Love, Dogs & Virality
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
I remember vividly, like most of you will, when smartphones didn’t exist. Nothing was smart other than a three piece suit. Remember polyphonic ringtones and snake? I remember when people started using smartphones; in Gibraltar they weren’t commonplace until a while after everywhere else. I remember a time, when I was a kid, when ‘America’ was this mythical place at least ten, twenty years ahead of the rest of the world. Of course, I didn’t know Japan, China and Korea were a thing, and Gibraltar was ten, twenty years behind the rest of the world anyway. Then came smartphones. Surprisingly late, if I may add. In 2011 Blackberry Curves were a thing and it wasn’t maybe two years until young people weren’t using Nokia brick phones anymore. Smartphones were (and some still are) expensive pieces of technology, and like everything Gibraltarians weren’t moving at the same pace as elsewhere. I remember a time when mIRC was a thing, then MySpace, then Bebo and finally Facebook. I even remember when Facebook was a thing. Today Facebook isn’t a thing; partly because their CEO (The Zucc) is a weird robot, but also because children don’t have attention spans like we used to. Facebook’s other ventures Instagram and WhatsApp are where it’s at in 2020, and in the strange bubble that is Gibraltar they do particularly well.
