Downloading in progress

That time we grew up in front of a computer screen.

MANILA, Philippines - It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the era of pre-cable Internet.

Recently, I had a discussion with my sister Dani, 25, about the first days of dial-up — an important moment, because it was the time we came of age. We’d stay up late to steal music off the inter webs, thinking we’d get the most bandwidth that way. Our thinking was: late nights = fewer users = faster download speeds, like say, half an hour for one song. Yes! And so we’d clock in precious overtime, lean, mean MP3 downloading machines stirred awake by the purr and crackle of a fax machine-like dial tone. We’d lurk in peer-to-peer networks and pass the time answering chain letters in our emails. The night timing also helped us improve our chances of an uninterrupted connection, a steady state thwarted every time someone picked up the phone (more likely in the daytime). At this point in the conversation, my boyfriend chimed in to narrate how he would tape handwritten signs by the landline: “DOWNLOADING IN PROGRESS / HUWAG MUNANG GAMITIN.”

Then Friendster came, giving us more things to do as songs saved to disk. And then that’s what being online became about. All I could think about, for a time, was writing and (ew) soliciting testimonials from my Friends. I remember getting “gentle” requests in my inbox to write the equivalent of a yearbook write-up to be approved and published on a personal profile page, extolling the subject’s virtues of grace, beauty and smarts, or whatever else my peers had allegedly accomplished at the ripe old age of… 15. And I would ask them to do the same.

Profile pictures also became a thing. A lot of top-angle shots, slightly blurred, in the low resolution of the first camera phones. Looking back, this was the genesis of the selfie.

In 2004, I got addicted to a message board. On “Teen Talk,” moderated by the tween magazine Candy (a manual, to this day, for crushes, BFFs and prom), threads talked about who the “tOp Ten pRettiEst gUrLs” in my grade were. Or the “hEaRttHroBs of AtEneo dE mANILa GrAde ScHoOL.”

And then it became about Multiply, and sharing entire photo albums with the general public. When we got comfortable with that, it was a natural transition into Facebook, and tagging, which was like literally pointing to ourselves on a screen, a little dog-ear, to make it easier for you to find me. Now, of course, it’s the epoch of hashtags, to make it easier for you to find the things that I am into.

We were raised on machines. We all have that media compulsion. Feeling lost without Wi-Fi, sleeping with an iPhone, or constantly itching to thumb through a feed are all perfect examples of this peculiar pathology-of-a-generation. With it comes marketing compulsion — the Millennial’s habit of projecting and distributing a packaged image of themselves. In the William Gibson book Pattern Recognition, a sort of cyberpunk look at viral videos and household brands in an eerily recognizable, fictive 21st century, there is a line that alludes to how these days, more thought is put into marketing goods than actually creating them. In my opinion, that translates to people, too. Sometimes it feels like we are promoters without fully formed products. The fault of the generation lies in getting so caught up in the packaging that no energy is left to develop what’s on the inside.

The strength, on the other hand, is that because of all that projection — images of ourselves upon images of others upon images of ourselves — we become a generation gifted with so much material. Every experience, every moment in life, gets converted into some form of media output, whether it’s a photo, a video, a piece of audio or a hyperlink to some obscure discovery online. We are wading in information. Information, in the end, is what forms our aspirations. It gets our minds to go where we physically aren’t, at least not yet.

Growing up, for us, happens on a screen. I remember the time I got really hurt when my old bosses asked me to tone down my social network activity, citing provocative photos and adding that it was time for me to grow up. In a fit, I threw a funeral. “For my Facebook,” I said, gathering my girlfriends at a bar, and over whiskey, asking them all to say goodbye to my old, pre-censorship self — for I was about to make my account private. As always, however, it was a celebration. I made masks in black lace for my guests and bought a white veil for myself. It caught fire from one of the candles on our dimly lit table, and my friend David snatched it from my head, flapping it around to extinguish it. We took the last of my bacchanalian photographs that night, swigging flutes of pink champagne from our perches as we sat on the tops of couches and dug our heels into the cushioned seats, before security helped us down. Every generation tries to rebel against the rules somehow. And mourning just isn’t rebellion.

Let me tell you about myself

In which Millennials attempt to define their generation