still the major form of music style – there wasn’t really much in the way of “rap” that took the mainstream until much later.
I remember that my mom practically raised my brother and I on real originals. Things like The Neverending Story, The Labyrinth, and a mess of other Jim Henson movies – and alongside those, like a great sage in and of itself, the original Star Wars trilogy. What she didn’t realize at the time was that she had just made the recipe to create a daughter who grew to be an absolute technology junky and a geek to the core. I bear these titles with pride.
We weren’t a very rich family at the time; I remember I was adopted later on because my mother could not provide for us. Either way, though, she did create the groundwork for how I am now. Not only did she get my brother and I hooked on music that’s now “classic” rock, and movies that, by modern standards of effects, are “old school”, I think she’s also what impacted the core of my personality. Not just in the way of Star Wars, but everything else.
I suppose that parents lay the groundwork for their kids, even if we tend to fight them at every turn and take their advice for granted. Media itself, however, does much the rest – for better or for worse. Now, I’m not a crusader against modern media, by any means, but I’ve read several articles discussing how design is becoming more and more similar. My thoughts on this: of course.
Media is a huge impact on creativity and charisma in the developing mind, at least in modern standards. During my mother’s time charisma was impacted by family and other, much different things – they didn’t have as much in the way of video games or movies the way that we do. Styles were much different at the time, and I think that may be part of the media revolution which occurred during that time period, which led to now. Many current designers were raised during that time period, and as such, share some of the same influences.
With the economic downturn, however, I have the feeling that things will be greatly affected in the future. Brands will fade out only to have their logos reused for newer branding, and companies will rise and fall. I think it will be an interesting thing to see what comes of it – even though, at the same time, it is still very frightening to think about.
